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Rather than attempt to recount all my tropical adventures, I'll let the photos do most of the talking.



If you like to relax on vacation, Hawaii may not be the best place. Our trip was the Fear Factor© version of vacation -- nearly everything we did required us to sign a waiver in case we were maimed or killed whilst doing it. That included kayaking on the open sea, which is pretty hard work, but well worth it to get to reefs, beaches, and bits of coast like this that are otherwise inaccessible.






These are the little touches that make Hawaii so awesome.




The west coast of The Big Island has top notch scuba-diving. This is our dive meister, who is a fine man and an expert in his field, and who also nearly killed himself the first time he took us out. When we got out to the reef, he leapt gracefully into the sea to moor our boat to the buoy. A few moments later, he came back to the surface with blood streaming down his face and neck from a massive gash on the top of his head, which he had slammed at full-speed into the hull of the boat. He was quite dazed, bleeding profusely, and lucky as hell that he didn't knock himself unconscious. His boss, who was captaining, helped haul him out of the water and said, "Duuuude, you gotta be more cogniscent of where you are in the water, bra." My favorite scuba quote.

To his credit, once his head stopped bleeding (several hours later), Dive Meister strapped his fins back on and was a pro the rest of the week -- by far my favorite among a stellar crew of people.







Luau food will tickle your taste buds! The pork was buried in a pit and slow-cooked, which is the traditional Hawaiian method. So tender and juicy, it makes me ache just thinking about it.



When we needed a break from the water, we went on an open-range horseback ride up in the mountains. A word of caution -- you cannot go up to high altitudes for a day or so after scuba-diving, so plan accordingly. Getting the bends and/or dying can ruin your vacation. But the view up there might change your life.









Much of the terrain on Hawaii was surprisingly desolate, covered in lava rock and not much else.




Plumeria and hibiscus -- classic Hawaii!






Tracking down a pod of wild dolphins and swimming with them is a pretty popular pastime in Hawaii. Early one morning, we found about 150 of these spinners and played with them for a couple hours. Great fun!

Another One Bites the Dust

Two days ago, I challenged the Chinese government to a race. I posted a link to a government spreadsheet hosted on a government web server which contained the name, age, sport, and government ID number of Jiang Yuyuan, another member of China's Olympic gymnastics squad, which showed that she competed underage. After having carefully collected a series of verifiable mirrors of the document, I linked to it for public download. And now that citizen journalists (and professional journalists) all over the globe have downloaded it and verified it en masse, the the document finally got deleted nearly two days later. Now to be purely objective I should probably state that I can't verify the reason for deletion, but at this point the options seem limited. An Excel spreadsheet going back years containing over twelve thousand athlete names vanishes 48 hours after I publish a link to it? That's no accident. Personally I don't think 48 hours is a very good level of effort for a professional censor, but then I've never done that type of work. So I'm interested in what you folks have to say. So here's my poll, let me know if you think 48 hours to censor deserves a Gold, Silver, or Bronze medal.

Here's what censorship looks like:
http://www.zjsports.gov.cn/zjty/node12/node43/userobject1ai4698/00000002.xls

And here's what freedom looks like:
MIRROR : wikileaks.org
MIRROR : Internet Archive
MIRROR : UCLA News Radio
MIRROR : heathershow.com

updated 8/25, scroll down for update

From the New York Times article published Aug 24:

Cui Dalin, the vice minister of the General Administration of Sport of China, said He Kexin, the uneven bars Olympic champion, had moved from one team to another last year, and a wrong birth date was written on the registration forms for the new team.
“During the registration, there were some discrepancies in the age of the athlete, therefore that mistake has led to a series of misunderstandings afterward,” Cui said during a closing news conference for the Chinese sports delegation here. “I can say for sure the age of the Chinese gymnasts comply with the rules.”

I think we can all breathe easier now that officials are beginning to address the problems that so many have observed. However having spent some time studying the documents, I'm concerned about what I perceive to be a discrepancy. The alleged mistake led to at least three separate Excel spreadsheets, now deleted, showing a birthday for Kexin of Jan 1, 1994. This in itself is interesting. However my interest is in Cui's statement that the change occurred "last year". Last year was 2007, and as alert readers of this blog will recall, the Internet Archive has kept two copies of a document published to sport.gov.cn which establishes Kexin's birthday as 1-1-1994. The problem here is that the Internet Archive saved one of these copies in June of 2006, two years ago. Additionally, when the document was stored in the Internet Archive, the document contained a publication date of January 27, 2006. Neither of these dates is in the least bit consistent with Cui's statement.

update 8/25

And that's just the beginning of the problems with Cui's statement. I'll start with a summary, and I'll follow with documents. On this blog, I've listed (over time) four different documents: three Excel spreadsheets and a web page, all deleted from www.sport.gov.cn, the General Administration Sport China web site, and they are all available mirrored or cached online. Two of the documents are after the team transfer that Cui is referring to in his statement: these are the zctc.xls documents. One of them is the web page that documents the team transfer of He Kexin, this is the web page saved in the Internet Archive. The most important document, however, is 05ticao.xls, still saved in the Baidu cache at the time of this writing. Turns out "ticao" is the Pinyin for "gymnastics", so this document is basically "05gymnastics.xls". It predates the team transfer that Cui is speaking to. And all four documents show He Kexin's birthday as Jan 1 1994. How can a mistake a "year" ago made during a team transfer have affected He Kexin's records well before the team transfer, in 2005? Here's a link to Baidu cache of 05ticao.xls (this will expire someday soon, I'm reserving this space for a mirror link). It's a registry of gymnasts for 2005. For the following sectoin, you can copy and paste to search within the document to follow along. The document tells the gymnast totals:

注:总注册1016人;其中确认676人;首注329人;交流11人.
Total registration 1016 people, among which 676 
people were previously registered, 329 people are 
first-time registrations, and 11 people are "exchange".

These exchanged gymnasts are the exchanges that Cui is referring to in his statement, however, this year was not an exchange year for He Kexin. This was He Kexin's first registration year, see row 799:

799,"何可欣","女","1994.1.01","北京","北京","北京市体育局","首注"
799, He Kexin, F, 1994.1.01, Beijing, Beijing, 
Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau, First Time Registration

Next the document identifies its originator:

体操中心体操部
(Gymnastics Center, Gymnastics Section)

And finally, the document contains its signing date:

2005-3-17

Cui's statement is not a reasonable explanation for the discrepancies that have been found. This list of gymnasts for 2005, published by Cui's organization, the General Administration of Sport China, lists He Kexin as having been born in 1994 during her first time registration. This is before her transfer in 2006, which is listed in this athlete exchange agreement archived by the Internet Archive in 2006. The team change that Cui cites in his statement as having happened a year ago actually happened two years ago, and He Kexin's original registration with a 1994 birthday in early 2005 is far too early to be explained by a mistake "last year".
end update

Now that Chinese officials have broken their silence on the inconsistencies that are surfacing, I'm hoping we can all expect a statement soon on the case of Jiang Yuyuan, whose name and government ID number appear in a government-hosted spreadsheet I linked to earlier this evening. Alert readers will of course realize that Chinese government ID numbers embed the birth date, hence the string "19931001" inside this government ID number should be addressed in any future clarifications.

In conclusion, here are links to the Internet Archive's 2006 copies of the athlete exchange agreement hosted on www.sport.gov.cn, Ciu Dalin's General Administration of Sport China.

Internet Archive history of document
Translated version of 2006 copy

Are you faster than the delete button?

DOCUMENT:
http://www.zjsports.gov.cn/zjty/node12/node43/userobject1ai4698/00000002.xls

DOCUMENT METADATA:
Size: 3438080 Bytes
SHA-1 Signature: 1e1ee2513116b729b927a056cae1af9e87bdfc7e

DOCUMENT SOURCE:
Zhejiang Provincial Sports Administration
http://www.zjsports.gov.cn
IP Address: 60.191.63.85

DOCUMENT MIRRORS:
Mirror @wikileaks Courtesy Dan Schmitt
Internet Archive (Direct Download)
UCLA Radio Courtesy Carey Shenkman
Mirror @www.heathershow.com Courtesy Heather Lawver

DOCUMENT ANALYSIS:

Registration Number: TC2001C017
Name: Jiang Yuyuan 江钰源
National Id Number: 330302199310013648
Gender: F
Date of Birth 10/1/1993
Training: Gymnastics

Jiang Yuyan's Wikipedia page states:

After beginning her gymnastics career 
in Guangxi Province, she transferred to the
Zhejiang Provincial Team in 1999

SCREENSHOTS:

Highlight of row 11279, showing Jiang Yuyan

Screenshot of the WorldLingo translation engine, with the name from row 11279 pasted in.

Credit where credit is actually due

I am dedicating this post to my anonymous source, without whom this would not have happened, as well as the large Internet community within China whom I believe started this investigation at much greater risks to themselves. In addition I'd like to cite four articles which pre-date this blog which cover a lot of the same material, though with a different presentation. It's impossible for me to know if I've run across the same or different documents than these reporters, because I've never had access to their urls. That said, these folks were covering this story long before I ever tried to learn anything about it.

• NY Times (Jere Longman and Juliet Macur)
• LA Times (Diane Pucin)
• Huffington Post (David Flumenbaum)
• Associated Press (Nancy Armour and John Leicester)

What Now?

This has been an exhausting week. I honestly don't know what there is left to do, after posting this document. It's an original document straight off a government web site, with government id numbers, birth dates, etc. There are over ten thousand names and hand entered details. How could anyone ever forge something like that? It would take an army to gather that amount of detail and make it stand up to scrutiny. I think I'm going to grab a beer and watch this young woman's identity vanish into thin air. If you're watching it with me, think about our upcoming American elections, which are going to be decided by voting machines which generate only electronic documents. Think about the permanence and weight of electronic documents. And think about a future in which our identities are purely electronic. Cheers!

---

update An article from 2007 which states that He Kexin was 13 at the time (making her 14 in 2008) is still hosted on a government website. Which would make five documents regarding Kexin, for anyone counting.

Here Goes Nothing

I have received a tip from an insider within China. What I was sent is a link to a government document which is still hosted on a government web server. I have downloaded it and done as much due diligence on it as I am able, and the results are amazing. This document contains a much deeper level of information on a Chinese gymnast than was previously available. I am in the process of asking trusted helpers to mirror this document and vouch for it.

1984 in Prime Time

What I am going to do is this. At exactly 1800 Eastern Standard (2300 GMT), I will post a direct link to a primary document hosted on a government server in China. Then, we will have a race. We will see how many people can download and verify this document before it is wiped out. And for those watching, you will have a chance at a glimpse of our possible shared future: the erasure of an entire identity.

At What Risk?

I may end up with egg on my face here. It is possible the folks at the Great Firewall will detect my Internet activity and delete the document before I release it to the public. I am willing to take this risk. I have a copy, I will swear to its authenticity. I have uploaded it to wikileaks with a delayed release. I believe the opportunity is worth the risk. I hope you will join me.

-stryde.hax

Dude, Where's My Cache?

Remember when this all began, four days ago, I asked the world to cache the documents discovered in the Baidu cache, just in case they disappeared? Well sometime between last night and today, they did just that. A day after the Wall Street Journal was able to retrieve a copy from the Baidu cache, it dissappeared. Here are the original links: cache1 cache2. Surprisingly, the document I linked in a subsequent post is (at the time of this post) still present: cache3. Does this removal necessarily mean malfeasance? We can't be certain, as all search engine caches have a timeout period, in which older documents are expunged. Maybe this was just the natural timeout period of the documents, maybe not. Either way, it now becomes imperative to build mirrors of the third document, cache3, as we can reasonably expect it to dissapear soon.

The good news is, hundreds of people mirrored these documents before they were removed, and can vouch for what they saw. Here are just a few of the massive outpouring of volunteer mirrors that showed up in the comments section:

• doc1 doc2
• doc1 doc2
• doc1 doc2
• doc1 doc2

Behind the Wall?

I've received so much information in that last few days I don't know how to get to it all. Here's a small excerpt of an email I received from within China:

As a fellow resident in China, some 60 miles north of Grace, I must say that Grace's comment is at least partially correct. China is in many ways a wonderful place. However, I must take factual exception to some of her statements. While your blog has not been discovered by authorities yet, if I do a search for "NYTimes and underage gymnasts" on Google my internet connectivity at home is suspended for 15 minutes, and I am unable to establish any outside connections to ANY website from any computer in my home. In addition, while researching the gymnasts scandal, my internet searches routinely turned up blank pages for well known sites whose uptime is better than four 9s and my internet connection was suspended several times for 15 minutes each

Like the earlier email from Grace this one is impossible to verify, but the assertions made within are repeated often by those living within China.

Full of Sound and Fury, signifying...?

In the end, what does this all mean? Aside from the three spreadsheets I found, there is this fourth document, hosted by the Internet Archive, also hosted by the General Administration Sport China (www.sport.gov.cn), also currently missing, which states that He Kexin's birthday is Jan 1, 1994. That's four documents removed from the same government web server that are all in complete agreement about He Kexin's birthday. Stored on multiple web servers around the world! In fact, the Internet Archive keeps a history of when it stored its document copies, and it goes back to the year 2006, showing two separate, identical retrievals of the now-removed document. And what of the amazing Huffington Post article which predates my blog, showing screenshots of official news reports in which He Kexin's age is suddenly changed from 14 to 16, and a list published by the Chengdu government showing He Kexin's birthday to be, again, Jan 1 1994? What can we do with this vast preponderance of electronic evidence, all of which has been removed from the servers that once hosted it?

A Future Yet to be (Re)Written

We live in the Information Age, and we are facing a future in which all documents will be electronic. Doubtful? Later this year, American voters will elect a president using electronic voting machines which don't leave a paper trail. Americans can sign up now for bank accounts which are completely electronic and generate no consumer available paper records. And most DMV's, state agencies for issuing official id, are online now. A future of electronic records? We're living in it.

No Proof

If you receive a printed bank statement one month that says you have $3000, and the next month it says you have $2000, you can take both statements to court. If you have online banking, what do you take to court? If you vote electronically, what is the standard of proof for an audit? How can anyone prove the validity of a digital document? That was the question I faced four days ago, and my ad-hoc solution of community mirroring shows the dearth of solutions available to the public. The nature of digital documents has changed irrevocably, and our institutions have failed to keep up. Digital documents are invisibly malleable and non-persistent.

Invisibly malleable. The art of paper document forgery is as old as art forgery, dating back hundreds of years. Meanwhile digital document forgery is as easy as changing one number in a spreadsheet, and right now we lack the tools to track these changes. The coming wave of remote application providers like Google Docs might someday be able to provide us with a chain-of-trust type solution to this problem, but that day is a long way off. In the meantime, we face this problem with voting machines, where digital changes to vote tallies cannot be detected. The public deserves a solution to this problem, and it is a challenge for the information security industry to provide it. For now, I favor paper verified voting.

Non-persistent. The problem of non-persistence is the problem that the international community is now having with the electronic documents mentioned in this blog and elsewhere regarding He Kexin's age. In the blink of an eye, a document can be removed from the web server that hosts it, and someone seeking to prove the historical existence of that document has no recourse whatsoever. In a future in which all identity documents are electronic, does that mean that someone's identity can be erased? I would answer with a question: is He Kexin being erased, or overwritten? I'll let anyone who has read this blog reach their own conclusions in that regard. But again, I challenge the information security community: we need a solution. Recently my colleague Mike Zusman and researcher Dan Kaminsky gave presentations at Blackhat highlighting fundamenatal problems with the mechanisms that allow Internet users to trust that they are arriving at the web site they requested. These problems are related: how do we verify sites, and how do we verify documents hosted on sites? DNS security, SSL security, and the unfilled need for a legally admissable Internet Notary that can prove the historical existence of electronic documents. These are the solutions to the problems I've encountered this week. These are the solutions which can keep our elections safe, and preserve our culture of verifiable documents. I for one look forward to a future where innovative solutions to these problems are available to the citizens of the world.

-stryde.hax

---

Check out this recently submitted link from an anonymous user comment, in English! "14-year-old newcomer to the national team"! Google Cache

---

No longer anonymous. The above link was submitted by Jody Lanard M.D.

Look what YOU found!

I've been reading the comments posted to this blog with great interest. What follows are comments that I found exciting and intriguing.

BrittleBlogger said...

Following your lead i have just translated the header in these documents (see below). This shows that the document that you translated is not just the results of a competition it is the NATIONAL REGISTER of gymnasts. This evidence is getting pretty damning!

"Gymnasts reported in 2005 the National Registry Page"
    "2005 National Gymnasts reported registry"
    "No.", "name (in)", "Sex" and "Date of Birth", "native", "birth" and "registered", "Remarks"

Please note: this translation has not been verified by a Chinese language expert. I am still hoping to get in touch with a language expert who can provide trusted analysis of these documents. -Stryde

Ronald said...

Update:
Do this search :
http://www.google.cn/search?complete=1&hl=zh-CN&inlang=zh-CN&client=aff-sina&channel=hpsearch&hs=D5Q&affdom=sina.com.cn&q=%E4%BD%95%E5%8F%AF%E6%AC%A3+1994+site%3Awww.sport.gov.cn&btnG=Google+%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2&meta=&aq=f
You'll see this reference:
http://www.sport.gov.cn/show_info.php?n_id=14342
Of course it's not there, but in comes the wayback machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070630205138/http://www.sport.gov.cn/show_info.php?n_id=14342

This is an absolutely amazing find by Ronald. What you're seeing above is a document which was removed from the Chinese government server www.sport.gov.cn, listing He Kexin's birthday as 1994-1-1, saved in The Internet Archive (last link). The Internet Archive is a U.S. based non-profit organization which collaborates with the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress in its mission to perform historical web document preservation. This is just one more document source to pile on top of Google, Google.cn and Baidu. Take a look at the Google Translated version of the Internet Archive's copy of this document, and try to look up He Kexin's age for yourself: Link
-Stryde

Grace Xiong said...

I am a Chinese girl.After scanning your articles,I must say I take my hat off to you,for your spirits and efforts to find a truth.Many many Chinese are supporting your behavior.The olympic should not be cheated!But there is one thing I have to tell you (after seeing some comments on your blog..) ,China isn't as some dear westerners'thinking that she is a autocratic, no-human-rights country.She is a great and magic country,and her people are very kind. Her people have the freedom to say whatever they want. People like you will get many respects here and Chinese government will not do someting bad to a person who is praiseworthy. I am at home now(you can check my ip,I am in Hangzhou,Zhejiang province),I can surf the internet ,scan your article,leave my comment just as all of you,it may be another truth people should accept. Thank you all the same ,for what efforts you have made for a better China!

Grace's post speaks for itself. -Stryde

What now?

I believe the media wave has at last crested. From here, hopefully, I can continue to focus again on this research and where it leads.

Fifteen minutes is a really long time

First an apology for not updating this blog in a timely fashion, for not responding to all my emails, and for the delay in approving comments. In my defense I can say only that I have found my blog and my findings at the center of an international media maelstrom. I never set out to change the course of the Olympics; I set out as I always do, a curious researcher, intent on the search for truth and the knowledge I could acquire along the way.

A thank you is in order to everyone who has helped me to catalog and establish the existence of these documents. There are so many of you now, I don't know how I can thank you all. But I believe that you have acted in a spirit of truth-finding and openness, and I thank you for that.

I have received a flood of information through my email in the last few days, and I'm way too behind to list all of it. However I feel it is a priority to mention that I am not the first blogger to have started investigating this controversy, and there are rumors that people within China have been blogging on this topic in the weeks preceding my post. Specifically this blog by BillyPan is full of meticulously archived screenshots, news clippings and web pages, and while I can't read the language, the pictures tell a very detailed story. I encourage everyone to have a look.

And now for a bit more content

I've gotten a lot of feedback about the appropriate way to get all three documents, still available from the Baidu cache at the time of this posting, into Google Translate correctly. The missing link here is that when you first copy the information out of the spreadsheets, they are covered in quote and comma characters, which messes up the translation. Groom out the punctuation and enter it into the translation box and you should end up with something like the screenshot below:

That's the three lines in question, from the three documents in question. At this point, I'm going to take a step back, let the experts analyze these documents, and see what the consensus is. I've done my part; citizen journalists of the world, this story is yours now!

The Day After

This blog has gotten a lot of feedback in the last 24 hours. If you haven't read the original story, read that first to catch up. Today, the story continues.

In addition to the outpouring of mirrors and support for preserving the information I discovered, I've also received some very helpful information from other Google hackers. Specifically, I was encouraged to check out the Chinese version of Google: google.cn. Presented here are the results, not all of which I can take credit for.

What about google.cn?

When I woke up this morning, I ran my existing search string against google.cn. Interestingly, I got back two spreadsheet results: the original spreadsheet I blogged about, zctc.xls, and a new spreadsheet I hadn't previously discovered, 05ticao.xls. Here's a screenshot.

A few hours later after moderating comments, I refreshed my search. And wow, was it eye opening.

Expunged entirely from google.cn's search index is my original find, zctc.xls. Down the memory hole. If the documents are false, why remove them? Why wipe their existence from the search index? I was intrigued. I decided to follow the trail of the second spreadsheet, 05ticao.xls.

Always one step ahead of me, the document was again missing from its original home, the home page of the General Administration of Sport of China. Undeterred, I decided to look again to Baidu to see if I could retrieve the results.

Could it be? More documentation? I followed the document cache link...

There's He Kexin again, listed with a birthday of 1-1-1994, fourteen years old. Running that line through Google Translate, the chances of a case of mistaken identity diminish rapidly:

799, BB He Kexin CC female AA 1994.1.01  Beijing and
Beijing Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau, First Note 

It is my suspicion that First Note is a mistranslation of First Place, as her world class gymnastics record speaks for itself. For those working to cache these documents, the direct link to the Baidu cache, for as long as it lasts, is here: cache link (update Baidu cache is dead now, here's a mirror at heathershow.com.

Conclusions

What is this post really about? I don't really feel that it's about the gymnastics age limit, or even really about whether fraud occurred. At this point, I believe that any reasonable observer already understands that age records have been forged. This story now is really about Internet censorship, the act of removing evidence while at the same time claiming that the evidence is wrong. For the first time I watched search records shift under my feet like sand, facts draining down a hole in the Internet. Will this stand?

For those interested in pursuing facts on their own, I should at this point cite my inspiration. If Johnny is the godfather of Google hacking, then his seminal book on the subject can be considered the bible of the field. There's nothing I've done here that you can't teach yourself from that book. Who knows what else can be accomplished; I am one, but You are Many. Good luck.

---

Updates

• The power of crowds is already hard at work. Check out this link found by Digg user Karate3409, posted in the Digg story on this blog: Link.
  

  
  10 何可欣 He Kexin 女 F 1994 11 1994  1  1  北京体育局
  Beijing Sports Bureau 武汉体育局
  Wuhan Sports Bureau 2年 2 years
  

  
  That's a nice piece of research!

---

I have no affiliation with this book, make no money from referrals, and all profits from its sale go directly to the organization Hackers for Charity. If you want to know where I got my start, well, there you go.

There's been some widely publicized controversy regarding the competition age of the Chinese women's gymnastics team recently. Rather than be too CNN, I decided to take a page from my friend Johnny and investigate on my own. I have an Internet connection, that means I should be able to verify the age of the gymnasts in question with primary state-issued documents and find out for myself if someone's cheating, right? Right. Let's go to work.

First, the rules.

1. Gymnasts must be 16 to compete. This means they must be born in 1992 or earlier.
2. Only publicly available, primary, linkable information can be used.

Who are we talking about?

Let's take a look at He Kexin (何可欣). Her Chinese issued passport lists her birthday as 01/01/1992, 16 years old and old enough to compete. However, allegations cited on her Wikipedia page put her birthday as 01/01/1994, fourteen years old and not eligible for competition. Which is the truth? Let's find out.

Let's ask Google!

First, we'll search all Chinese web sites for Excel spreadsheets containing He Kexin's name and the word 1994. (site:cn 何可欣 filetype:xls 1994). This seems like a pretty good search. Try it yourself! Here's what Google gives us back, one measly hit:

Wow, an Excel spreadsheet hosted on an official Chinese government web site (http://www.sport.gov.cn/files/jts/reg2006/zctc.xls) that contains the official birthday for He Kexin, awesome! Unfortunately, when you click on it, it's been removed.

That's strange. Fortunately, we can click on "View as HTML" in the Google cache and see it. However, even though the Google search results indicate that He Kexin is listed in the spreadsheet, when you view Google's cached version, her name no longer appears.

What a strange software bug!?!? Oh well, I guess we should give up. Right?

What if we don't give up easy though?

What about Baidu? Baidu is a Chinese language search engine with its own cache and search index. It's different than google. So what if we run the same search on Baidu? Here's the Baidu results, as of today, for the same search string: (site:cn 何可欣 filetype:xls 1994). For those who don't speak Search Engine, that's all Excel spreadsheets in China that contain He Kexin's name and the string 1994. So, here's Baidu:

Interesting. Baidu lists TWO spreadsheets at sport.gov.cn with Kexin's name. Not surprisingly, the new one discovered by Baidu has been been deleted as well:

But what about the Baidu cache? If you click on the "HTML" link next to these XLS documents on Baidu (do it yourself!) you can access a cached copy of the document. This means that it was fully available... until recently. So, does Baidu's copies of these documents have anything to say about Ms. Kexin?

In the Baidu cache, which apparently has not been hit with the scrub brush (yet), two spreadsheets published by the Chinese government on sport.gov.cn both list He Kexin's birthday as 01-01-1994, making her 14 years old. For as long as these links work, you can access the documents directly, either using the directions and screenshots above, or these links: cache1 cache2

Conclusions

How official are these documents? Pretty dang official - they were issued by the General Administration of Sport of China.

Much of the coverage regarding Kexin's age has only mentioned "allegations" of fraud, and the IOC has ignored the matter completely. I believe that these primary documents, issued by the Chinese state, directly available from China by clicking on the links above rise to a level of evidence higher than "allegation". The following points bear mentioning:

1. Google's cached copy of the spreadsheet does not contain Kexin's age record, and Baidu's does. This does not necessarily imply that Google allowed its data to be rewritten by Chinese censors, but the possibility does present itself.
2. From the minute I pressed the publish button on this blog, the clock is ticking until Kexin's true age is wiped out of the Baidu cache forever. It is up to you, the folks reading this blog, to take your own screenshots and notarize them by publishing them. If you put a link in the comments section, I'll post it.

In closing, I'd like to point out that this is not an anti-China post; far from it. While I may disagree with the effort the Chinese government is making to conceal this young woman's age, I have the utmost respect for the Chinese people, and I believe that united they will be able to make state sponsored censorship a thing of the past.

---

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Update 8/27/2008

• It seems that most of the traffic to this blog is still coming here, to the original post. I'd like to point out for the record, this is the first blog post I've ever written in my life. I did my best. That said, there's now a lot more to the story. Please visit http://strydehax.blogspot.com.


• One side bar to this post that keeps getting picked up is my statement that censors could have had access to the search engine results. It remains true that this is possible, or at least I cannot disprove it. However, it is very important to note that documents disappearing from web servers is very different from results leaving a search engine. Results "time out" and naturally remove themselves from search engines all the time; this is a natural artifact of how the technology works. Hence I cannot in any way state that there is evidence that information is being intentionally removed from search engines. When I was writing this, it seemed like everything I clicked on had already been deleted; in retrospect, it's important to differentiate between missing documents on web servers (which is highly suspicious) and missing search engine results, which can simply be an artifact of the search engine catching up. I hope this clarifies things.

Update 8/22/2008

• Referred to this story directly? Please see the rest of my blog, as I attempt to follow up in real time: strydehax.blogspot.com


• Many readers have pointed out mistakes in this posting, including my use of the phrase "Ms. Kexin", which is incorrect (the correct name order dictates the phrase "Ms. He". I have decided not to modify my original posting. If I go back and change my mistakes, how can I comment honestly on the topic of online redaction?


• I've recently been alerted to this excellent Huffington Post article which uses screenshots of primary sources regarding He Kexin. This is the type of reporting I was originally looking for! One guy can't read everything. Tip o' the hat.

Update 8/20/2008

• New to the story? Check out Part II


• Well, this has hit Slashdot and appears to have legs. I am approving comments as fast as I can; bear with me


• Readers in the comment section have noted that I misspelled Ms. Kexin's name as Hexin; corrected


• I have received several comments to the effect of "Who cares how old she is?". In response: certainly not me. This blog is about government censorship and state sponsored fraud. I am attempting to demonstrate the power of free citizens to subvert government censorship. The finer points of gymnastics competitions are outside the scope of this post.


• An alert reader has alerted me that perhaps the New York Times was the first to run across these documents, in their story here. In fact, it may have been visits by the NY Times reporter to the official web site that originally caused the Excel spreadsheets to be deleted. I find it unfortunate that at the time the NYTimes did not 'notarize' and redistribute the primary documents when they were found, if this is the case. Either way, it appears readers of this blog have taken up the torch. The truth isn't going to be stamped out.


• I am amazed at the outpouring of technical support and mirrors contributed by readers in order to preserve these records. I will continue to post every one I receive; thank you.


• I can be reached privately via stryde dot blog at gmail dot com

I'm from Michigan. For anyone whose US geography is a little shaky, -- I'm looking at you, Kentucky -- Michigan is the one in the north that's surrounded by all the water. From where I live now, driving to Windsor is faster than driving to Toledo. Given the option, I'd rather drive to Canada than to Ohio anyway. I have more friends there and I know the area better. This unique border-state position of being closer to a foreign country than to a neighboring state makes for some interesting blending of cultures.

For starters, I have a deeply rooted affection for Canada. Sort of the way I imagine I'd feel if I had a younger brother who had out-grown me. He's bigger than me, and if I really pushed him, he'd probably be able to kick my ass, but he would never do that because at the end of the day, he's still just my sweet little kid brother. And I'd never claim that Ontario was exactly like Michigan any more than I'd claim my brother was a little clone of me. But we can't deny we grew up on a lot of the same culture -- euchre, "The Red Green Show," fantastic winter storms, no shortage of corn fields, and of course, the Lakes.


Ontarigan -- Between the two of us, we pretty much own all the cool beaches.

Ohio's like my stepbrother. We live in the same house. Other people seem to think we have things in common, but... I don't really know him. I'm told they play euchre there, but sometimes they use sixes and fours to keep score instead of fives. And while Michigan has nearly 3300 miles of shoreline on four of the Great Lakes, Ohio borders Lake Erie for just over 300. I can't begin to relate to that.



When I returned home from Seattle, I took a little look-see at my calendar and realized I had two empty weeks before our annual family romp on Lake Huron. I wanted to get out of the house, but after so much traveling, I knew I needed to head for somewhere relaxing. I immediately composed an email message to send to a handful of my Strong & Free friends. It began: "Dear Canada, are you busy next week?"

Several emails, a few pricey phone calls, and one exemplary set of directions later, I set out on the eight-hour haul to central Ontario.



Despite having several friends in Toronto, I decided to spend the majority of my week a couple hours east of there in a quiet, rural area close to the shore of Lake Ontario. Going to another major urban center just didn't appeal to me. So instead, I went to see my buddy Brice -- an old work mate from Japan who, like me, has since returned to his hometown. This made Brice the fourth ex-NOVA friend I got to see this summer. Well done, me! And as with Dave and Jenny in Dublin, I hadn't seen Brice in over two years, so it was a deeply gratifying reunion.



In the first fifteen seconds after I pulled into Brice's, I got three things: a bear hug, a brief introduction to the fam, and a cold beer. That set a pretty good tone for the whole visit.

Despite Brice's assurances that there was absolutely nothing to do in his town, we kept pretty busy. We went to a bonfire and a baseball game; we grilled out every night; we played ferociously competitive euchre (the only kind, really); and we sat outside at their mom's listening to the coyotes. Brice and I went swimming in a rock quarry one afternoon, which is an experience everyone should have at least once. His brother's girlfriend and I got to laugh and roll our eyes while the menfolk attempted to force open a safe they had found, using an electric drill, hammers, chisels, and sheer tenacity. Naturally, we spent a day on a Lake Ontario beach with a bit of frisbee, a bit of sunburn, and a respectable cooler of beer. And at night when I crawled in bed at the family farm, it was pitch black and perfectly silent. I haven't slept that well in quite a while.

I even changed my plans for the rest of the week so that I could stay longer. I guess I just couldn’t think of anywhere worth running off to. :-)

While everyone's going batty over "The Dark Knight," make sure you don't miss "Mamma Mia!" Meryl Streep is a diva! She dominates the screen throughout and delivers a particularly heart-rending performance of "The Winner Takes It All." The adorable Amanda Seyfried sparkles as Sophie, bringing a fresh face and powerful voice to the hopelessly starry-eyed role. Packed with humor, charm, and a fantastic score, this film is so wonderfully well-done, you won't even mind that Pierce Brosnon was cast for his ability to act the aging heart-throb and not for his singing voice. ★★★★★