BETRAYED BY THE INTERNET!
With all the recent buzz in the JBlogsphere on the Orthomom case and in the Domestic Violence Blogsphere (and I'm fairly certain every other blog niche on the net) on anonymity, free speech and intellectual property law - I felt this article was important enough and 'scary' enough to warrant reposting it here. Be glad this isn't us... or is it?
YAHOO BETRAYED MY HUSBAND!
By Luke O'Brien
(excerpts)
FAIRFAX, Virginia -- Early one Sunday morning in 2002, a phone rings in Yu Ling's Beijing duplex. She's cleaning upstairs; her son is asleep, while downstairs, her husband, Wang Xiaoning, is on the computer. Wang writes about politics, anonymously e-mailing his online e-journals to a group of Yahoo users. He's been having problems with his Yahoo service recently. He thinks it's a technical issue. This is the day he learns he's wrong.
Wang picks up the phone: "Yes?"
"Are you home?" asks the unfamiliar voice on the other end.
"Yes."
The line goes dead.
Moments later, government agents swarm through the front door -- 10 of them, some in uniform, some not. They take Wang away. They take his computers and disks. They shove an official notice into Yu's hands, tell her to keep quiet, and leave. This is how it's done in China. This is how the internet police grab you.
Five years later, Yu, 55, sits in the dining room of a small house in Fairfax and weeps softly. She is a slight woman -- 100 pounds and barely 5 feet tall in slippers. Her eyes betray her exhaustion; but she is determined, too. She carries a thick stack of notes with her, and she has scrawled more on her left hand.
"Yahoo betrayed my husband and deprived him of freedom," Yu says through a translator, her voice trembling. "Yahoo must learn its lesson."
Yu's husband is now in Beijing Prison No. 2, serving a 10-year sentence for inciting subversion with his pro-democracy internet writings. According to the written court verdict, the Chinese government convicted Wang, in part, on evidence provided by Yahoo.
After a year of preparation, Yu flew into Washington, D.C., last week for one purpose: to find a lawyer and sue the internet giant. She told her story to Wired News in the Virginia headquarters of The China Information Center, a nonprofit advocacy group headed by former dissident Harry Wu, who helped arrange Yu's travel to the United States.
Now that she's here, Yu says she's not leaving until she has held Yahoo accountable. Her life, as she puts it, is "broken." Without Wang, she doesn't go for walks anymore, once a favorite pastime. She no longer takes vacations with her friends. It's hard for her to look at happy couples.
"I cannot think about the past together with my husband," she says. "I can only hide it in my heart. Without my husband, I never have a full meal. I don't feel whole."
Legal experts are doubtful of Yu's chances in court...
It's also a trade-off that Yahoo is not alone in making. To comply with government requirements, Google's China search engine blocks access to sites the government deems objectionable. Microsoft launched its Chinese blogging service in 2005 with filters that prohibited sensitive words such as freedom and democracy in blog titles. And Cisco supplies internet backbone equipment the Chinese government uses in the so-called Great Firewall that shields citizens from websites about Tibet and the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Yahoo and its subsidiaries, which provide web mail and the Yahoo Groups service to the Chinese market, have faced the harshest criticism. The company has been called out no fewer than four times by human rights groups for complying with Chinese government demands for sensitive information about journalists and online dissidents. Writers such as Shi Tao, Li Zhi and Jiang Lijun are all in prison for "crimes" similar to Wang's -- and Yahoo allegedly helped put each of them there.
We are required to follow the laws of those countries and that's what we've done," says Jim Cullinan, a Yahoo spokesman. "Law enforcement agencies in China and elsewhere don't explain to us or telecom companies or anyone the reason why they're demanding specific information. We can't tell the difference between a legitimate national security issue and something else."
Cullinan says Yahoo is strongly opposed to repression of free speech and is working to develop a set of operating principles to guide its engagement in countries with repressive governments. He adds that Yahoo had not heard of Wang's case until now, though it was widely reported last year.
"We haven't seen the court documents," he says. "But we condemn what happened."
"She's presumably going to have to establish that this was a human rights violation," says Weiner. "Whether arbitrary arrest would count is something that the courts haven't really decided.... The next thing to figure out is whether Yahoo aided and abetted it.... The bottom line is that it's pretty hard to prevail in these cases."
If Yu's legal prospects are dim, her husband's are nonexistent. In 2003, Wang appealed his case to the Beijing Higher People's Court. He lost. According to the court's written ruling, Wang had edited, published and contributed articles to 42 issues of two political e-journals, advocating for open elections, a multi-party system and separation of powers in the government. In his e-journals, Wang called socialism a "totalitarian and despotic political system," and wrote that the Chinese government was "outwardly democratic but inwardly despotic."
Confronted with a rap sheet like that, the court ordered Wang to serve out his sentence.
Yu says she's not giving up. "I think Yahoo should follow the world human rights standards," she says. She wants Yahoo to pay damages and, less realistically, she hopes U.S. legal action might somehow result in her husband's freedom. "I want my husband released from prison.... Money cannot pay back my husband's freedom, his life."
"He's a stubborn guy," Yu says. Then she smiles.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
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