Yahoo! implicated in a third Chinese dissident jailing

Yahoo! implicated in a third Chinese dissident jailing: "Yahoo! implicated in a third Chinese dissident jailing

4/20/2006 11:03:31 AM, by Anders Bylund

Reporters sans frontières (Reporters Without Borders), a Paris-based organization defending freedom of the press worldwide, just released Chinese court documents translated to English (PDF), showing Yahoo! playing an instrumental part in the arrest of a Chinese dissident. It's the third case of this type RSF has been able to unearth, all pointing out Yahoo! Mail as the instrumental piece that led to the arrests.

'Little by little we are piecing together the evidence for what we have long suspected, that Yahoo! is implicated in the arrest of most of the people that we have been defending,' says the organization in a press release. 'Last week we went to the headquarters of the company to urge them to end this collaboration. We called on them to remove their email servers from China, because it is the only way to avoid taking part in the current crackdown against journalists and democrats.'

Jiang Lijun was sent to prison for four years in November 2003 on charges of 'subversion' and seeking to use 'violent means to impose democracy.' Through an e-mail draft found on a Yahoo! Mail server, Lijun was linked to a series of online articles, highly critical of the government. It is unclear whether Yahoo! directly provided the information to the Chinese police, or whether another dissident by the name of Li Yibing turned his colleague in."