But @Cyril, the “principal [sic] of free speech” is NOT what people understand it to be. It does not EVER, in ANY society, mean that you can say whatever you want whenever you want to. That is anarchy. If freedom of speech means what you are interpreting it to be, then why is it illegal to make threats against people? Why is it illegal to post child pornography? There are decency laws in the U.S. as well; why is no one protesting those laws? If this was a cut-and-dried freedom of speech case, others in the group would have been arrested as well, but that fact seems to be ignored again and again.

I am frustrated by the attention this one article has received without any reading of past articles I have written about the issues in China and in Myanmar and in other countries.

You’re siding with the prosecution of free-thinkers in China.
You’re siding with the military junta in Burma that wants to crush all voice of dissent.

Before you present the argument that we must honour the law, remember it’s the rulers who make the law, and that the law can be changed to suit the tastes of the ruler.

Do you fail to recognize that laws can be brutal, one-sided, and even dishonest?

There’s a law in Iran which makes it illegal to practice the bahai religion.

Do you support it?

What are you standing for?

Unlawful freedom, lawful or oppression?

Remember, this is not in the present context, but in the broader view.

http://www.economist.com/media/pdf/DEMOCRACY_INDEX_2007_v3.pdf

Go to page 3 to see that India’s electoral process and civil liberties are rated 9.58/10 and
9.41/10 respectively…

The corresponding numbers for the US are 8.75 and 8.53 .

And the Washington Post should make note of the fact that India does not require its legislators to swear on a particular religious book, nor does it require currency to be stamped with the name of God.

Conclusion: Different nations have different curbs on civil liberty. The US should stop pretending that they are the “one free country”. Indian law also discriminates against certain sexual minorities etc, just as US law discriminates against non Christians. The UK, for instance, discriminates between “monotheistic religions” and “polytheistic religions”, as if it were better to substitute one piece of nonsense for another. So: we are all trying to be better on civil liberty and the US is actually falling behind…

Now the rant:
Regular people think conjoined twins must have terrible lives and therefore should be separated but studies show that conjoined twins can’t imagine their lives without their twin and rate their lives as happy.

I’m tired of the moral imperialism that some Americans keep pushing. What people like Arrington don’t realize is that their talk is influenced from always living stateside. They’ve never lived in the ‘real’ world of shiites versus sunnis, alarms going off because of scuds flying overhead, being demeaned because of skin color or caste or political affiliation or the other hundreds of reasons people use to discriminate against each other. I’ve lived my entire life as an expat and have met the gamut of nationalities. And most Americans have the tendency to build little America wherever they are. They’re just as parochial as the other immigrants who create Chinatown or little Italy/India etc.

If you live or do business in another country, if you want to succeed and have goodwill, you need to live by their rules. You can’t just come in and say, “Guess what? We know better than you.” If you think you know better, then stick it out and bring change from within. Thrashing the system from the outside doesn’t work.

If you want to take a stand or get American companies to take a stand, then get them to help not rebel. Why isn’t Google more involved in social endeavors in the third world? Why isn’t Arrington? It feels great to talk about the moral high ground, but if you aren’t doing anything constructive and concrete, then please take your holier-than-thou attitude somewhere else. The world needs more DO-ers not preachers.

You are correct in that it was bad form, and I have removed it. However, I would like to point out that posting via an employer’s network when you are going to slam someone for pointing out that a competitor is getting some (for once) undeserved bad PR is also bad form, and rather silly. With several easily accessible proxies out there, more people should think about using them in situations like this one.

The fact that India has a law such as the one you cite above isn’t the issue. China has laws it uses to justify its actions. Was the arrest of Shi Tao, based on information provided by Yahoo, for ‘espionage’ just? It was certainly ‘legal’ as defined by China. The same was true for companies that did business with Nazi Germany.

The issue is whether the arrest of Rahul Krishnakumar Vaid violates The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 19 states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was ratified by the UN in 1948 with no votes against it.

I’m not aware of the specifics of the case, but it seems to me that Vaid was objecting to a political figure in his country. Thus, as long as he didn’t advocate violence, Vaid should be viewed as a political prisoner.

It may be that the specifics of the material uploaded put Vaid in a different category…I haven’t read the text he allegedly uploaded.

But your post is about whether it’s okay for Google to reveal information when presented with a legal justification. Is that really a position you want to take?

PS: Mentioning the IP address of an anonymous poster is poor form. If the poster is posting from Yahoo, he or she is doing so as an individual. Trying to associate the individual with that company’s less than stellar human rights record is unfair…the poster may have nothing to do with Yahoo’s policies.