Yahoo! Apparently Involved in Jailing Yet Another Chinese Dissident

BizzyBlog Internet Wall of Shame member Yahoo! apparently is continuing to justify its presence on the Wall (though the article indicates that the company may have a little wiggle room on this one):

Yahoo Inc. may have helped Chinese police to identify an Internet writer who was subsequently jailed for four years for subversion in the third such case, an advocacy group for journalists said on Wednesday.

News implicating Yahoo in the imprisonment of Jiang Lijun in 2003 surfaced on the eve of a summit between Chinese President Hu Jintao and President Bush in Washington.

….. The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said it had obtained a copy of the verdict showing that Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong) helped Chinese police to identify Jiang by confirming that the e-mail account ZYMZd2002 had been used jointly by Jiang and another pro-democracy activist Li Yibing.

“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,” the group said.

….. But the watchdog conceded that the access code could also have been provided by Li, who is suspected of having been a police informer in the case.

The 40-year-old Jiang was accused of seeking to use “violent means” to impose democracy, Reporters Without Borders said.

The full Reporters Without Borders statement is here.

To keep up on developments relating to Chinese censorship and free speech on the Internet, there is NO better source than Rebecca MacKinnon at RConversation, who says this about the about the Jiang case (links within the excerpt at RConversation, and were not added here to encourage you to go there):

Way to go, Yahoo! When will Yahoo! senior executives, and their Chinese partner Alibaba, announce concrete measures to prevent such cases from happening in the future?

Their congressional testimony claimed they are reviewing practices, yet in public statements their top executives sound pretty unapologetic and unrepentant.

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UPDATE, April 20, 1PM: Michelle Malkin reports via Drudge that a woman on the south lawn at the White House shouted protests at President Bush and Chinese “President” Hu about Falun Gong persecution today before being led away and presumably arrested. I’m sure the Chinese people will see that on TV tonight (not).

UPDATE 2, April 20, 3PM: On the Yahoo!-Jiang story, this AP report published in USA Today has none of the reference to a possible police informant in the original Reuters report above.