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Congressional Commitee Rips Yahoo Execs
A number of readers sent word of the hearing by the US House Foreign Affairs Committee in which committee members raked two Yahoo execs over the coals. "While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies," the committee chairman Tom Lantos, D-Calif., said angrily after hearing from Jerry Yang and Michael Callahan about Yahoo's actions that resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of a Chinese dissident. In 2004 Yahoo turned over information about journalist Shi Tao's online activities requested by Chinese authorities. In Feb. 2006, Yahoo's General Counsel Callahan testified that he had not known the nature of the investigation the authorities were conducting. He later learned that several employees of Yahoo China were aware at the time that the investigation involved "state secrets," but Callahan did not go back to Congress to amend his testimony. Committee members were withering in their disdain for Yahoo's refusal to help Shi Tao's family after his arrest.
Isn't that like the pot calling the kettle black?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
I wonder will these politicians be as robust in their denunciation of China's human rights record the next time a Chinese trade delegation pays them a visit.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Yahoo's actions that resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of a Chinese dissident.
Yahoo complied with a request from the government of a country that is on friendly terms with the US government for an investigation that involved "state secrets".
Since the US government is taking the position that you have no privacy in your email, ever, and they can read it anytime without getting a warrant, let alone for "National Security" investigations, it's a bit ridiculous to expect US companies to have stricter standards in other countries.
Note that I'm not saying Yahoo is innocent, just that the congresscritters are being hypocritical.
Right, so Yahoo are bad for grassing up the online activities of a Chinese dissident to their government, but AT&T are good for spying on Americans for their government. This, presumably, is because the US government has a squeaky clean human rights record.
Aha. OK. You can put me on your list now.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
but wouldn't they expect Yahoo! U.S. to rollover if presented for an information request on the basis of "national security"?
Yahoo! China has to follow the laws of that country, just as we expect Yahoo! U.S. to do so.
Maybe the U.S. Government should issue Letters of Marque to multi-national corporations...
I don't for a second condone what Yahoo! did on moral grounds. However, legally they acted as expected.
Because he's not. If IBM can be raked over the coals for doing business with Nazis, then Yahoo, Google and Microsoft deserve no less. If De Beers can be raked over the coals for its role in the horrors of the African diamond trade, then Yahoo, Google and Microsoft deserve no less.
How precisely is Yahoo helping making China free by selling out dissidents? Explain precisely how Google is bringing freedom to the masses in China by censoring the Tiananmen Square incidents?
They are colluders, profiteers and immoral traitors to the societies in which they were created. Corporations exist as legal fictions in the industrialized world as a favor to their investors, but I see no reason that if those investors and those they put in positions of authority within the corporate entity decide to piss on the human rights that the industrialized world have taken since the Enlightenment to be inalieable that notions of legal fictions of personhood should stand. I think a consistent threat to strip corporations doing business in other parts of the world of their personhood, making directors and stockholders directly criminally and civily responsible for the actions of their foreign dummy companies would go a looong way. Let the cowards and villains in China's government persecute their own citizens, without the collusion of Western companies.
Make that the price of China doing business with the West.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What's Yahoo supposed to do when faced with a subpoena from the Chinese Government?
dunno - wait it out and see if they come back an hour later?
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Let's see a Congressman get away with substituting in Black/Jew whatever and lasting out the day.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The better the state is established, the fainter is humanity. To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task. -- Nietzsche
I love Slashdots almost prescient ability to provide a fortune that bears on the topic. The US is going into the toilet, Bush's war needs to be paid for and that money is going to be coming from US' citizens children for quite some time to come. The government of the US exists within a moral vacuum, nobody asks if something is "right" they just ask if its "legal". From the Patriot Act denying first ammendment rights (you can't tell anyone - even your lawyer or a judge - if you've been served under that act effectively cutting due process out of the loop) to what is torture, waterboarding. I think they should all be lined up against a wall and shot. This would be satisfying but would not likely result in any improvements so something else must be done. The only thing I can think of that has any hope of leading us out of the quagmire is demanding full transparency out of government. So, no "secret" subpeonas, no "secret" detentions, no "secret" trials, no "secret" interrogation techniques, no secrets because thats where evil hides.
Fuck Bush. I think he's leading a great nation into ruin.
Shh.
Yeah, but I hear if you drop a Lantos into Diet Coke, it foams furiously.