Why you should be proud to live in America…

I stumbled across a Wall Street Journal article the other day about Iran blocking Gmail services. For those of you who live under a rock, Gmail is a free email system operated by Google. The article mentions that Iran is going to roll out their own government operated email system in an effort to build trust amongst Iran’s citizens and their government.

I’m calling “BS” on this one. Iran is not blocking Gmail to promote trust. They are doing this to spy on their citizens. Why else would a government want to burden themselves with supporting an email service that runs near perfectly when operated by a large company? Why would the Iranian government want to burden themselves with supporting e-mail? I can only think of one reason: to spy on it’s citizens. I know I would not trust a government that censors its people and restricts access to certain websites. This doesn’t just go for Iran either. China blocks access to certain websites as well. I do not trust them as far as I could throw them. Ever since attention has been drawn onto China over the “recent” Google hacking (along with numerous other companies) trust has started to go downhill for China.

With that said, how can a citizen of a country trust what they are seeing on the Internet if a government represses certain sites? Folks, this is why I am proud to live in America where we have freedom of speech and our Internet access is not controlled by the government (it may be controlled by ISPs, but that is another story) and we have access to just about any information we could possibly want.

I only imagine it is just a matter of time before Iran blocks access to other free email services. We shall wait and see. This should just highlight some of the freedoms we take for granted.