internet - The Yahoo-dilemma

ESWN uses the case of a false bomb threat in Hong Kong to make his point on the dilemma Yahoo and other information services face when they have to deal with requests from a government to hand them over information on one of their users. Comply or refuse are the only two options, he argues, as nobody wants to even consider a third option:

This leaves the third option, which is a mixture between the first two options. This is hinted by Philip Bowring in Yahoo's mess of pottage: "Assisting in tracking murderers, suicide bombers and drug smugglers is not the same as handing over providers of what in most countries would be legitimate news to which the public had a reasonable right." Of course, we would all like to see a responsible corporate citizen assisting in legitimate law enforcement on one hand and rejecting suppression of human rights on the other hand. But my challenge in that previous post was how to design and implement such a system in China.
If several hundred requests come into Yahoo! every day, how would they know which is which? As Jerry Yang said, "We do not know why they want that information. We're not told what they look for." So in order to tell which is which, Yahoo! will have an in-house Chief Privacy Officer, who will demand the law enforcement agency to produce the full evidence, explain the purpose of the inquiry and then he/she will play God/Supreme Court Justice and render a decision in his/her Infinite Wisdom. Routinely, this CPO will have to make several hundred potentially life-and-death decisions every day. Now who wants that Chief Privacy Officer job, with all the pressures and the legal and moral liabilities?

ESWN writes he know this is not going to make him popular, but I agree that this is a serious dilemma. I do think it makes sense to raise the alarm when - like in the case of Shi Tao - a government uses its legal power to jail for example journalists for what is considered to be improper reasons. It makes sense that larger IT-companies use their leverage with Chinese legal autorities to explain that when they are forced to give information in this kind of widely disputed cases, it might be harder for them to provide evidence in cases where everybody would agree Yaoo-likes would comply with judicial demands for information.