Big Brother is watching

The State Department is advising Americans planning to attend the Olympic Games in Beijing to be mindful that they could be under surveillance.

"All hotel rooms and offices are considered to be subject to on-site or remote technical monitoring at all times," the department's Bureau of Consular Affairs advised Thursday.

"Hotel rooms, residences and offices may be accessed at any time without the occupant's consent or knowledge."

In a section on privacy and safety, the State Department's Olympic "fact sheet" warns Americans that "they have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public or private locations."

America's victory in the Cold War was real. Russia's nuclear fleet sits rusting at its piers; citizens of Poland and old Czechoslovakia no longer have any immediate fear of Russian tanks rolling through their capitals to remind them to stop singing sarcastic folk songs.

But in the rush to let bygones be bygones, some have been too hasty in referring to the "formerly authoritarian, formerly communist" regimes in places such as Moscow, Hanoi and Beijing.

The "new openness" is an extremely relative term, as the protesters currently being shot in occupied Tibet can attest.

The United States may not be a perfect paragon. The debate continues about whether the current administration eavesdrops on some American citizens without proper court authorization.

But the point is that it is a debate -- an open and heated one, with the voters serving as the final arbiters.

Perhaps opening American markets to Chinese goods in the hopes they'll open their own nation to Western goods -- and ideas -- will work in the end. But wishful thinking should not cloud our eyes to the fact that China remains a regime out of George Orwell's nightmare, a country where the government still seeks to control with an iron fist what the people may read and publish, see and speak and learn and hear and do.

And so long as that is true, China's newfound prosperity will remain, in important ways, an illusion.