Glutter

Freedom of Expression

Last week I was interviewed by a journalist at the BBC, and somehow the link to parts of it was sent to me in an alert by google. I am not even sure in what context this is in, or whether I have the rights to put it up. But here goes.... (I have to say it was well edited, because it got a lot of my points across in a more succinct than I put it.

Yahoo Case Moves to Discovery Phase

"Our lawsuit against Yahoo, filed in April 2007, has now advanced to the discovery phase after the District Court for the Northern District of California granted our motion to begin initial and jurisdictional discovery. The court's order comes after Yahoo attempted to delay initial and jurisdictional discovery by asking the court to bifurcate proceedings, which would have meant that the court would have to delay addressing the merits of the case. Human Rights USA successfully challenged Yahoo's attempts to split up proceedings into multiple parts.

Human Rights USA filed suit against Yahoo in April for its complicity in handing over identifying internet user information to Chinese authorities, leading to the arbitrary arrest, long-term detention, abuse, and torture of Chinese journalists and human rights and pro-democracy advocates. Two of the plaintiffs -- Wang Xiaoning and Shi Tao -- have been arrested and imprisoned in China for having expressed their right to free speech as a result of Yahoo's actions." http://www.humanrightsusa.org

Forbes: Congress To Google: Don't Sell Out To Censors
Andy Greenberg 10.23.07, 2:35 PM ET

For global tech companies like Google and Yahoo!, cooperating with repressive states like China has been a public relations nightmare. Now that ethical dilemma may be slowly widening into a legal morass.

The House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs voted Tuesday to pass the Global Online Freedom Act, a bill designed to penalize U.S. companies up to $2 million if they cooperate with the technological surveillance of political dissidents or share technology and information used for "Internet-restricting" purposes.

"Dictatorships need two pillars to survive: propaganda and secret police. The Internet, if misused, gives them both in spades," said Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey. "Both wittingly and unwittingly, companies operating in places like China have discovered they're a part of these regimes."

Tuesday's bill must still pass several hurdles before reaching the House or Senate floor. But it is a clear sign of the growing frustration in Congress over the tug-of-war between supporting U.S. technology companies in politically charged countries and America's long support of human rights abroad.

Companies under the congressional microscope included Cisco, which Smith accused of helping China create a "police net" database used to track and imprison political dissidents around the country. He alluded to Yahoo!'s cooperation with Chinese police, offering up email information that led to journalist Shi Tao receiving a 10-year prison term in 2005 for "revealing state secrets." Smith also criticized Google for its decision to appease China by blocking politically controversial search results on its Mandarin site.

"Google has joined hook, line and sinker with the propaganda regime of Beijing," Smith said.

While Google and Yahoo! couldn't be reached for comment, Cisco responded with a statement denying any participation in government censorship and arguing that the company "supports transparency in the way the Internet is used and complies with applicable regulations."

Microsoft faces issues similar to those of Yahoo! and Google in countries that censor search results and track dissidents. The software giant said it is "not advocating for a legislative solution" and is instead working with organizations including Business for Social Responsibility and the Center for Democracy and Technology to develop new guidelines for protecting human rights abroad.

Since turning over information key to jailing Shi Tao, Yahoo! has been called before Congress to explain its actions. Yahoo!'s general counsel Michael Callahan told Congress last February that the company was unaware China's government would use Shi Tao's email information as evidence in a politically motivated trial.

Earlier this month, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos accused Yahoo! of knowing the Chinese government's intentions in that case and lying in the Congressional hearing. Lantos has demanded Callahan and Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang return to Congress for further questioning next month.

Legislators supporting the bill contend it could help protect dissents abroad by making it illegal for companies to store sensitive information that could be used to indentify individuals in countries with restrictive Internet policies, including China, Belarus, Vietnam, Ethiopia, and Tunisia. U.S. search engines and Internet Service Providers would also be prevented from filtering search results at the request of a government or for any Internet-restricting purposes.

Not every member of Congress was convinced. Though the committee overwhelmingly supported the measure, Representative Adam Smith of Washington contended the bill was "overly broad," and in its current form, would simply prevent American tech companies from doing business in many countries around the world.

"This is a very delicate area, and a very indelicate piece of legislation," he added.

Internet companies in China already face an unfriendly business landscape. Despite cooperating with the Chinese government's censorship demands, Google has lagged its competitor Baidu in China. Monday, Google confirmed reports that some users were being mysteriously redirected from Google's search page to Baidu's.

But Representative Dan Burton of Indiana countered critiques that the bill would crimp U.S. business abroad by comparing those concerns to arguments in 19th century Britain over the fiscal sacrifices associated with ending slavery.

"Some nation has to start to change what's been going on in China," he said. "Let it be us, today."

23.10.2007

House committee approval for Global Online Freedom Act hailed

Reporters Without Borders welcomes today’s decision by the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee to approve the proposed Global Online Freedom Act (GOFA). Drafted in February 2006 by Republican Representative of New Jersey, Christopher Smith, this bipartisan bill would prevent US Internet sector companies from collaborating with repressive governments. It will now go before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

“This is a wonderful advance for online free expression,” the press freedom organisation said. “At least four cyber-dissidents, including Wang Xianing and Shi Tao, have been convicted and jailed because of information supplied by the US company Yahoo! to the Chinese authorities. Cooperation with repressive government by American Internet companies runs counter to the very nature of the Internet and facilitates the work of the censors.”

Reporters Without Borders added: “We hope the House committee on energy and commerce will now in turn quickly recognise this bill’s importance so that it can it can be submitted to a floor vote as soon as possible.”

The Global Online Freedom Act would prevent repressive governments - those that punish dissidents and human rights activists who use their right to online free expression - from having access to personal data by banning US companies from locating the servers containing this data in the territories controlled by such governments.

The bill would also ban US companies from providing information enabling users to be identified, except in cases in which the law is being legitimately applied. This, however, would be decided by the US justice department and not the companies.

The US companies concerned would also have to act transparently and transmit information about the type of censorship they apply to an interagency-staffed Office of Global Internet Freedom, which would have the job of defining US government policy for the promotion of the free flow of information online and monitoring violations. The office would also have the job of encouraging US companies, NGOs and academics to draft a voluntary code of conduct.

Companies that do not respect the GOFA’s provisions would be sanctioned. The GOFA would also establish a feasibility study for controlling the export of equipment, software and applications sold by US Internet sector companies to countries designated as repressive by the White House.

US companies Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft have been repeatedly criticised for agreeing to censor themselves in China. Cisco Systems is accused of providing China with online censorship technology. A Yahoo! representative will appear before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on 6 November in connection with his apparently untruthful claims to Congress on February 2006. He claimed that the company knew nothing about the content of the investigation into Shi Tao as a document published by the Dui Hua Foundation seems to prove the contrary.

When American corporations deliver U.S. foreign policy ...

Michael Likosky,Michael Shtender-Auerbach

Friday, November 2, 2007

The headlines that Yahoo had handed over Chinese journalist and democratic activist Shi Tao's e-mails and IP address to China's secret police dominated the news last year. This sent a panic through an industry usually praised for its social responsibility and unaccustomed to external scrutiny. Congress called in the general counsels of four of our leading high tech firms - Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo - to account for their collaboration with the Chinese government. In the course of events, it became clear that the problem in the high-tech sector was not isolated but endemic.

Since this hearing, human rights activists have uncovered three additional cases whereby Yahoo's policy of sharing personal records of its users with Chinese authorities has led to arrest, alleged torture and lengthy prison terms. When our high-tech firms engage in such behavior abroad, they undermine a basic tenet of our foreign policy. What then is the appropriate response?

The U.S. foreign policy of "peaceful evolution" encourages the democratization of authoritarian regimes not through isolationist policies, but instead through constructive commercial engagement; that is, the promotion of free market capitalism abroad. However, some American companies promote and reinforce authoritarian capitalism and suppress democratic movements. The question is: How endemic is corporate-facilitated authoritarianism?

In places such as China, one worries that legitimate reform and resistance will be squelched with the help of U.S. corporations. Commercial engagement may at times produce the very authoritarianism that our high-tech firms make a claim to eradicating by virtue of their technologies. Sophisticated commercial actors and governments realize this.

On Nov. 6, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs will question Yahoo's senior executives on the veracity of testimony given by the company's general counsel during the 2006 hearing in relation to the Tao case. This offers Congress a unique opportunity to change the status quo for American high-tech companies cooperating with authoritarian regimes.

This hearing comes just two weeks after the same committee passed the Global Online Freedom Act, legislation aimed at promoting Internet freedoms and protecting U.S. firms from governments attempting to coerce them into participating in authoritarianism. It, in part, places constraints on U.S. firms, and then backs those constraints with possible civil and criminal sanctions.

Yahoo's director of global public affairs, Tracy Schmaler, maintains that Yahoo's legal counsel provided "truthful" testimony in 2006 and that Yahoo is working "to develop a global code of conduct for operating in countries around the world, including China." Corporate codes are important for advancing peaceful evolution and are part of the mandate of the Global Online Freedom Act. However, we must be wary of private solutions in which the regulator and the regulated are one and the same.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has tied wider corporate accountability in his industry to the need for new legislation, modeled perhaps on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Congress must assess the nature and extent of the social risks engendered by high tech corporate collaborations abroad. Are we genuinely concerned with the wider social harm of some transnational commerce? If so, what public or private institutions - domestic, foreign or international, or combination thereof, are the appropriate ones to assess and mitigate transnational high technology social risk?

Whether de facto or de jure, our companies are our foreign policy organs. American hi-tech companies - Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Cisco - may not fly an American flag, but Chinese citizens, and others, may see it otherwise. The decision by Congress to summon the legal counsel of our blue chip high-tech firms into a congressional committee room last year was an important step in addressing this issue.

The continued congressional inquiry into Yahoo's testimony is further indication that our government values accountability and takes peaceful evolution seriously. While Lantos attempts to get at the truth of Yahoo's actions, Congress should consider legislative action, such as the one proposed by Gates, as an appropriate means for mitigating our collective social risks.

Michael Likosky is a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School and author of "Law, Infrastructure and Human Rights," (Cambridge University Press). Michael Shtender-Auerbach is managing director and founder of Social Risks, LLC, of which Likosky is also a principal.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/02/EDQGT3KJL.DTL

This article appeared on page B - 11 of the San Francisco Chronicle

When American corporations deliver U.S. foreign policy ...

Michael Likosky,Michael Shtender-Auerbach

Friday, November 2, 2007

The headlines that Yahoo had handed over Chinese journalist and democratic activist Shi Tao's e-mails and IP address to China's secret police dominated the news last year. This sent a panic through an industry usually praised for its social responsibility and unaccustomed to external scrutiny. Congress called in the general counsels of four of our leading high tech firms - Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo - to account for their collaboration with the Chinese government. In the course of events, it became clear that the problem in the high-tech sector was not isolated but endemic.

Since this hearing, human rights activists have uncovered three additional cases whereby Yahoo's policy of sharing personal records of its users with Chinese authorities has led to arrest, alleged torture and lengthy prison terms. When our high-tech firms engage in such behavior abroad, they undermine a basic tenet of our foreign policy. What then is the appropriate response?

The U.S. foreign policy of "peaceful evolution" encourages the democratization of authoritarian regimes not through isolationist policies, but instead through constructive commercial engagement; that is, the promotion of free market capitalism abroad. However, some American companies promote and reinforce authoritarian capitalism and suppress democratic movements. The question is: How endemic is corporate-facilitated authoritarianism?

In places such as China, one worries that legitimate reform and resistance will be squelched with the help of U.S. corporations. Commercial engagement may at times produce the very authoritarianism that our high-tech firms make a claim to eradicating by virtue of their technologies. Sophisticated commercial actors and governments realize this.

On Nov. 6, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs will question Yahoo's senior executives on the veracity of testimony given by the company's general counsel during the 2006 hearing in relation to the Tao case. This offers Congress a unique opportunity to change the status quo for American high-tech companies cooperating with authoritarian regimes.

This hearing comes just two weeks after the same committee passed the Global Online Freedom Act, legislation aimed at promoting Internet freedoms and protecting U.S. firms from governments attempting to coerce them into participating in authoritarianism. It, in part, places constraints on U.S. firms, and then backs those constraints with possible civil and criminal sanctions.

Yahoo's director of global public affairs, Tracy Schmaler, maintains that Yahoo's legal counsel provided "truthful" testimony in 2006 and that Yahoo is working "to develop a global code of conduct for operating in countries around the world, including China." Corporate codes are important for advancing peaceful evolution and are part of the mandate of the Global Online Freedom Act. However, we must be wary of private solutions in which the regulator and the regulated are one and the same.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has tied wider corporate accountability in his industry to the need for new legislation, modeled perhaps on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Congress must assess the nature and extent of the social risks engendered by high tech corporate collaborations abroad. Are we genuinely concerned with the wider social harm of some transnational commerce? If so, what public or private institutions - domestic, foreign or international, or combination thereof, are the appropriate ones to assess and mitigate transnational high technology social risk?

Whether de facto or de jure, our companies are our foreign policy organs. American hi-tech companies - Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Cisco - may not fly an American flag, but Chinese citizens, and others, may see it otherwise. The decision by Congress to summon the legal counsel of our blue chip high-tech firms into a congressional committee room last year was an important step in addressing this issue.

The continued congressional inquiry into Yahoo's testimony is further indication that our government values accountability and takes peaceful evolution seriously. While Lantos attempts to get at the truth of Yahoo's actions, Congress should consider legislative action, such as the one proposed by Gates, as an appropriate means for mitigating our collective social risks.

Michael Likosky is a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School and author of "Law, Infrastructure and Human Rights," (Cambridge University Press). Michael Shtender-Auerbach is managing director and founder of Social Risks, LLC, of which Likosky is also a principal.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/02/EDQGT3KJL.DTL

This article appeared on page B - 11 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Spotlight: Jerry Yang - China success a two-edged sword
By Richard Waters in San Francisco
Financial Times
updated 6:41 p.m. PT, Fri., Nov. 2, 2007

When Jerry Yang, chief executive and co-founder of Yahoo, appears before a congressional committee tomorrow, it is likely to be the kind of political theatre that US business leaders dread.

By handing Chinese authorities the e-mail records of one of its users, Yahoo helped to land Shi Tao, a dissident Chinese journalist, with a 10-year jail sentence. The company's chief lawyer apologised publicly last week for failing to hand over all the information he had on the affair to a House committee investigating the matter, but that may not be enough to draw the committee's sting.

For Mr Yang, an intensely private man who was an idealistic Stanford University student when he co-founded Yahoo at the start of the dotcom boom, the drawn-out controversy over the Shi case has come at considerable personal cost.

"I think this is really painful for him," says one former Yahoo executive. "Yahoo hasn't wrapped itself in grandiose language the way Google has, but he really built Yahoo to be a force for good."

Ironically, tomorrow's appearance in Washington will come on the very day that Mr Yang should be celebrating the culmination of Yahoo's new business strategy in China. According to some observers, that strategy should also serve to insulate his company in future from controversies such as this - though others believe it could instead backfire and leave Yahoo's reputation even more exposed.

The new approach to China began two years ago, when the US internet company folded its own stumbling operations there into a local e-commerce company, Alibaba. Along with a $1bn injection of cash, that bought Yahoo a 39 per cent stake.

Shares in Alibaba are set to start trading in Hong Kong tomorrow, capping the biggest initial public offering for an internet company since Google and valuing Yahoo's investment at about $3.5bn.

By reducing Yahoo's involvement in China to a minority investment, Mr Yang's deal with Jack Ma, the entrepreneur behind Alibaba, theoretically distances Yahoo from any future human rights controversies.

"It's for Jack Ma to follow local customs," says one person who has been involved in Yahoo's planning. "[The problem] does go away."

However, even though it has no direct control, Yahoo's reputation could still be on the line over Alibaba's actions. Mr Ma has made no secret of his own willingness to co-operate closely with the Chinese authorities in any investigations into his company's users.

Full Story

The New York Times

November 3, 2007
Yahoo Executive Apologizes to a Congressional Panel
By REUTERS

A senior executive at Yahoo has apologized for failing to give American lawmakers additional information about its role in the imprisonment of a Chinese dissident.

The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said that Yahoo’s general counsel, Michael J. Callahan, gave false information at a hearing in 2006 about what the company knew of the Chinese government’s investigation of Shi Tao, a reporter who was sentenced last April to 10 years in prison for leaking state secrets.

Mr. Callahan testified that Yahoo China, then a subsidiary of Yahoo, had passed information about one of its users to Chinese authorities in 2004 without knowledge of why China wanted the data.

It was only in October 2006 that he realized that the order from the Chinese government had mentioned an investigation into state secrets, a Yahoo spokeswoman, Tracy Schmaler, said.

The problem was caused by a bad translation of the 2004 Chinese order given to a company lawyer based in the region, she said.

In a statement dated Nov. 1, Mr. Callahan said he had neglected to alert the committee of the new information, leading to “a misunderstanding that I deeply regret and have apologized to the committee for creating.”

At a Congressional committee hearing next week, Yahoo’s chief executive, Jerry Yang, is expected to answer questions on his company’s disclosure of information to Chinese authorities. Mr. Callahan is expected to repeat his apology at that hearing.

Anthropology

Lately, I have been asked about what I believed in, and if I had any religious views. I always say, "I believe in science. I believe in having experiments that can be recreated to find the truth of the natural world. I believe in gravity. I would like to believe things happen for a reason, or that there is a meant-to-be but I don't."

I am not having a good time right now, a series of really unfortunate things have happened, and in that mist of sadness, I do wonder if religion could possibly give me solace. I wonder if this is time to turn to God, as the pain and circumstance seems so outside of myself, and I am not big enough to deal with. I finally understand that "life is bitterness" as the Chinese says, because sometimes no matter how you try, you cannot control the outcome of what you worked so hard to achieve. Peace of mind does not come, the right decision is not easy, and even if you did your best you can be disappointed because we have no control of others, and we do not have control of nature. We might be able to destroy it, but we cannot stop it from appearing when it does.

So I wonder about god quite often. I wonder about going to Church for more than the music and atmosphere. I wonder that if I just let myself go, I can tell myself "this is what is meant to be," but I know better. I know that it didn't have to turn out this way. If humans had more control, foresight, the ability to think ahead, if they could go beyond their myopic emotion of that moment, how I would feel right now would be different. How my life would have turned out would be different, and what I looked forward to and planned would still be here, so I think maybe I should just allow myself to be anesthetized by the comfort of religion or belief, and let go of what I do believe in, maybe just for this moment, maybe for the rest of my life.

Then I came across this clip where Naturalist Sir David Attenborough discusses his lack of religious belief, how he believes in nature and I remember that's all I believe in too. Maybe that's how people feel when the find god, when the word is spoken, they find relief to be reminded of what they do believe in again when they have lost their way. Watching it, reminded me I am an atheist, I believe in science, and that used to help me through the day. Maybe tomorrow I can look at the sky and mountain and think of the science of how it all came to be, eel awe and wonder and solace simply because it's there, and I live in a time when I can understand them in ways that was not possible before.