p2pnet news | Politics:- The truthfulness of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and general counsel Michael Callahan has already been seriously questioned by US House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Tom Lantos.

The two executives are central in the ongoing scandals in which Yahoo is accused of supplying information to Chinese police which resulted in the arrest and jailing of Chinese cyber dissidents.

Now, following further “strong” criticism, Yang and Callahan have, “apologized for not fully informing the committee about the case” but deny they lied, says the Wall Street Journal.

During the congressional hearing into Yahoo role in the men’s imprisonment, “Gao Qinsheng, the mother of jailed journalist Shi Tao, and Yu Lin, the wife of imprisoned cyber-dissident Wang Xiaoning, spoke passionately about Yahoo’s conduct,” says the story, quoting Gao as saying:

I am very happy that I saw and I heard the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee and other congressmen criticize and condemn Yahoo for having lied to the Congress.

Shi Tao was jailed after Yahoo China, then a unit of the company, handed information about him to Chinese authorities in 2004. Wang Xiaoning was arrested in 2002 for using a Yahoo account to advocate open elections in China, according to a House Foreign Affairs Committee spokeswoman. The company is alleged by lawmakers and human-rights groups to have cooperated with Beijing over his arrest as well.

“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.

After the Tuesday hearing, “Messrs. Yang and Callahan met privately with Ms. Gao and Ms. Yu in a room in the offices of the House Committee,” says the WSJ.

“According to Ms. Gao, the two apologized profusely for the company’s role in the jailing of Messrs. Shi and Wang, and pledged to put pressure on the Chinese government to release them.

“They also discussed a court case in which the women are suing the company, accusing it of breaking several laws, including one which prohibits U.S. companies from assisting in the commission of torture and other human rights abuses in other countries.”

‘Moral pygmy’

But as p2pnet as frequently pointed out, Yahoo is far from being alone.

Its crimes against its own users probably make it the Number One in the corporate pile, but Google, Microsoft and Cisco have also been frequently called out for their continuing collusion with Chinese authorities in the interests of maintaining the health of their bottom lines.

Says Peter Navarro, a business professor at UC Irvine and author in the Los Angeles Times:

Cisco Systems Inc. helps send thousands of Chinese dissidents to prison by selling sophisticated Internet surveillance technology to China.

But, “Cisco is hardly alone in helping China keep the jackboot to the neck of its people,” he goes on:

Skype, an EBay Inc. subsidiary, helps the Chinese government monitor and censor text messaging. Microsoft Corp. likewise is a willing conscript in China’s Internet policing army, as Bill Gates’ minions regularly cleanse the Chinese blogosphere. Google Inc.’s brainiacs, meanwhile, have built a special Chinese version of their powerful search engine to filter out things as diverse as the BBC, freeing Tibet and that four-letter word in China – democracy.

Business executives have justified their actions with a “when in China, do as the Chinese do” defense. To do business in China, these executives insist, they must comply with local laws. But China’s local laws often force executives to make moral and ethical choices that would be intolerable in the West.

With American corporate help, “China remains the world’s biggest prison.” he states, adding:

As reported by the Laogai Research Foundation, millions of dissidents languish in Chinese-style gulags known as laogai, and thanks in part to U.S. corporations, their numbers are growing.

In addition, human rights abuses are both systematic and endemic in China. From Catholics and Muslims to the Falun Gong, from pro-democracy voices and investigative journalists to the Free Tibet movement, the penalty for being caught for banned religious or political expression is arrest, beatings and sometimes death.

For all these reasons, it is ultimately shortsighted to single out Yahoo for the kind of behavior now common to many big U.S. companies operating in China. That’s why we need to have a much bigger discussion about how to engage economically and politically with China. It’s also why the proposed Global Online Freedom Act, which would make it unlawful for U.S. companies to filter Internet search results or turn over user information, should not be viewed as a magic bullet but rather as the start of that debate.

Stay tuned, but don’t expect anything beyond meaningless platitudes .

Slashdot it!

Also See:
seriously questioned – Yahoo summonsed in Shi Tao case, October 17, 2007
Wall Street Journal – Families of Chinese Dissidents Speak Out Against Yahoo, November 7, 2007
sentenced Shi Tao to jail – Yahoo in new China dissident lawsuit, May 31, 2007
Los Angeles Times – Yahoo isn’t the only villain, November 7, 2007

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 8:36 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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