November 6th, 2007
Yahoo takes a drubbing in Congress
Jerry Yang offered this promise after an all-morning grilling in Congress, as blogged by Declan McCullagh:
“We will take more responsibility both morally and ethically.”
Yang and Yahoo’s top lawyer, Michael Callahan, were summoned to Washington Tuesday by Rep. Tom Lantos of California, who has been demanding answers as to Yahoo’s complicity in the arrest by Chinese authorities of Shi Lao, a Chinese journalist. Yahoo turned over information about Shi’s Yahoo account which led to his arrest.
Today, Callahan and Yang were on the hot seat to explain how and why they gave “false information” to Congress in February 2006. At a hearing last year, Callahan said he didn’t know the nature of the government’s inquiry when it turned over the information on Shi.
But in mid-October Lantos said he had proof that Yahoo had a pretty good idea what it was all about. At the time Yahoo stuck by Callahan’s testimony, saying at the time Yahoo had no idea what the Chinese request for information was related to.
Then over the weekend, Callahan offered an apology of sorts. He said Yahoo had learned - after the February 2006 testimony - of the reason for the inquiry but failed to alert Congress. “That oversight led to a misunderstanding that I deeply regret,” he said, according to an AP story.
So today was Lantos’ chance to rip Yahoo a new one and he took advantage. Yahoo’s actions were “spineless and irresponsible.”
“I would urge you to beg the forgiveness of the mother whose son is languishing behind bars thanks to Yahoo’s actions.”
The controversy hinges on the fact that China gave Yahoo a document invoking “state secrets.” That’s the smoking gun that Yahoo knew the score. Declan doesn’t think it’s a smoking gun: “It’s not like the police requests said ‘give us this information so we can put an innocent journalist in jail.’ ”
But that seems disingenuous. Police requests don’t have to say any such thing. You’d have to be a lot more naive than Declan to think that Yahoo’s Chinese executives didn’t know what “state secrets” means. Throughout the Communist world, “state secrets” means treason, spying.
As you can tell, the boys from Yahoo didn’t get a chance to say a real lot in the early going. And apparently when they did talk, it was pretty “lawyered up.”
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican: “Were any [Yahoo Chinese employees] fired?” . . . “Are you going to comply with requests from authoritarian governments in the future?” Callahan replies: “We are looking at ways to operationally and legally structure the entity… so we would not have to do that.”
