The wife of a Chinese dissident is suing Yahoo, Inc. for providing identifiable evidence to the communist government that imprisoned her husband for writing anonymous editorials critical of China’s communist rule.

From Wired News:

Early one Sunday morning in 2002, a phone rings in Yu Ling’s Beijing duplex. She’s cleaning upstairs; her son is asleep, while downstairs, her husband, Wang Xiaoning, is on the computer. Wang writes about politics, anonymously e-mailing his online e-journals to a group of Yahoo users. He’s been having problems with his Yahoo service recently. He thinks it’s a technical issue. This is the day he learns he’s wrong.

Wang picks up the phone: “Yes?”

“Are you home?” asks the unfamiliar voice on the other end.

“Yes.”

The line goes dead.

Moments later, government agents swarm through the front door – 10 of them, some in uniform, some not. They take Wang away. They take his computers and disks. They shove an official notice into Yu’s hands, tell her to keep quiet, and leave. This is how it’s done in China. This is how the internet police grab you.

Yahoo! isn’t the only search engine company guilty of conforming to the rules of communist countries in exchange for access to their marketplace. According to the article, Google also censors certain phrases on its Google China search engine that relate to subjects such as freedom and democracy that the Chinese government prefers its citizens not learn about.

It’s an interesting notion that, ostensibly, the rights our government recognizes for its citizens are God-given and do not dissolve when an American travels to another country, and yet there is no system in place to ensure that big American companies follow the same rules where civil rights are concerned when offering their products to other countries as they would have to follow here. The implication is that either our government believes the people of other countries are innately less than Americans or that our government no longer believes such rights are innate at all. It could be argued that while the US government may recognize those rights it has no jurisdiction for protecting the rights of foreigners, but even so, it does have an obligation to ensure that American businesses do not engage in practices that violate those rights anywhere.

Legal experts are doubtful of Yu’s chances in court. But her presence in the United States puts an inescapable human face on the pain caused by the uneasy alliances American technology companies have forged in the last five years with China’s repressive regime. These partnerships are the price of admission to China’s booming market, but they are not without their casualties.