JaBbA's Hut

Althrough there seemed to be definitive proof that the Gold Medal winner of the uneven bars was underage, there won't be any kind of investigation into the matter:

The International Olympic Committee opened up an investigation into the age of two of China's gold-medal-winning Olympic gymnasts this weekend -- and closed it a day later, following a security consultant's discovery of online documents listing the competitors as too young to compete.

The security consultant, Mike Walker of the Intrepidus Group, used tailored searches of Google and Baidu to find excel spreadsheets that appeared to show the ages of Chinese gymnastic competitors at meets prior to the Olympics. If the competitors are found to be too young, as many as four of China's medals could be affected. On Sunday, the IOC reportedly indicated that an initial review of documentation has not found any issues and that the medals will not likely change hands.

Last week, China blamed the entire issue on paperwork errors, according to the New York Times.

The spreadsheets, on a Chinese government website, that showed the gymnast to be 2 years younger than claimed simply disappeared, and the Chinese govenrment claims that it was all a misunderstanding.

OK, so that sucks for Nastia, but what does that have to do with the U.S. election?

Soon after Walker, who blogs under the name Stryder Hax, found each document, the evidence quickly disappeared. The lesson, he said, is that -- while it is difficult to delete documents from the Internet -- an entity with the power and reach of China seems to be able to make information about He Kexin disappear quickly.

"I think I'm going to grab a beer and watch this young woman's life vanish into thin air," Walker wrote on Sunday. "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!"

Cheers, indeed.