Chinese activist jailed over Yahoo email is freed

Chinese activist jailed over Yahoo email is freed(theguardian.com)

28 points by boi_v2 12 years ago | 7 comments

perlpimp 12 years ago |

He was freed but Bradley Manning got 30 years in the clinker. I understand that Bradley's disclosures were more or less about bureaucratic processes.

Never the less whisleblower is freed 10 years after. Bradley will spend rest of his life in jail.

I don't think Chinese government is democratic in any way, even repressive. But one can't ignore how this plays out in public media - contrast and all that.

tty 12 years ago | |

>Bradley will spend rest of his life in jail.

Are you sure about that? Jeffrey Carney, an American who worked for the US Air Force and spied for the DDR, was sentenced to 38 years in prison, but only ended up serving 11 years.

eksith 12 years ago |

I wonder if Yahoo will make any statements regarding this or say nothing and hope the story quietly disappears. It's an awkward moment when the company is trying to distance itself from the past and reinvent itself.

rll 12 years ago | |

I still don't really understand what people think Yahoo should have done in this case when local authorities go through proper local legal channels to obtain information. It happens all the time in the US, and as we have seen recently, the US legal channels are at least as murky as the Chinese ones and as it turns out, Yahoo was the company that put up the biggest fight against those, although they still lost.

eksith 12 years ago | | |

According to the EFF, a lot more : https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/11/undermining-freedoms-c...

It's important to remember that this wasn't in the U.S. and happened in 2005, when Yahoo's public policy with regard to cooperation with authorities wasn't under scrutiny, and therefore, a lot more complicit than today. The cost of complicity was quite a bit worse and even Yahoo acknowledged that fact.

mindslight 12 years ago | | |

This is the _Internet_, not an interactive cable tv service. Don't setup servers in every last country, choose maybe one in every geographical cluster. Then you have way fewer "local authorities" to be concerned about.

Also, don't keep logs or ask for any signup information besides authentication credentials in the first place.

But alas, we really shouldn't expect web services to work against the status quo, as corporations are mere extensions of government and wish to identify, track, and datamine people similarly. After all, there's a reason we view a webmail address as an indicator of an uncaring noob.

djvu9 12 years ago | | |

The company was actually Yahoo HongKong (the server is said to be hosted in the US). The order was sent by Department of National Security, through a representative of Yahoo in Beijing. There is no evidence indicating that Yahoo had ever fight for this.

Also the message leaked by Shi was just a guideline sent by the Department of Propaganda to all the newspapers/media companies. It is nothing similar to the Manning case.