Yahoo and China

From Wired:

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.

And:

"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.

And:

Legal experts are doubtful of Yu's chances in court. But her presence in the United States puts an inescapable human face on the pain caused by the uneasy alliances American technology companies have forged in the last five years with China's repressive regime. These partnerships are the price of admission to China's booming market, but they are not without their casualties.

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.

Technology firms are "compromising their duties as responsible corporate citizens," Rep. Chris Smith (R-New Jersey) charged in a blistering opening statement during congressional hearings on the issue last year. "Women and men are going to the gulag and being tortured as a direct result of information handed over to Chinese officials."

[Disclosure, I make technology purchasing decisions for a company that uses technology from many companies including: IBM, Lenovo, Cisco, Google, and Novell.]

I am troubled at many levels on this. What the technology companies are doing is wrong. One needs only pick up Reinhold Billstein's book (Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors, And Forced Labor in Germany During the Second World War)
to understand that this is morally wrong and the current board and leaders will be judged negatively by history for their wrongdoing.

At the same time, it is nearly impossible to run Information Technology in a modern American corporation without using this technology (and supporting these companies). It is a Faustian bargain that bothers me; we cannot process the information necessary to continue to function without the tools; I feel dirty every time I sign a new contract and submit the paperwork for payment.

I honestly don't know what the solution is, but we have to keep the faces like Ms. Yu front and center and continue to ask these companies and their leaders to examine their consciences. . .