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Yahoo! Allegedly Helps Beijing Arrest a Third Reporter
reporter writes "According to a damning press release from Reporters without Borders, Yahoo has
helped Beijing to locate, arrest, and imprison a 3rd reporter.
This latest incident occurs about 2 months after Yahoo testified,
under oath in front of Congress, that the company regrets being
'forced' to help Beijing." From the article: "'We hope this Internet giant will not, as it has each time it has been challenged previously, hide behind its local partner, Alibaba, to justify its behaviour. Whatever contract it has with this partner, the email service is marketed as Yahoo !' the organisation said. According to the verdict, Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong) confirmed that the email account ZYMZd2002 had been used jointly by Jiang Lijun and another pro-democracy activist, Li Yibing."
Because these 'safeguards' will work both ways. They protect you but they also identify you by your access information (and worse) machine IP address stored in server logs. "Federal Regulations" here in the states means your identity should be protected (but we've all seen that start to ebb) while in China it probably means just the opposite. There, the government is a government 'of the people' which means it has a right to all information and property of the people. Without arguing against too much Marx & Engels here, I'm just going to say that it's not aligned too closely with my beliefs of a government's limitations.
As Reporters without Borders states, the solution is obvious: move your servers to a country where "federal regulations" protects rather than ousts the end user. Yes, it's going to be slightly more expensive for Yahoo to host it out of the United States and there will be more network load for the internet. This would most certainly be a slap in the face to the Chinese government, however. Not as bad as moving the servers to Taiwan but still bad. I think that we should all watch this quite closely. If Yahoo moves the servers, then they are concerned about the Chinese citizens who want better human rights. If they leave them there and continue to allow the Chinese government to mine their servers
Honestly, the Yahoo! logo is colored red. It's missing a star or maybe a hammer and sickle
Have search engines become government whipping boys? Will Google kneel before the Bush administration while Yahoo! raises the population of the gulags?
My work here is dung.
Maybe its time we started boycotting Yahoo? This would mean amongst other things replacing people replacing own their Geocities pages with a boycot message.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Yahoo is not very likely to move their servers though. If they were to move the servers out of china to prevent this sort of thing, then the Chinese Government will just block all business from Yahoo.
The and I am sure the Chinese Government is willing to use that as a threat to prevent Yahoo from doing such a thing.
Money is always the deciding factor, lives are usually the last thing on the mind of executives. Just look at Ford and the Pinto fiasco.
Maybe for unrestrained capitalism, but we certainly don't have to adhere to that. Frankly it turns my stomach that people would be so complicit just for the sake of dollars. I was just about as "touched" by the search engine companies' testimonies in front of congress as I was with the steroid using baseball players. It was a really hard decision to turn their backs on the ideals of this country for the sake of their stock price!
One of my friend's dads made a profound statement about this when confronted with a less than scrupulous boss... "well, hell... if we're going only interested in making money, lets buy a few planes and start smuggling drugs! That's lucrative!"
You've gotta draw the line somewhere.
Q: What's your favorite search engine, and why?
I once had a prospective employee answer Yahoo! I should have known that she was a bad apple just from that answer, but she was otherwise qualified so I hired her. What a big mistake. Turns out that she wasn't nearly as good as her references suggested, and she left with one days notice.
Now I know: never hire anybody who claims to use Yahoo! as a seach engine.
You gotta be kidding me. It doesn't matter how ballsy a president is, all the billions (and possibly trillions) invested in china can't simply be ignored. And aside, do you think that China turned evil all of a sudden? The governments which allowed business with china knew exactly what they were dealing with. Get of the high horse and get a basic grasp of economics
I was just going to say the same thing.
Corporations are obligated to make money, though not through any means possible. They also have a moral and ethical standard to which they are obliged, yet a lot choose to ignore them whenever the mighty dollar is on the line.
I can guarantee that if this ever hits the mainstream press, it will definitely chill Yahoo!'s business in the US, and that could be far more damaging than their 'potential' lucrative Chinese market... after all, they're probably making a name for themself in mainland China as the 'evil' corporation that's spying on it's users for the government.
They're technically shooting themselves in both feet with their current actions... all for a fast buck.
A little of both. Desire for money justifies (not really but for Yahoo!) compliance with the hammer and sickle rule of law.
What's a shame is that people in opressive countries see these companies - Yahoo!, Google, etc. as bearers of the American brand of freedom - as idealistically as they may see it. So Yahoo! and Google and the like make their money off of the desire to partake and the understanding that the American company will bring American values and understanding of freedom of speech, and then said company turns around and stabs them in the back.
Yet another reason that people are growing increasingly upset with America. Anything for the almighty buck, even if it means preaching American freedom to justify Iraq, and then allowing companies to cooperate with communist regimes at the same time. Anything for that next dollar.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
Here in Beijing expat reporters have their knickers in a twist about Yahoo (HK), Jiang Lijun and Li Yibing. I have some sympathy for their position but, really, you have to apply a bit of common-sense and objectivity to this. The underlying sentiment, if not argument, is that what Yahoo (HK) and China did together would not happen in the US. Lets all move servers. Huh? Come on. The only difference between China and the US is that China for some reason is allowing Yahoo (HK) to speak to the press about China's legitimate (as in legal) request and Yahoo (HK)'s response. In the US, government requests to Yahoo for similar data are allowed, frequent, protected and secret. The whole process is secret and cannot be revealed even in court - by law. Yahoo, cannot tell anyone about the governement request, its against the law. The victim, if he/she were to somehow get to know of the government request, would be forbidden from telling anyone about it - its against the law and you can't go to court and have it reversed. The main difference here folks is that China does not have the Patriot Act and is not applying a press gag. I am no defender of China but . . . . Sheesh. The US is the one that has the Patriot Act and makes all such transactions and requests secret, hidden, beyond review.
> So why do the people of the US care so much about lack of rights for the people
> of China -- what about the Freedom of the Press and Due Process rights of Chinese
> people in the US?
Actually, you could s/Chinese//. I'm sure the Chinese people in the USA aren't particularly ill-treated. At least I haven't heard of any stories to that conclusion.
I'm not an American, and I don't know enough of them to understand their thinking, but I'm always under the impression that they find it necessary to point out "human rights problems" abroad so they feel cozy and comfty at home knowing that there's a major nation out there that has "worse" human rights than that at home.
The fact that things are deteriorating in the USA, and things are getting better (arguably) in China is irrelevant of course.
Don't quote me on this.
Yes, I think that the relationship between China and the U.S. is more one of codependence than anything else; it's two countries 69-ing each other, if we must continue the sex analogy. Both of us have the other by the balls. China has a whole lot of paper that's only worth anything because the U.S. Treasury says it is, and the U.S. basically doesn't manufacture enough stuff anymore to supply our own needs for pretty much anything (except perhaps basic food staples).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
No, we really have each other by the balls. China can induce inflation in our economy by dumping our cash. The US on the other hand takes in a huge amount of Chinese exports. If the US was to suddenly refuse to buy from China, China would be severely economically crippled. The US can just move their imports to some other country that pays their workers shitty practically over night. China on the other hand can't induce another nation to suddenly start consuming 1/5 of the worlds GDP over night so that they can sell to them.
Further, a tanking American economy has implications beyond just the direct pain it does to China. If the US tanks, the world economy tanks. When the US economy goes down, it drags everyone else down with it. So not only are they cut off from the US, but everyone of their other trading partners will descend into recession or (more likely) depression.
This is the beauty/curse of the globalized world. The big economic powers are simply too interconnected to inflict harm upon each other. Any sort of economic action they take against another power is going to directly affect them in a very big way. China and the US can inflict massive economic harm on each other because they are so interconnected, but the harm they inflict on the other is harm that they inflict on themselves and the rest of the world.
You counter-revolutionary capitalist running-dog! How dare you try to undermine the people's revolution in China by accusing them of being Capitalist!? You are obviously a capitalist agent, trying to create an insurgency to destroy the work of the great chairman Mao and the people of China! All those who oppose capitalism must oppose people like you! And we owe it to the people, and to the revolution, to stop your capitalist lies!
The only way we can defeat capitalism is to confront and suppress the capitalist and imperialist propoganda being spread by aussersterne!
Of course I am being sarcastic (although you can hear talk like I said above in China on occasion)... but you can see that fighting non-existant boogiemen like "Capitalism" ("Capitalism" doesn't exist. There is no "Capitalist Manifesto", there is no clear definable economic system that Marxist claim to be "Capitalist". "Capitalism" is a catch-all straw man invented by Marxists.) The thing to understand is that China is trying to do the right thing, as they percieve it. The problem with censorship and oppression isn't caused by greed and amorality, it is caused by people who believe they are truly helping the people and opposing what is bad. If we attack China's economic system (and that is what we would be doing if we carry out some sort of embargo, or place restrictions on trade), on some pretense of morality, we could be just as destructive and dangerous as the people who carry out the censorship.