p2pnet - rss feed: Yahoo on ‘grass’ charges
p2p news / p2pnet:- Yahoo claims it had no choice but to grass out journalist Shi Tao to Communist China’s Net police.
The company handed over information about Shi Tao, who was later jailed for 10 years under state secrecy laws.
Shi Tao had used his email account to highlight a government order, “barring Chinese media from marking the 15th anniversary of the brutal 1989 crackdown on democracy activists at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square,” said Agence Press France.
But at a Net forum, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang defended the move, “saying it was obliged to comply with Chinese laws and regulations,” says the Associated Press, going on:
“The demand for the information was a ‘legal order’ and Yahoo gets such requests from law enforcement agencies all the time, and not just in China,” it has Yang saying.
Yahoo, et al, “have been expanding their presence in mainland China in hopes of reaching more of the country’s fast-growing population of Internet users, which now number more than 100 million,” government information sharing requirements and other restrictions notwithstanding, says AP, adding:
“New York-based Human Rights in China and the Paris-based international media watchdog Reporters Without Borders sent an open letter addressed to former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who was a keynote speaker at the Internet forum, urging him to bring up Shi’s case during his visit to China.
“But Clinton only alluded to the risks faced by Internet users targeted by the authorities for whatever reason” and:
“The political system’s limits on freedom of speech … have not seemed to have any adverse consequences on e-commerce,” he said. “It’s something you’ll all have to watch and see your way through.”
But Yahoo is far from being alone in cooperating with the Communists. Google had been censoring news from within mainland China by excluding certain sites and at the time, a Google spokeswoman admitted to p2pnet. This was to, “create the best possible news search experience for our users, we sometimes decide not to include some sites, for a variety of reasons,” she said.
In a blog, Google said losing a “fractional” number was, “better than having a service that is not available at all”.
The “fractional” number is 2% which, says Bil Xia, whose DynaWeb free proxy network built to circumvent internet blocking in China unveiled the situation, is hardly insignificant, particularly since those sites could easily be the most important, a view based on the fact it was deemed necessary to ‘block’ them in the first place.
And, “MSN Spaces quite possibly has a separate Code of Conduct for users in China,” says The Epoch Times, one of the sites censored by Google.
Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net
See:-
grass out - Yahoo: China police informer?, September 8, 2005
Associated Press - Yahoo ordered to share reporter’s e-mail, September 10, 2005
censoring news - Google China censorship: more, October 2, 2004
separate Code of Conduct - Microsoft as China censor, June 17, 2005
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If you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent website blocking outside of China.
Download it here and feel free to copy the zip and host it yourself so others can download it.
September 10th, 2005 at 8:01 pm
It would be interesting to know if Yahoo was required to keep logs per the local laws. If logging is not required, why keep them for more than 24 hours? That should be sufficient time to aid with diagnosing any immediate technical problems. After that, get rid of them. You can’t provide what you no longer have. More ISPs in the Western World should adopt this approach and it will cut down significantly on the John Doe (”You posted something I didn’t like on the internet.”) Lawsuits and the crap the RIAA and MPAA is pulling.
September 11th, 2005 at 10:32 pm
see http://tinyurl.com/bhp98
here’s a snip:
“NEWCASTLE (Reuters) - European Union ministers made little progress on Thursday on plans to log and store phone, email and Internet use to track terrorists as industry complained of the scheme’s multi-million euro costs.
The proposed measures have triggered civil liberty concerns among EU and national lawmakers, while European telecommunication companies say far more discussion is needed before any agreement can be reached.
Before the talks, EU president Britain was hopeful the 25-nation bloc would take significant steps towards an agreement next month to keep records of everyone’s phone calls, emails and Internet use for up to 12 months.”