Yahoo Inc. acted on behalf of the Chineese government by tracking the journalist down via his Yahoo email account. In other words, your Yahoo account is not a free speech zone.
I wrote about this story here after Reporters Without Borders issued a report condemning Yahoo.
Yahoo's excuse? The company must comply with local law. Yeah, the infamous Nazi excuse.
The Washington Post opines that if American companies are going to work on behalf of totalitarian regimes, it's time for Congress to rethink foreign policy.
In the meantime, some of us may want to rethink our Yahoo accounts.
Washington Post editorial:
At a meeting in April 2004, a local communist party boss gave Shi Tao and his colleagues verbal orders on how they were to cover the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Shi Tao took notes at the meeting and, using his private e-mail account, sent off a description of what he'd been told to a pro-democracy Web site run by a Chinese emigre in New York.
A few weeks ago, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for doing so.
Though Shi Tao's "crime" would not have been considered illegal in America, an American company was directly responsible for his conviction. Unfortunately, Shi Tao had a Yahoo e-mail address, and when the Chinese government asked, Yahoo Inc. complied with its request to hunt him down. . . .
There's more here on American companies that value profit over free speech, including Microsoft's anti-democratic tools that filter out forbidden words like "democracy" and "Dalai Lama." (Hat tip to Citizen's Band)
Politics Democracy China Yahoo free speech Shi Tao
