If you listen to the talking heads around the blogosphere (and how the hell can you not; Most of them never shup up), Yahoo is the evil Satan of evil Satans. When they took over Flickr, you should’ve heard the proclamations from the Flickrati that it was going to be the end of Flickr, and Yahoo was going to destroy the world.
Of course, most of the hysteria against Yahoo is anti-corporation, rather than anti-Yahoo. You know the shpiel… Yahoo is evil because Yahoo is a corporation; it’s a standard battle cry of the left these days, and most of the people on Flickr, as with any other community of artsy types, leans left.
Both the blogosphere and Flickrati have picked up on this latest story as if it’s proof positive that corporations are evil, and Reporters Without Borders (all these organizations with the “Without Borders” moniker amuse the hell out of me; can’t we be a little bit more original?) is beside itself.
Cue the dark and ominous organ music before you read this:
“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,” the press freedom organisation said.
“Yahoo ! obviously complied with requests from the Chinese authorities to furnish information regarding an IP address that linked Shi Tao to materials posted online, and the company will yet again simply state that they just conform to the laws of the countries in which they operate,” the organisation said. “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 ?”
Ethics do not take precedence over law in any country I know of. Why would they in an oppressive black hole like China? It’s not about pleasing Beijing; it’s about not violating the law. Just because something may be ethical (ie: getting the word out on some horror committed by the Chinese government) doesn’t mean it’s legal (ie: getting the word out about some horror or oppression about to be committed by the government and communicated in a governmental e-mail).
Yahoo ! Holdings (Hong Kong) is subject to Hong Kong legislation, which does not spell out the responsibilities in this kind of situation of companies that provide e-mail services. Nonetheless, it is reportedly customary for e-mail service and Internet access providers to transmit information to the police about their clients when shown a court order.
Tests carried out by Reporters Without Borders seem to indicate that the servers used for the Yahoo.com.cn e-mail service, from which the information about Shi was extracted, are located on the Chinese mainland.
Shi Tao Aged 37, Shi worked for the daily Dangdai Shang Bao (Contemporary Business News). He was convicted on 30 April of sending foreign-based websites the text of an internal message which the authorities had sent to his newspaper warning journalists of the dangers of social destabilisation and risks resulting from the return of certain dissidents on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Chinese state security insisted during the trial that the message was “Jue Mi” (top secret). Shi admitted sending it out by e-mail but disputed that it was a secret document. He is still being held in a prison in Changsha to which he was sent after his arrest in the northeastern city of Taiyuan on 24 November 2004.
So the reporter gets an e-mail from an admittedly oppressive government. He takes said e-mail and sends it outside of China, gets busted because his illegal activity was caught on to by the Chinese authorities, and then everyone gets up in arms because Yahoo turned over the proof of the illegal act. Of course, Reporters Without Brains Borders is livid over this turn of events and is, like most other outlets piling on, accusing Yahoo of doing this heinous thing, cooperating with authorities in the investigation of a crime, in the interests of expanding its Chinese operations.
Think about that, for a minute. Let it soak in and rattle around inside your brain.
Yahoo, in effect, helped the government of China investigate a crime on a court order.
Is that so out of the ordinary? And so out of the ordinary that it requires accusatory tripe from every leftist outlet and RWB?
You won’t see me defending China on here. I think they’re an oppressive and horrific communist government, like all other communist governments as far as I’m concerned, that no one should have to live under. However, there is nothing in this case that warrants further scrutiny of any kind. Yahoo’s motivation in turning over the emails is irrelevant because, in the end, the man did in fact break the law.
In fact, his only defense wasn’t that he didn’t do it, but that the e-mail wasn’t that big of a secret. The headlines are just as sensational as the story. “Yahoo collaborates with Chinese Gov’t to Jail Reporter” and that type of hysteria are all over the internet now and people are trying desperately to villainize Yahoo.
They did what they had to do in respecting the laws of the country they operate in. This isn’t an ethical battle, it’s a legal one, and when the person accused of a crime admits to doing it but does nothing more than hand out mitigating circumstances (ie: it wasn’t that secret), you can’t really expect to win.
Case closed.