Yahoo seems to be accountable for the jailing of a Chinese reporter who was jailed in April 2005 for “illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities.” Nice going Yahoo.

Shi Tao, a journalist from Hunan province, was jailed in April for “illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities”. He was accused of having e-mailed a pro-democracy activist in New York details of a government order barring Chinese media from marking the 15th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders has published a translation of the court’s verdict which showed that Yahoo!’s Hong Kong subsidiary had provided Chinese investigators with the detailed technical information that allowed them to prove that only Shi could have sent the e-mail in question.

“We already knew that Yahoo! collaborates enthusiastically with the Chinese regime in questions of censorship, and now we know it is a Chinese police informant as well,” the organisation said.

This doesn’t look good, but sadly it’s just a company trying to create inroads into other markets. In this case they helped prosecute a journalist who was trying to implement Demcrocay into China, a government style and word in which China strictly forbids.