A short course in Ethics

I ran across this and was immediately led to consider the telecoms' insistence on immunity from prosecution in this light.

Of course for the Yahoo execs, the confinement and torture lasted only a few hours

Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang and General Counsel Michael Callahan trod grimly up to the sacrificial alter in the chambers of the House Foreign Affairs Committee today and laid themselves open for evisceration over the company’s cooperation in the 2004 arrest of Chinese journalist Shi Tao and his 10-year sentence for offending the state. The lawmakers did not hold back.

“While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies,” railed Committee Chairman Tom Lantos, D-Calif. Lantos made it clear he was not buying Yahoo’s story that because of a poorly translated document, it only belatedly discovered that the request for Shi’s records was related to a questionable “security” investigation (see “It was the Chinese word for ‘quisling’ that threw us“). “This was inexcusably negligent behavior at best and deliberately deceptive behavior at worst,” said Lantos. Twice. For purposes of extra shaming, the committee seated Shi Tao’s mother right behind Yang and Callahan, and at Lantos’ directive, they turned and bowed in apology, leading her to break out in tears.

The Yahoo duo vainly continued to defend their company’s actions. “I cannot ask our local employees to resist lawful demands and put their own freedom at risk, even if, in my personal view, the local laws are overbroad,” Callahan said. Replied Lantos, “I do not believe that America’s best and brightest companies should be playing integral roles in China’s notorious and brutal political repression apparatus.” Committee members were also unhappy at the pair’s vague answers about whether Yahoo would somehow compensate Shi’s family (”You’re one of the richest companies in the country, and you don’t know whether you can provide for the humanitarian needs for a couple of families?” asked Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif.), and whether it would continue to accede to such data demands. Callahan would say only that in going into new markets, “I would hope to have a structure in place … that we would be able to resist those demands or have that data not be accessible.” And Yang promised that in the future, “we’ll take more responsibility both morally and ethically.”

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