Yahoo has already come under a lot of well-deserved flak following the imprisonment of Chinese dissident Shi Tao. Now it turns out there's more.
Via a morning scan of BoingBoing, I saw this from Reporters Sans Frontières:
Reporters Without Borders called on Yahoo ! to supply a list of all cyberdissidents it has provided data on, beginning with 81 people in China whose release the worldwide press freedom organization is currently campaigning for.
It said it had discovered that Yahoo ! customer and cyberdissident Li Zhi had been given his eight-year prison sentence in December 2003 based on electronic records provided by Yahoo.
The story that Li Zhi was sent to prison itself is not new [BBC report from 2003], but the fact that the imprisonment came as a result of Yahoo action is. Now the question must surely be how many of the 81 people languishing in Chinese jails for posting critical articles on the net did Yahoo send down?
Late last year I wrote an editorial saying that internet companies had to decide who they support. Each day it seems the answer is coming through more clearly.
