Sometimes the title just speaks for itself. This NYT editorial page column Building the Great Firewall of China, With Foreign Help has some interesting facts about the journalist whose identity Yahoo revealed to the Chinese government.
In April 2004, a few weeks before the 15th anniversary of Beijing's massacre of protesters in Tiananmen Square, the top-ranking staff members of The Contemporary Business News in Hunan were called into a meeting. An editor read a message from the Communist Party's propaganda department warning that protests or media coverage of the anniversary would not be tolerated as June 4 approached. Though the message was routine, the reporters were warned not to take notes.
But Shi Tao, one of the journalists, did. He e-mailed them to a Chinese dissident in America, who posted them on the Web. A few months later, Mr. Shi was arrested. This April, he was given 10 years in prison, a sentence the judge called lenient, for disseminating state secrets abroad.
The Times agree with me that Snitching on a client to totalitarian police is still another category of bad behavior, a move that should shrivel the keyboard fingers of Yahoo users everywhere.
Tomorrow morning I will be taping a segment about this on The Bob Edwards Show. It's recording at 9AM, though I'm not sure when it will play. We'll be discussing whether companies have a greater corporate responsibility when selling in foreign markets than simply complying with local law. It's an interesting question.