EU Referendum

Some time ago we reported that the Chinese dissident, Wang Xiaoning, who is serving a 10-year sentence in a Chinese prison as a result of Yahoo HK activity and his wife, Yu Ling, were suing the company under the Alien Torts Claim Act and the Torture Victims Protection Act.

News comes that a Chinese reporter, Shi Tao, also in Chinese prison, is suing Yahoo.Inc.

Shi, a former writer for the financial publication Contemporary Business News, was jailed for providing state secrets to foreigners. His conviction stemmed from an e-mail he sent containing his notes on a government circular that spelled out restrictions on the media.

Yahoo has acknowledged turning over data on Shi at the request of the Chinese government, saying company employees face civil and criminal sanctions if they ignore local laws. It denies Yahoo Hong Kong was involved.

Shi's legal challenge is part of a law suit filed by the World Organization for Human Rights USA, " which is suing Yahoo, its subsidiary in Hong Kong, and Alibaba.com Inc., a Yahoo partner that runs Yahoo China".

As we said before, we shall be watching developments carefully.

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Labels: China, Internet

Not that I would ever dream of dismissing the dangers to free speech (and already existing controls) that we face in this part of the world, having written many thousands of words about the latest piece of legislation on racism and xenophobia to come from Brussels. But other people in other parts of the world are facing far worse problems and it is our duty to highlight them and to show support for the very brave people who face imprisonment and worse for doing what we take for granted.

Our readers will recall the scandalous development whereby Yahoo HK, a wholly owned Yahoo subsidiary based in Hong Kong helped the Chinese police to identify several bloggers and posters on the internet, who were voicing criticism of the government and the system.

As Jim Cullinan, a spokesman for Yahoo puts it:

Companies doing business in China are forced to comply with Chinese law.

Obeying the law is one thing, one might say, and needless officiousness that results in the imprisonment of bloggers and journalists is something else.

According to this morning’s International Herald Tribune, one of those imprisoned together with his wife who is in California, has decided to sue Yahoo.

A Chinese political prisoner and his wife have sued Yahoo in a U.S. court, accusing the company of abetting acts of torture by helping Chinese authorities identify political dissidents who were later beaten and imprisoned.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday under the Alien Tort Claims Act and the Torture Victims Protection Act, may be the first of its kind against an Internet company for its activities in China.

Wang Xiaoning, who is serving a 10-year prison sentence in China, according to the lawsuit; his wife, Yu Ling; and other unidentified plaintiffs seek damages and an injunction barring Yahoo from identifying dissidents to Chinese authorities.

We shall watch this potentially important precedent with great interest.

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Labels: China, Internet

Well, I guess that is not a particularly accurate wish. We were first in something not so long ago. The United Kingdom is proud to announce that it was first in having a TV programme, now world-famous and, unlike the NHS, imitated by many other countries. It was called Big Brother. Some of our readers might recall it.

What I would like to see is for Britain to be first or, at least, close second in something important and advanced in the modern world. For instance, we have blogs but do they play any serious part in the country’s politics?

I am sure Iain Dale (who is a friend, as I had better admit, while my colleague is otherwise occupied) and Tim Montgomerie, whom I also know, would tell me that their blogs play a very important part in Conservative Party politics and that may well be true, though I have yet to see David Cameron take any of their ideas on board.

There are similar blogs on the Labour and Lib-Dim sides and, no doubt, they have some influence within the parties. The problem concerns the wider field of politics, which is more likely to be of import and interest to the people of this country.

The assumption that the blogosphere has an existence and growing importance of its own, so widely recognized in the United States, is almost completely missing in this country. Newspaper readership may be going down, TV viewing is certainly not growing and, as far as the BBC is concerned, actually going down but they are still the measure of all things.

Even on the forum that is attached to this blog we get periodic comments about the need for us to try and get into the MSM or to be nice to journalists. Of course, if the blogosphere were taken seriously in Britain, the MSM would want to publish what this blog puts up often ahead of them. (The Daily Telegraph has finally managed to notice that Germany is proposing EU-wide legislation to make the denial of genocide carried out with racist and xenophobic motives illegal. Duh!)

Instead, our journalists run their own p**s-poor blogs in which they assure the world that the real, independent blogs never have an original story. And the readers nod their heads, the definition of a story being something published in a newspaper, no matter how late in the day.

Going back to the United States, I note that a number of bloggers formed a Media Bloggers Association and this organization has been "credentialed" to cover the Libby trial. As a result, a number of them, from different parts of the political spectrum, are live-blogging. To be fair, it took two years for the Association to negotiate this but they have made it.

Both the Republican and Democrat Conventions last year gave bloggers accreditation. And no, that is not the same as choosing one favoured blogger, as our parties do, and letting him or her produce an official version of what is going on. (On the other hand, party conferences in this country are so dull that live-blogging becomes an oxymoron.)

One of the recent developments on the blogosphere has been the growth of what my colleague calls "clogs", that is corporate blogs. Then there are the various blogs and blogger communities that are being created by news and media outlets. What they are trying to do is to institutionalize and, thus, control this so far unpredictable phenomenon.

As it happens, I do not think that can happen. The essence of the Internet and the blogosphere is anarchy and it has empowered, to use that seriously overused word, more people faster than anything has done since the invention of printing.

Only then England was ahead in the game.

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Labels: blogs, Internet