Posted on 11/06/2007 2:52:10 PM PST by endangeredfaces
WASHINGTON - Two top Yahoo Inc. officials on Tuesday defended their company's role in the jailing of a Chinese journalist but ran into withering criticism from lawmakers who accused them of complicity with an oppressive communist regime.
"While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies," House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos, D-Calif., said angrily after hearing from the two Yahoo executives.
He angrily urged Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang and General Counsel Michael Callahan to apologize to journalist Shi Tao's mother, who was sitting directly behind them.
Shi Tao was sent to jail for 10 years for engaging in pro-democracy efforts deemed subversive after Yahoo turned over information about his online activities requested by Chinese authorities.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
bastards. I’m closing my yahoo account.
Close your Google accounts while you’re at it.
More proof (as if any more were needed) that moonbats are fundamentally cowards.
I’ll bet they would never willingly turn over information about terrorists to the U.S. government.
F**K Yahoo, up one side and down another.
I guess when Yahoo isn’t spending their time writing absurd articles declaring Obama the ideal canidate for Republicans, they are helping the communists lock up pro-democracy dissidents.
No one on the committee came to the company's defense.
Yahoo’s Chinese employees are hostages to demands by the Chinese security apparatus for information. There is no way Yahoo could have avoided handing out this information without endangering its employees. And writing off its billion-dollar investment in Chinese operations. The real problem was this guy using his workplace to post items on the internet. It’s not his fault - he was just ignorant, but it was his mistake.
It has been clear to me for a long while that ANY support of google or yahoo is a mistake. They both deserve to go into the dust bin of history.
“morally you are pygmies....”
Whooooa! Wait a minute... Lantos just uttered a derogatory remark against pygmies. Shame on him.
Asswipes. Quislings.
Hell no, they’d fight that to the hilt. They’d post all kinds of their “news” stories about how horrible and oppressive America is and how psychotic islamics who commit or support atrocities are people, too. But selling out Chinese dissidents for a pittance to a communist dictatorship that will send them off to slave-labor camps reminiscent of World War II is no problem at all.
They’re just like the U.S. and Euro libs who were willing to look the other way at Rwanda’s U.N.-approved bloodbath. Since Bubba Krinton and Goofy Annan were looking the other way at a million dead people, it had to be OK for every POS moonbat to do it, too.
Yahoo is going to roll anyone rather than risk market share. I’m closing my account with them as well.
Yahoo could have told the Chinese government that it refused to cooperate, and left it up to up to the Chicoms to force the issue. If the Chicoms moved against the employees, Yahoo could have immediately shut down operations, taking it out of the employees' hands, and gone public with the story.
A billion dollars at risk. But worth the risk, in the long run, for a company with moral vision.
>>Close your Google accounts while you’re at it.
More proof (as if any more were needed) that moonbats are fundamentally cowards.<<
Google pulled out of China rather than give into the Chinese government demands - Yahoo gave in.
The employees go to jail, Yahoo loses a billion dollars, and the guy gets arrested anyway. My take on it is that if the guy's gonna get arrested anyway, it's not the responsibility of Yahoo's shareholders to shoulder his burden. Let me put it this way - Yahoo's executives aren't the ones losing out if its Chinese operations shut down. It's shareholders like you and me. There is no moral dilemma. It wasn't Yahoo who actively bugged and fingered him. The Chinese knew what they were looking for and actively sought out specific information from Yahoo. The guy would have been better off sending a fax. Instead, he chose to get Yahoo involved. As far as I'm concerned, he should have known better.
Controversy has occurred over Google’s decision to adhere to the Internet censorship policies of China, colloquially known as “The Great Firewall of China”. Google.cn search results are filtered so as not to bring up any results concerning the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, sites supporting the independence movements of Tibet and Taiwan or the Falun Gong movement, and other information perceived to be harmful to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This is interpreted by some activists as contrary to the “Don’t be evil” corporate philosophy of Google.
The PRC, whose human rights have been criticized by people in both China and the international community, has in the past restricted citizen access to popular search engines such as Altavista, Yahoo!, and Google. The mirror search site elgooG has been used by users in mainland China to get around blocked content. This complete ban has since been lifted. However, the government remains active in filtering Internet content. In October 2005, Blogger and access to the Google Cache were made available in mainland China; however, in December 2005, some mainland Chinese users of Blogger reported that their access to the site was once again restricted.
In January 2006, Google affirmed its intent to filter certain keywords given to it by the government of the PRC. The restrictions applies to thousands of terms and websites.[3] The censored content will appear on a website called google.cn. Google was heavily criticized for the move, yet it claims it is necessary to keep the PRC government from blocking Google entirely, as the case of the 2002 block.[4] The company does not plan to give the government information about the users who search for blocked content, and will inform users of restricted categories.[5] Google states on its help pages that it does not censor content, but it does block pages as demanded for in certain jurisdictions, such as DMCA requests in the United States.
Most Chinese Internet users did not express much concern about Google’s choice. Also, Google offers to Chinese Internet users a choice that protects their privacy better than existing search engines available in China, since Google keeps confidential records of its users outside China, unlike domestic search engines that could be compelled by the government to hand over information at any time.[6] The following message appears at the bottom of the Google search result page whenever results are blocked: “In accordance with local laws and policies, some of the results have not been displayed.” Currently, Google is the only major China-based search engine to explicitly inform the user when search results are blocked or hidden. Chinese and Tibetan Internet users have also criticized Google for assisting the Chinese government in repressing its own citizens standing up to the said government and advocating human rights [7].
On the other hand, Google has been accused of hypocrisy for agreeing to China’s demands and fighting the US government’s requests for information concerning Google-users, by groups such as Reporters Without Borders[4]. Critics say that Google had made a great deal of its mission statement, in that it was different from other “evil” Internet corporations, to gain support when it started.
On February 14, 2006, some Internet users participated in a “mass breakup with Google” whereby users agreed to boycott Google on Valentine’s Day to show their disapproval of the Google China policy.[8][9]
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