Jerry Yang, Yahoo, Summoned to DC
By Curt on Oct 17, 2007 in Yahoo, China
Yahoo’s CEO, the cynical Jerry Yang, and the company’s General Counsel Michael Callahan have been ordered to appear in Washington D.C. before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Rep. Tom Lantos, on November 6.
According to the CFA statement, the “committee staff will investigate whether officials from the Internet company Yahoo! misrepresented the company’s role in a human rights case in China that sent a journalist to jail for a decade.”
“It is bad enough that a wealthy American company would willingly supply Chinese police the means to hunt a man down for shedding light on repression in China,” said Lantos, who also co-chairs the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. “Covering up such a despicable practice when Congress seeks an explanation is a serious offense. For a firm engaged in the information industry, Yahoo! sure has a lot of secrecy to answer for. We expect to learn the truth, and to hold the company to account.”
Yahoo’s defense was a combination of unlikely ignorance and a convenient belief in the sovereignty of China and its laws. The first element may be disproved thanks to a San Francisco foundation.
Lantos ordered a probe into the matter in August after the Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights group that focuses on China, released a document that it said shows that the Beijing State Security Bureau had told Yahoo in writing that Shi was suspected of “illegal provision of state secrets to foreign entities.”
Joshua Rosenzweig, manager of research and publications for the foundation, said:
We must remember that before Shi Tao there were three other Chinese dissidents about whom Chinese police obtained user information from Yahoo! in Beijing. If we assume that law enforcement agencies investigating these cases followed the same procedures to obtain that information, three other notices would have been provided specifying investigations into subversion or incitement—crimes of a more unambiguous political nature.
1389 | Oct 17, 2007 | Reply
Linked to this article here: Blogger Persecution Hall of Shame: Governments silence bloggers with imprisonment, torture
sandy | Nov 9, 2007 | Reply
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