Yahoo! Executive accused of lying to Congress

Yahoo! has been accused of lying to Congress over the case of the Chinese man who got jailed for ten years after being identified by the company. John Palfrey at the Berkman Center, who has been inclined to give the company the benefit of the doubt since they started working on getting industry guidelines in the area, considers the accusations worrying.

"Rep. Tom Lantos has called on Yahoo! executives to return to Congress to talk about what they knew and when in the Shi Tao case. Rep. Lantos alleges that Yahoo!’s general counsel misled a hearing (at which I and others submitted testimony, too) in 2006 by indicating that the company knew less than it actually did about why the Chinese state police were asking for information about Shi, a dissident and journalist. Yahoo! did turn over the information; the Chinese prosecuted Shi; he remains in jail; and the issue continues to point to the single hardest thing about our US tech companies doing business in places that practice online censorship and surveillance...

The hard problem at the core of this issue is that police come to technology companies every day to ask for information about their users. It is a fair point for technology companies to make that they often cannot know much about the reason for the policeman’s inquiry. It could be completely legitimate: an effort to prevent a crime from happening or bringing a criminal to justice. In the United States, these requests come in the context of the rule of law, including a formal reliance on due process. And every once in a while, a technology company pushes back on requests for data of this sort, publicly or privately. The process is imperfect, if you consider it from a privacy standpoint, but it works — a balance is found between the civil liberties of the individual and the legitimate needs of law enforcement to keep us safe and to uphold the rules to which we all agree as citizens.

This hard problem is much harder in the context of, say, China. It’s not the only example, but it’s the example here with Shi Tao. In Yahoo!’s testimony in 2006, Michael Callahan, the executive vice president and general counsel, said that Yahoo! did not know the reasons for the Chinese state police’s request for information about Shi.

You can read the testimony for yourself here. The relevant statement by Mr. Callahan is:

“The Shi Tao case raises profound and troubling questions about basic human rights. Nevertheless, it is important to lay out the facts. When Yahoo! China in Beijing was required to provide information about the user, who we later learned was Shi Tao, we had no information about the nature of the investigation. Indeed, we were unaware of the particular facts surrounding the case until the news story emerged.” (Emphasis mine.)

The key phrase: “No information about the nature of the investigation.” Not that the information was inconclusive, or vague, or hard to translate, or possibly of concern. “No information.”

Now, we are told, there’s a big disagreement about whether that testimony was accurate...

The big problem here for me is if we’ve in fact been misled, all of us, to believe that it was one problem when it really was quite another. If “no information” proves to be inaccurate, I’m not sure how much longer I can keep extending that benefit of the doubt in this case."

Rebecca MacKinnon has been saying since July that Yahoo! knew more than they claimed.