Yahoo 'helped jail China writer'

Internet giant Yahoo has been accused of supplying information to China which led to the jailing of a journalist for "divulging state secrets".

Reporters Without Borders said Yahoo's Hong Kong arm helped China link Shi Tao's e-mail account and computer to a message containing the information.

The media watchdog accused Yahoo of becoming a "police informant" in order to further its business ambitions.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4221538.stm

is not what it purports to be--that is, a freedom of the press org. No good info on that, tho, just a caveat fwiw.

http://209.81.10.18/data/20050504-Wed1700.mp3 Starts at 33 minutes.

I won't expect them to be criticizing the US government anytime soon, but there are other groups that handle that anyway.

Whether or not you like Reporters Without Borders' funding source, the fact remains that their citicisms are largely indisputable. When someone is jailed for reporting the news, the funding sources for the people complaining about it aren't important...getting the imprisoning country to free them is.

Yahoo owns lots of the internet transport servers, which form the "backbone" of the web. Unfortunately, the use their services is inescapable.

from libertarians, that there is no ethics involved in running a company, and that everything a corporation does is only a business decision. I used to debate such topics on Slashdot, for example when it was revealed that Google censors search results in China so that it can continue to do business in China. Usually the prevailing opinion was that Google can and must do what's good for its business, and that anyway the Chinese are better off with a censored Google than with no Google at all.

I was abhorred then and am abhorred now. There are always ethical dimensions to business, which many libertarians obtusely deny. These people would be selling gas chambers to Hitler if there was money to be made.

The problem is, the law, as it stands, REQUIRES corporations to behave in this manner, because the law doesn't recognize any non-monetary aspects, values or responsibilities in corporate business.

To anyone interested in such matters, I highly recommend a book called "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power" by Joel Bakan, as well as his DVD by the same title. The book is short and concise, and makes a well-argued point about how the law actually encourages behavior that would be called antisocial or psychopatic if an individual person did what corporations do. I'm sure no-one at Yahoo or Google likes to see dissidents imprisoned, tortured and executed - but they make these decisions on behalf of a legal fiction that is corporation, which shields them from personal responsibility.

the pigs and the humans all start to look alike.

what's the price of a life or two when there's business to be done?

I'm not surprised at this.

How do we make Yahoo pay for this kind of criminal activity?