Thank you, Mr. Chairman and good morning to everybody.
Mr. Chairman, thank you for having the commitment to truth and the integrity of this Committee to call this hearing today.
I take a great personal interest in it. It was in large measure a response to Yahoo!s cooperation with the Chinese infamous secret police hunt for democracy advocate Shi Tao that I called the hearing in February of 2006 on “The Internet in China.”
For the benefit of those who weren’t at the February 2006 hearing, we swore in Mr. Callahan, and then I asked him to proceed as he would like. In his opening statement, before I had asked him any questions, he brought up Shi Tao and said that Yahoo had, “no information into the nature of the investigation.” This was not a casual remark. The written statement Mr. Callahan submitted to the Committee said the same thing.
A few months ago we learned from Reporters Without Borders that when the Chinese police came to Yahoo! looking for Shi Tao, their request for information had specified that they were investigating someone who had “violated state secrets.”
Everyone involved with China knows that when democracy and human rights activists, religious believers, and members of persecuted nationalities are arrested it is often for “violating state secrets.” It is the modus operandi of dictatorship. In effect, this charge means nothing more than that they told the truth about some misdeed of the Chinese government.
If the Chinese Government would prefer that people not know something about life in China, then they make that something a “state secret.” The so-called “state secret” the Chinese Government accused Shi Tao of violating was to pass on a directive calling for censorship of news on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Mr. Callahan now claims that when he testified in 2006 he did not have personal knowledge of the contents of the Chinese police request. But that he and the company he works for made a good-faith effort to inform themselves about the matter he was called to testify about.
Mr. Chairman, Yahoo!’s lawyers have told our staffs that almost a dozen people prepared Mr. Callahan for his testimony.
How could a dozen lawyers prepare another lawyer to testify before Congress, without anyone thinking to look at the document that had caused the hearing to be called? This is astonishing.
It is even more incredible that Yahoo! claims that when, after his testimony before this committee, Mr. Callahan later found out that Yahoo! knew that the police request had to do with “state secrets,” he forgot to inform the Committee.
It’s one thing not to know something, it’s another thing altogether to choose not to know. I’d like to find out, at this hearing, whether the whole corporate culture of Yahoo! was shaped by a fundamental decision not to look too closely into to what their employees in China were doing.
Mr. Chairman, two weeks ago this Committee marked up and reported the Global Online Freedom Act, HR 275. I authored that legislation to prohibit exactly what Yahoo! did to Shi Tao.
The Global Online Freedom Act would prohibit U.S. companies, like Yahoo!, from disclosing information identifying Internet users to officials of countries like China unless the Department of Justice determines it is for a legitimate law enforcement purpose.
The Act would require other U.S. Internet companies working in countries like China to disclose Internet content that they remove or block, or terms that they use to filter or alter search engine results.
The Act would also create an Office of Internet Freedom at the State Department to develop a global strategy to combat attempts from countries like China, North Korea, Syria, Vietnam to transform the Internet into a tool of surveillance and repression.
Mr. Chairman, I’d like to remind my colleagues, and everyone here today, that Yahoo!’s failure to provide this committee with accurate information about its sad betrayal of Shi Tao is powerful evidence that we cannot entrust the human rights of vulnerable people living under repressive regimes, like China’s, to the “industry code of conduct” that is being formulated by the IT companies.
A Yahoo! code of conduct would be cold comfort to people like Gao Qinsheng, Shi Tao’s mother. The fact that we are here today is evidence that we need a Global Online Freedom Act like the one this committee reported two weeks ago.
