The Yahoo company assisted the Chinese government in tracking down journalist Shi Tao, as Reporters Without Borders report. In its defense, the company said that “its local country sites must operate within the laws, regulations and customs of the country in which they are based”. It is a known practice of the Chinese government to prosecute and imprison journalists under the pretence of protecting China’s national security.

Isabel Hilton (of openDemocracy) writes in ‘China’s freedom test’: “Any government has the right to look after national security. But in China, national security is used as a catchall category that allows the authorities to imprison people whom they perceive as a threat less to the national interest but to the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. For the party, these are the same thing. By any reasonable measure, they are not.”
Read the full article (in openDemocracy.net): ‘China’s freedom test’, or visit the Reports Without Borders site for the original report: ‘Information supplied by Yahoo ! helped journalist Shi Tao get 10 years in prison’. You can read Yahoo’s defence at TimesOnLine: ‘Yahoo! on defensive over jailed Chinese journalist’.