Seduced by money, Yahoo leaves its scruples at the door
If only imprisoned mainland journalist Shi Tao had heard of Hushmail. Hushmail messages are stored encrypted on the company's servers so if, say, the mainland government requires e-mails to be handed over, they will be useless unless the account holder provides the password.
No doubt the State Security Bureau has ways of making people talk, but at least the decision would have been made by Shi himself. As it turned out, the decision to hand over an e-mail he had sent containing state secrets was made by Yahoo in Hong Kong, and Mr Shi is now serving 10-years in a Hunan jail.
For Yahoo this has been a public relations nightmare compounded by the story breaking just before a visit to China by co-founder Jerry Yang, who attended the China Internet Summit in Hangzhou earlier this month along with former United States president Bill Clinton.
What was intended as a self-congratulatory celebration of Yahoo's tie-up with mainland e-commerce giant Alibaba.com degenerated into a grilling for Mr Yang, who eventually cancelled his afternoon press conference to avoid the pointed questions of the international press pack.
Just to be clear, the state secrets Shi was convicted of e-mailing through his Yahoo account to online democracy groups in the US were a set of central government instructions sent to media groups across the country, including Shi's business paper in Hunan province, exhorting them to be vigilant around the time of the 15th anniversary of the 1989 June 4 Tiananmen 'incident'.
The e-mail he sent included directions to 'insist on never releasing any talk that is inconsistent with the central policies', and 'pay attention to any liaison between overseas democratic elements and individual media editors and reporters inside China'.
It is hardly a secret that China controls its media, and it would be hard to find too many other places in the world where sharing that sort of information would get someone 10 years.
In defence of his company, Mr Yang said Yahoo got requests from governments all over the world to provide information on personal e-mail accounts, and was required to comply with local laws wherever it operated.
'We get hundreds of those in the US, we get hundreds in Europe, we get a lot of them in China,' he said. 'We do not know what they want that information for; we're not told what they look for. If they give us the proper documentation and a court order, we give them things that satisfy both our privacy policy and the local rules.'
But according to Human Rights in China, Yahoo had a choice of whether to locate its servers inside or outside of China. Servers for competitor MSN's Hotmail service are all outside China, which means that MSN does not have to turn e-mails over to the central government. That does not necessarily mean Microsoft does not turn them over when asked. After all, this is the company that exceeded government requirements by banning words such as 'democracy', 'freedom' and 'human rights' from its MSN Spaces blogging service. Even Google, which has an explicit clause in its founding charter that it will 'do no evil', had admitted it did not post links that were offensive to the central government.
In the end this is a pretty clear-cut case of a corporation making a concession in order to further its business. One wonders if Yahoo would have received approval for its multibillion-dollar tie-up with Alibaba if it had refused to hand over information on Shi's e-mail account.
If the thought of refusal was ever entertained, it certainly will not be now.
Jack Ma, chief executive of Alibaba and the man now in control of Yahoo's China operations, said: 'We have to make compromises to do business; everybody has to.'
For journalists, this case is particularly close to home but it was likely that there would be greater understanding in the media if Yahoo had at any time provided court documents and explained the process by which it was legally obliged to provide information to investigating authorities.
Presumably it had not done so because of fears it would be liable for providing state secrets.
The reality in China today is that the internet is seen by the government not only as a vibrant sector of the economy, but also as a potential threat to political stability. If companies wish to do business in what will be the world's largest internet market within the next three years, then they have to be willing to leave their scruples and distaste for local justice at the border.
But that does not mean that individuals must make the same concessions. As Mr Yang said in Hangzhou: 'Without our users, we don't have a business.'
Hushmail anyone?
