Special Analysis: Yahoo! Accused of Providing China with Information to Jail Reporter

Shi Tao was sentenced in April by a Chinese court to ten years in prison, ostensibly for sending state secrets in an e-mail message. The e-mail message in fact contained his notes on a government document that set forth restrictions on Chinese media. The France-based group Reporters without Borders alleges in a September 6, 2005, article that Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sunnyvale, California, based Yahoo! Inc. (NasdaqNM:YHOO) "...provided the Chinese investigating organs with detailed information that apparently enabled them to link Shi’s personal e-mail account (huoyan-1989@yahoo.com.cn) and the specific message containing information treated as a 'state secret' to the IP address of his computer."

Yahoo! and other companies, including Microsoft, providing e-mail, search engine, and browser support add-ons have been accused in recent months of seeking access to the enormous Chinese market by acquiescing to censorship and other content restriction requirements of the Chinese government, which has recently become more aggressive in curtailing use of and access to the Internet and in censoring television and other broadcast media content that challenge state-mandated cultural values.

Yahoo! recently paid US$1 billion to acquire a 40% stake in Alibaba.com, which is China's largest online commerce company.

Pravda reports that Yahoo! has declined to comment on the allegations by Reporters without Borders because it has yet to fully review the report by the advocacy group.

Should those allegations against Yahoo! prove accurate, three recommendations are in order:

a Congressional hearing should be held to investigate the delivery by U.S.-based companies to foreign governments of personal and proprietary information collected from individuals, particularly as such information might be delivered to and used by nations on human rights watch lists compiled by the State Department and other officially recognized, international bodies;

a bill should be submitted to Congress seeking to amend the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to include language criminalizing the delivery by U.S. companies of information to any other country when such conveyance is carried out with the intent to advance an overall plan or scheme to achieve commercial advantage in the markets of that country; and

a cessation of usage of services offered by Yahoo! should be instituted by reporters and their media outlets until such time as can be established an independently verifiable regime for protection of the privacy of all individuals, groups, companies, and other entities for whom Yahoo! holds proprietary, personal, or otherwise private information.

To be indifferent to the complicity of an American company in the imprisonment of a reporter of any country is to allow further challenges to and erosion of individual rights to privacy and freedom of the press worldwide. Ultimately, every journalist in the world is endangered by the actions of corporations that are willing to surrender the rights of individuals for profitable opportunities.

For bloggers to ignore this emerging threat is to stand willing to be victims one day of similar actions, which might occur not in a socially repressive, free-market country like China, but in a far closer but equally socially repressive, free-market country.



The Dark Wraith has spoken.