Yahoo summonsed in Shi Tao case
p2pnet news | Politics:- Why were Yahoo executives less than truthful about the case in which Chinese dissident Shi Tao was thrown into jail for ten years because of information Yahoo allegedly supplied to the Chinese police?
The US House Foreign Affairs Committee wants to know.
Last year, in sworn testimony, a Yahoo official, “testified that the company knew nothing ‘about the nature of the investigation’ into Shi Tao, a pro-democracy activist who is now serving ten years on trumped up charges’,” says committee member congressman Chris Smith.
And, “We have now learned there is much more to the story than Yahoo let on, and a Chinese government document that Yahoo had in their possession at the time of the hearing left little doubt of the government’s intentions,” he says.
US companies, “must hold the line and not work hand in glove with the secret police,” says Smith.
The committee says it’s calling on Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang (left) and the company’s senior VP and general counsel Michael Callahan to explain why how they gave, “false information to Congress about its role in a human rights case in China that sent a journalist to jail for a decade,” it says in a statement.
They’ll also be expected to go into detail at a November 6 hearing about, “the implications of the company’s current business model with regard to future disclosures”.
Congressional investigators plan to look into whether Yahoo officials misrepresented the Internet company’s role in the arrest of a Chinese journalist sentenced to a decade in jail, p2pnet posted this Fall.
Now, “Our committee has established that Yahoo! provided false information to Congress in early 2006,” committee chairman Tom Lantos says, going on that his committee wants to “clarify how that happened” and “hold the company to account for its actions both before and after its testimony proved untrue”.
Says the committee statement:
At a February 2006 subcommittee hearing on limits to freedom on the Internet in China, Lantos and Smith questioned Callahan about the case of Shi Tao. A reporter and editor for a Chinese newspaper, Shi was arrested in his home after posting material about a government crackdown on media and democracy activists on an overseas Web site, Democracy Forum, under a pseudonym. Police in Beijing found him after Chinese authorities asked Yahoo! to provide information about his e-mail account, including his IP address, log-on history and the contents of his e-mail over several weeks.
Callahan said at the hearing that when the company divulged this identifying material, ‘we had no information about the nature of the investigation.’ In late July 2007, the San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation released documents showing that police had written Yahoo! specifying that they sought evidence about Shi in a case of suspected ‘illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities,’ a charge frequently invoked against political dissidents in China.
Shi joined Yu Ling, wife of Wang Xiaoning, another imprisoned cyber dissident, in suing Yahoo for its part “facilitating the arrest, imprisonment, and torture of Chinese internet users,” said a p2pnet story, going on:
” ‘The 2004 Chinese court verdict that sentenced Shi Tao to jail specifically cited Yahoo! as having provided Chinese authorities with information identifying Shi Tao as the owner of the e-mail account and the source of the communications,’ says World Organization for Human Rights USA’s Colleen M. Costello.”
Twice in the past companies have approached p2pnet suggesting we might like to carry textual advertising. However, it turned out Yahoo was a major advertiser and didn’t approve of p2pnet. So the would-be textual advertisers decided not to pursue the matter.
In the circumstances, we find that both interesting and ironic.
Also See:
p2pnet – Congress to investigate Yahoo, August 7, 2007
specifically cited Yahoo! – Yahoo in new China dissident lawsuit, May 31, 2007
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October 17th, 2007 at 11:28 am
Let’s jail the persons at Yahoo responsible for that. Otherwise we should boycott Yahoo.
Are they communist or something at Yahoo?
As Carl Marx said (Who was mistakenly taken for the father of communist) Extreme capitalism
is equal to communist because it’s end up with few mega corporations controlling evrything and not
operating under democratic priincipal. Soon familiar?