Like Syria, the government of Bahrain employs aggressive tactics to censor and monitor its people's online activity.

The U.S. relationship with Bahrain is obviously more complicated than with Syria and Iran.

When U.S. commercial interests press the Chinese government to do a better job of policing Chinese websites for pirated content, a blind eye is generally turned to the fact that ensuing crackdowns provide a great excuse to tighten mechanisms to censor all content the Chinese government doesn't like.

I know plenty of people in China who don't like what their government does to the Falun Gong, but they don't want to entrust their data to the Falun Gong, either.

Whatever Tencent can see, the Chinese government can see.

In the Internet age, it is inevitable that corporations and government agencies will have access to detailed information about people's lives.