The Chinese government has ordered foreign-owned hotels to install additional equipment to monitor their guests' internet communications, says Republican senator Sam Brownback of Kansas.
Brownback held a press conference Tuesday to highlight documents that his office has received in recent months from two foreign-owned hotel chains' legal counsels.
The hotel chains' management, which requested anonymity, are "outraged" that they have to install the equipment, Brownback said.
The order violates the spirit of the Chinese government's promise to the International Olympic Committee to provide open access to information and more press freedom before being chosen to host the games, he said.
The documents say that the hotels may lose their licenses if they don't comply with the Public Security Bureau's order, according to Brownback, who provided translated copies of the order to journalists attending the press conference.
"These hotels are justifiably outraged by this order, which puts them in the awkward position of having to craft pop-up messages explaining to their customers that their web history, communications, searches, and key strokes are being spied on by the Chinese government," Brownback said.
Brownback said that he planned to introduce a senate resolution calling on the Chinese government to reverse the decree.
When asked about the NSA's own warrantless monitoring of electronic communications in the United States and how that's different from the Chinese government's practices, Brownback responded:
No mention was made, during the grandstanding, of the Bush Administration's monitoring of animal rights, environmental and poverty relief activists, as documented by files released in 2005 as a result of a series of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits by the American Civil Liberties Union. (In those cases, the monitoring was done by the FBI.)
Photo: Associated Press/Orlin Wagner____
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