Yahoo!, the Shi Tao Case, and the Benefit of the Doubt
From Executive Director John Palfrey...
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 case has led to Congressional hearings, proposed legislation, shareholder motions, and lawsuits against Yahoo!
(For much more on the general topic of Internet filtering and surveillance, see the OpenNet Initiative’s web site, a consortium of four universities of which we are a part: Cambridge, Harvard Law School, Oxford, and Toronto.)
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.
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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 case has led to Congressional hearings, proposed legislation, shareholder motions, and lawsuits against Yahoo!
(For much more on the general topic of Internet filtering and surveillance, see the OpenNet Initiative’s web site, a consortium of four universities of which we are a part: Cambridge, Harvard Law School, Oxford, and Toronto.)
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.
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