Do You Boo Yahoo!

An acquaintance sent me an email, referring me to an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times about Yahoo, proclaiming “from now on I’ll never use Yahoo again”. I had been intending to provide further coverage on the topic of ghosts this week, but this startling statement defected me to investigate the “Yahoo thing”.

Apparently Congress’s House International Relations Subcommittee on Global Human Rights subpoenaed four IT companies; Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo in order to – er.., well to be honest, give them a bad time in public. It must have been terribly embarrassing for the Don’t-Be-Evil Google and a little disconcerting for Cisco as neither company is used to being in the political cross-hairs. For Microsoft it was probably just an another-day-another-dollar kind of thing.

Cisco was criticised for selling equipment to the Chinese that could enforce censorship. (Pardon me, but isn’t there some kind of list the US government produces that restricts technology sales to “certain regimes”. If Congress is unhappy with these sales, why is the Cisco kit not on the list? I’m sure HP, IBM, Dell, Sun and others sell the Chinese kit that is or might used for censorship). Google and Microsoft were both criticised for directly imposing censorship in their search services to China.

But Yahoo, in this case, is a horse of a different colour. Over a period of years, Yahoo has revealed the identity of a number of Chinese citizens to the Chinese government. As a consequence many of these individuals (about 49 by some estimates) are now serving time in Chinese jails. These are the names of two of them, and a brief description of the heinous crimes they committed:

Li Zhi posted comments in an on-line discussion group criticising official corruption in China. The nerve of it! This 35-year-old ex-civil servant from Dazhou and running-dog-capitalist-lackey was promptly given an eight-year jail sentence in December 2003 for inciting subversion.

Shi Tao, a reporter, brazenly forwarded an email that openly divulged state secrets. He revealed the risks of referring to the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests and he even used seditious words like “democracy”. Mr Shi, a shameful-tool-of-American-Imperialism, who used the pseudonym ‘198964′ (the numbers form a completely meaningless date on which nothing of import happened) will spend 10 well-deserved years in jail.

Oddly, there are some people who are not entirely happy with Yahoo’s prompt and responsible actions in this matter. Some of them are visiting a web site, www.booyahoo.com, in order to sign a petition and send Yahoo a letter that expresses their misgivings. They are even closing down their Yahoo email accounts, ceasing to use Yahoo’s search capability, or movie service, or GeoCities or HotJobs. Some are even demanding that Yahoo provide financial support to the families of the criminals it grassed up.

What is the world coming to?

Yahoo may come to regret its decision to compromise the privacy of its customers, commercially. Nevertheless we should not lose sight of the fact that Yahoo was “only following orders”.