YAHOO! HELPS SEND COURAGEOUS CHINESE JOURNALIST TO PRISON

Yahoo! helped send Shi Tao, 37 (left) -- a journalist with the business daily Dangdai Shang Ba -- to prison for 10 years, by providing China's state security authorities with details that helped to identify and convict him, the Paris-based international organization Reporters Without Borders announced today. Yahoo! for years has gone to any lengths to gain a larger share of the Chinese market, but this ratting out of a courageous journalist marks a new low for the U.S.-based Internet giant. And Yahoo's co-founder, Jerry Yang -- a Taiwanese native whose company bio describes him as "Chief Yahoo" -- has apparently forgotten his roots.

Shi Tao was convicted in April and sent to the slammer for a decade for the crime of "divulging state secrets abroad." And what was the so-called "state secret" Shi Tao was accused of disclosing? He sent out the text of an internal message which the authorities had sent to his newspaper warning journalists of the dangers of "social destabilization and risks" resulting from the return of certain dissidents on the 15th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre and intimating another crackdown on dissenters, and it was this document which Shi Tao distributed to foreign websites.

RSF today charged that Yahoo complied with requests from Chinese authorities to furnish them with information regarding an IP address that linked Shi Tao's personal e-mail address  to a specific message containing the government's alert to possible political protests on the massacres anniversary. This information comes from the official verdict against the journalist as translated into English by the Dui Hua Foundation, which works to document the cases of Chinese political prisoners. When I read the RSF's press release on all this today, the image that flashed into my mind was of that famous picture: a boy, barely 20, standing alone in front of a tank to prevent its chasing and crushing the young demonstrators in Tienanmen Square. Yahoo's unconscionable actions in the Shi Tao case mean that Yahoo is on the side of the tank

"We already knew that Yahoo! collaborates enthusiastically with the Chinese regime in questions of censorship, and now we know it is a Chinese police informant as well," RSF said in a statement. "We know that Yahoo! will, yet again, simply state that they just conform to the laws of the countries in which they operate," RSF added, "but does the fact that this corporation operates under Chinese law free it from all ethical considerations? How far will it go to please Beijing?"

For years Yahoo! has allowed the Chinese version of its search engine to be censored. In 2002, Yahoo! voluntarily signed the "Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the China Internet Industry", agreeing to abide by PRC censorship regulations. Searches deemed sensitive by the Chinese authorities -- such as "Taiwan independence" in Chinese typed  into the Yahoo! China search engine --  retrieve only a limited and approved set of results.

Yahoo! Appears to be willing to go to any lengths to gain shares of the Chinese market and it is investing heavily in local companies. In 2003, it spent 120 million dollars to buy the search engine 3721.com. More recently Yahoo! acquired a large stake in the Internet giant Alibaba in an operation that reportedly cost nearly a billion dollars. Reporters Without Borders has written several times to Yahoo! executives in an attempt to alert it to the ethical issues raised by its Chinese investments, but RSF's  letters have so far received no answer.

Yahoo needs to be held to account. You can protest their shameless collaboration with the Chinese one-party dictatorship in the jailing of courageous journalist Shi Tao by writing Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang (left) -- a Taiwanese native -- at: Yahoo! Inc., 101 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, California 94089; or faxing Yang at Yahoo at (408) 349-3301.  Jerry, you ought to be ashamed of yourself and what your company has done in the Shi Tao case -- you of all people ought to know better.