First off, what follows are my opinions and only mine. They're mine, mine, mine and belong to me. Are we clear? Good.
Ok, so yeah, i read about the Y!China thing and how they turned over information about the reporter. Explain to me why Y!China shouldn't have done this?
Let's put it a different way. Say you're working at your company in China. You get a knock and standing at the door are various law representatives brandishing a warrant for you to turn over information about account Bobo123. Let's put a few things into perspective shall we?
1) Chances are, you're not on a first name basis with all 35 million (or however many) customers, the multiple aliases they may have or what they happen to be sending around.
2) Your customer base, not being filled with nice guys, probably has it's fair share of child pornographers, defrauders, racketeers, and miscreants to justify the several dozen or so requests for information you get from authorities on any given day.
3) China, not being run by nice guys itself, takes a fairly dim view of anyone who doesn't play nice by their standing. Not wanting your company to be shut down that particular afternoon or have any number of your employees disappear that night, you decide not to tell said government official bearing legitimate court orders "Can you hang on a tick? We'd like to ask the guy if this is OK"
4) The court papers in question probably didn't note precisely what the offense was or what the suspects job was, instead simply stating something like "Suspected of divulging state secrets abroad". Well, that's espionage, which i'll note usually gets the death penalty here, in not China.
So, why is Y!China getting the "Bad Guy" rap for divulging information about a suspected criminal of a serious crime to federal authorities bearing legal documents requiring the company to do so?
If this was the BTK murderer who was sending the cops his taunting notes using a Hotmail account, wouldn't you expect Microsoft to turn over that information?
If this was a guy trying to blackmail you using a gmail account, wouldn't you hope the judge would issue a warrant for that information?
Yes, it's terrible that China is persecuting it's reporters. Yes, it's sad that they don't really give political dissidents a fair trial. But for the love of God people, don't shoot the damn messenger. Or the messaging service. Particularly since they were doing exactly what they should have done.
Heck, even the articles citing it say that there wasn't anything the company could have done, other than say "This is atrocious, here's the info you required."
And yes, i would absolutely feel the same about ANY company in the exact same position, even AOL.
Oh come on. If you live in the U.S. in 2005, practically everything you do has something to do with China from imports to bond prices. There is no moral high ground left unless you move to the hills and live off the land.
Wait til this happens to Google. I can't wait to read those news reports.
“This is atrocious, here’s the info you required," has become my new catch phrase.
So, wait, because Yahoo! HK turned over information regarding a suspected criminal to government authorities after presenting a court order to do so, they are the ones that are evil?
They do that already in every other country they're in.
If Y!HK provided that information to the government without said court order, provided covert montioring of a customer for an extended period of time or cited the customer to the Chinese government directly, then I'd agree.
Isn't this example similar to saying that the Watergate Hotel was complicit with the Nixon administration because they allowed Liddy to break in?
RR -
Yahoo has its own option: "Invest in infrastructure in China, or don't." and it chose to do so. It now has to live with that, including "being the pawns of the totalitarian government" because that's part of what that gov't does.
JR –
You and I both know that Yahoo *does* allow covert monitoring of communications because it refuses to enforce encryption to/from the mail servers in China. The "Great Firewall of China" happily sees and proxies all SMTP traffic going in and out of Yahoo!Mail servers. All Yahoo would have to do is to set the Y!Mail servers in China to smarthost to a VIP in the US, and enforce encryption on that link, and voila, the surreptitious monitoring would be gone. But they won't do that, even though they KNOW the SMTP traffic is monitored (we demonstrated it at one point, because the proxy gave replies to SMTP commands that weren't possible from the remote site).
If you want to do business in a land where "being an independent reporter" can be a crime, then I suppose you can *legally* hide behind the "well, he was a criminal" argument, but *ethically* that's a far cry from being a valid defense.
So, in other words, if Yahoo! wants to do business in the largest growing capital market in the world (one that would has demonstrated every compulsion for fostering it's own state supported commercial entities, and has openly stated strong interest in foreign investments where those state policies can reach beyond their borders) it has to keep better tabs on it's customers than the government currently does, because while it may get a warrent that states and individual is engaging in anything from fraud to state espionage, they should actually know the rare cases where the person in question is actually a reporter.
Ah, I think I understand your point.
I disagree, but I undertstand.
Yes, I know that Y!HK (as does any other information company that does business in China) must go through a centralized proxy. So does Google, Microsoft, and any number of home-grown companies. Yes, I know that there are ways to get around that centralized proxy.
Apparently, I know something that reporter didn't.
And at this point, in the context of this scenario (state secrets, spying on citizens, etc.), our government differs only in degree not in kind from the one in the PRC.
Is there an agreement when you sign up for Y! mail (or a followup agreement) saying, in essence, "this information may be given to government authorities when requested in cases of national security…" blah blah blah?
Yep, sure is. It's part of the Terms of Service notably section 24 citing: "The TOS and the relationship between you and Yahoo! shall be governed by the laws of the State of California without regard to its conflict of law provisions. You and Yahoo! agree to submit to the personal and exclusive jurisdiction of the courts located within the county of Santa Clara, California."
Since we're under the aegis of those courts, we have to obey any court order coming from them.
I'll note that any other business will generally have this same clause in their terms of service.
I think we all fervently hope that China's "state policies" never reach beyond its borders.
They reach too damn far as it is.
[...] In China, Yahoo! was doing exactly as the law required. If they had the same request by the FBI here, they would also turn over data. That's the law of the local country where they are operating and that's the law that needs to be followed. How is that an issue? And I don't want to hear any "well they shouldn't be doing business in a country like China" crap from all you Wal-Mart shopping Chinese product buying people. [...]
This is why many, myself included, said at the time that Yahoo should bypass the "easy money" and take a moral high-road, and stay out of China entirely.
A man who walks into a minefield, knowing it's a minefield should be held accountable for his own lack of foresight when he steps on one of the mines.
That's what Yahoo has done here. They knew they were going to provide service in a jurisdiction that is, for all intents and purposes, an oppressive totalitarian state, and that they were going to be legally responsible for doing what a totalitarian state told them to do. They knew that the State had a long history of civil rights injustices, and that the State felt no compunction about forcing people to help them chase down what many people consider to be "good people."
This is a monster of Yahoo's own creation, and they don't get to pass the buck saying, "Aw shucks, that's what we have to do when we're in China."
If you want China's money, it comes with a price — your honor, your soul, call it what you will. You put yourself in a position of having to help very very evil people, and if money is enough incentive for you to help evil people, then well, you're pretty evil yourself.