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Yahoo Asks Forgiveness


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The company passed information to the Chinese government in 2004 about one of its users without knowledge of why the request was being made. That user, Chinese journalist Shi Tao, was subsequently sentenced to 10 years in prison for divulging state secrets. Yahoo has offered an apology for the oversight.

Shi Tao worked as a journalist for the daily Dangdai Shang Bao newspaper. While working as a reporter in 2004, he received a document that was sent by Beijing to several news organizations around the country instructing them not to report on events related to the upcoming 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen protests of 1989. Shi used his Yahoo email account to send information about that document overseas to the Asian Democracy Foundation. The Chinese government considered this a breach of state secrecy, and, as a result, began an investigation.

The case of Shi Tao is one of several that, critics have charged, proves that Yahoo has been a willing collaborator in league with Chinese communist officials in censoring free speech in general, and the Internet in particular, in China — a claim Yahoo denies. In 2006, according to The Hill, Yahoo "had assured Congress that it did not know about 'the nature of the investigation' when it handed over the information" to Chinese authorities that led to Shi's arrest and conviction.
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