Yahoo betrayal?
Boing boing brings this wired article to my attention. It tells of a chinese dissident who was using Yahoo to send pro-democracy writings to a group of people. Yahoo seems to have given up the man’s information to the Chinese government and he was arrested and jailed. Read the article, their story is horrifying and seems almost unreal to me. That they would call him first seems so movie script to me, you just can’t imagine that that happens.
The wife, justly upset, has come to the states on a quest to make Yahoo face justice for the “betrayal” of her husband. Now while I sympathize with the problem, I’m just not sure there was any betrayal involved. Yahoo never suggested that it should be relied upon for personal secrecy. As a large corporation it’s seems almost a given that if pressure was applied it would conform to any governmental request.
These are the things that just prove that genuine tools are increasingly required in this world to assure anonymity and privacy. I read more and more about the increasing surveillance in the physical and electronic world with more than a little trepidation. Tools already exist like Tor and Hushmail and they should be supported. I hope that more comes along so that folks like Yu Ling and Wang Xiaoning can work with much more reliable anonymity.
