Hi, Pot, I'm Kettle

Greenwald today shakes his head after reading this AP article about Kansas Senator Sam Brownback's outrage over a plan by the Chinese government to require devices in foreign hotels to monitor email and internet traffic by its guests. Brownback at his most eloquent:

If you were a human rights advocate, if you're a journalist, you're in room 1251 of a hotel, anything that you use, sending out over the Internet is monitored in real time by the Chinese Public Security bureau. That's not right. It's not in the Olympic spirit.

Ahem. At least the Chinese government is telling you to your face that you're being monitored. Here, in the Land of the Free, we don't know if or when we are having our phone calls or emails monitored by Big Brother. In China, you fully expect the police to come knocking on your door in the middle of the night if you're blogging against the government. Here, you just never know if or when (or where) the G-men will show up to ask you a few questions about that email you sent the other day, in which you speculated how one could infect a certain high-ranking elected official with a bad case of dysentery, so that his excrement would spew out in the other direction for a change.