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Doubts On Yahoo's Human Rights Code of Conduct
Ian Lamont writes "The US Senate has been pushing American technology companies to work with rights groups to develop a human rights code of conduct, which would help to guide their overseas activities. Yahoo now claims that it has established the 'core components' of a global code of conduct, and a more complete version will be ready this fall. However, the Industry Standard notes that there's a fundamental flaw with such efforts: US law is not world law. Following the local laws is a requirement of doing business in any country, and conflicts between corporate ethics and the law of the land in which these corporations do business are inevitable. The US Senate's push for such a code was prompted by a number of incidents, including Yahoo's complicity in the arrest of Chinese dissidents and a Chinese journalist."
Of _course_ they can intercept Gmail traffic! Much of it is over HTTP, not HTTPS, and communicating among the mail servers it's SMTP. Unless you're encrypting end-to-end, expect your email to be trivially monitored. Even if it were encrypted, passwords are trivial to steal in most environments.
Given that Google's servers are deployed worldwide in various data centers and portable data centers, it would be relatively inexpensive to hire an unappreciated Google employee to plant fiber optic taps in various of their data centers, intercepting the traffic there. And the Chinese have doubtless themselves pulled the stunt that AT&T did for the NSA, permitting backbone Internet taps on their core routers.