Sunder wrote... "Not that I've been there, but the last I heard, China was still an almosttotalitarian communist state and free travel in China is not possible." Your information is almost staggeringly out of date. Even in the late 1980s when I lived in China it was easy to move about freely (well, easy isn't quite the right word when you couldn't book any rail tickets remotely or in advance!). Now of course, things are even more "free". As for "totalitarian communist state", there's not much communist left about it, except for the name of the ruling party. Right now, most of mainland China is about as capitalist as you can get, with the Army one of the biggest capitalist enterprises around (in the early 90s the central government informed the army they were going to have to find a way to raise money to pay a lot of their own bills!). As for the totalitarianism part,as long as you don't complain too loudly about the government, you're fine for the most part (particularly if you have lots of $$$). (Although every now and then Jong Nan Hai will decide to crack down on something and you may come under fire.) If you want to call it "totalitarian", fine. But like all western terms applied to China, its relevance only has a very limited meaning. -TD

From: Sunder To: Neil Johnson CC: cypherpunks@lne.com Subject: Re: Mike Hawash Date: Thu, 1 May 2003 09:58:01 -0400 (edt)

Not that I've been there, but the last I heard, China was still an almost totalitarian communist state and free travel in China is not possible. In all likelyhood the hotel he stayed at is one where all westerners stay. It's also possible that airline schedules being what they are provided reasons for the same day arrival departure coincidences.

As for the hotel not having a record of him, it could be they misplaced it, or more likely misspelled his name, etc, or he didn't want to be tracked so he used Mike Smith...

Many things are possible, not all have to be true.

----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :NSA got $20Bil/year |Passwords are like underwear. You don't /|\ \|/ :and didn't stop 9-11|share them, you don't hang them on your/\|/\ <--*-->:Instead of rewarding|monitor, or under your keyboard, you \/|\/ /|\ :their failures, we |don't email them, or put them on a web \|/ + v + :should get refunds! |site, and you must change them very often. --------_sunder_@_sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, Neil Johnson wrote:

...

Hawash flew to China and returned to the US on exactly the same dates as the other guys.

Hawash appears to have stayed in the same building as the other guys. His and the other guy's lodging was in the same building, but different hotels, and the hotel that Hawash had reservations to stay at doesn't have a record of him being there.

_________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail