Yahoo: Notice What We Say, Not What We Do

One day after the mother of Chinese reporter Shi Tao announced she was suing the Internet company Yahoo for helping Chinese officials imprison her son, Yahoo said it was "dismayed that citizens in China have been imprisoned for expressing their political views on the Internet." Yahoo's brief statement did not mention Shi Tao, who received a 10 year jail sentence for "leaking state secrets" in 2005. He had forwarded an email describing media restrictions placed by the Chinese government. The court that sentenced Mr. Shi used information provided by a Hong Kong subsidiary of Yahoo to convict him. The new legal challenge is part of an lawsuit filed by the World Organization for Human Rights USA against Yahoo, its Hong Kong subsidiary and Alibaba.com, which runs Yahoo China.