Blackmoor Vituperative

Yahoo has been complying with the Chinese government’s requests to help it censor and oppress its citizens for several years. 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”, retrieve only a limited and approved set of results in the Chinese Yahoo search engine.

But the ante has gone up. Now Yahoo is helping the Chinese authorities actually imprison political dissidents — or even those who admit that such dissidents exist.

This journalist, Shi Tao, was sentenced in April to 10 years in prison for the horrible crime of passing on a memo via Yahoo Mail saying that the Chinese government was worried about unrest during the 2004 anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. […]

I’m not sure what it will take to make companies rethink their “whatever the Chinese government wants, it gets” policies or to raise public consciousness enough to cause change — probably something on the level of a public execution followed by officials thanking the company that helped them nab the dissident.

You may also want to read the report from Reporters Without Borders.

What does this mean here in the USA? You may not think it means much. After all, even if companies like Yahoo are heartless mercenaries, our government would never ask companies to help spy on us, censor us, or oppress us. Right?