Boycott anything Yahoo. Yahoo will sell you down the river. You cannot trust that you are protected using their products. The large internet company is complicit in the arrest of Chinese journalist Shi Tao, a freelance journalist for Internet publications and an editor for the Chinese business newspaper Dangdai Shang Bao and other Chinese democracy dissidents that had used the internet to spread the idea of democracy.
In hearings before the House Foreign Affairs committee, two top Yahoo executives, Michael Callahan and CEO Jerry Yang admitted that Yahoo turned over internet information to the Chinese Government. The Chinese then used that information to arrest and prosecute journalist Tao and other Chinese cyber dissidents. Tao was sentenced to ten years in prison for posting a Chinese government order forbidding media organizations from marking the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising on the Internet. This was considered by the communist government to be the releasing of state secrets. The Chinese learned it was Tao’s posting because Yahoo turned over email and other computer files which connected the postings to Tao.
So in Yahoo’s world making money in China is more important than the life and liberty of internet users, more specifically Yahoo users. Not only did they directly help in sending Tao and others to prison, Yahoo did not notify the US Government of the requests made by the Chinese government in previous testimony before the Foreign Affairs committee. Yahoo’s Callahan blamed it on a bad translation. Funny that the translation came from the Yahoo office in China. If Yahoo is willing to give information to the Chinese imagine what they would be willing to give to the Bush administration’s efforts to watch everything we do. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos (D-Calif) said it best when addressing Callahan and Yang, “while technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies.”