Good to see that Amnesty International is calling on its supporters to challenge Yahoo! for their roll in the recent imprisonment of a Chinese journalist. From the first paragraphs of the story there:

Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, is serving a ten-year prison sentence in China for sending an email to the USA. He was accused of “illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities” by using his Yahoo email account.

According to the court transcript of the evidence that led to Shi Tao’s sentencing, the US internet company Yahoo provided account-holder information on him.

Shi Tao was accused of sending an email summarizing an internal Communist Party directive to a foreign source. The Communist Party directive had warned Chinese journalists of possible social unrest during the anniversary of the June 4 Movement (in memory of the Tiananmen crackdown), and directed them not to fuel it via media reports.

Here’s a list of articles concerning Yahoo in China over at the very worth visiting Committee to Protect Bloggers. Shi Tao is just one of a number of folks internationally who are in prison for their electronic communication.

TagCentral Tags: ShiTao, Yahoo, CPB, AI, Amnesty, bloggers, prison, China, Web2.0