US slams Yahoo CEO for identifying Chinese dissident

Yahoo Inc’s chief executive was verbally lashed by US lawmakers on Tuesday over the Internet company’s role...

Yahoo Inc’s chief executive was verbally lashed by US lawmakers on Tuesday over the Internet company’s role in helping identify a Chinese dissident who was later imprisoned by the Government.

“While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies,” Representative Tom Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told CEO Jerry Yang and Yahoo’s general counsel, Michael Callahan, at the three-hour hearing.

Yang and Callahan got criticism from the Democrats and Republicans over the case of Shi Tao, a reporter accused by Chinese authorities of leaking state secrets abroad and sentenced him to 10 years in prison. Shi has been charged of forwarding an e-mail from Chinese Government to foreign human rights groups that directed journalists to avoid coverage of the 15th anniversary of the Chinese army killings of pro-democracy protesters near Tiananmen Square in 1989, said Lantos, a California Democrat. At Tuesday’s hearing, Yang apologised to the committee and to Shi’s family and said Yahoo was doing what it could to help get Shi released. Yang told the committee that Yahoo did not know that the personal information sought by the Chinese government involved a political dissident when its China office turned over the data.