A top executive at Yahoo Inc. has apologized for failing to inform U.S. lawmakers about the circumstances under which the Internet company gave the Chinese government information on one of its users.
Michael Callahan, executive vice president and general counsel at Yahoo, told a House Foreign Relations panel in February 2006 that the company passed information to the Chinese government in 2004 about one of its users without knowledge of why the request was being made. That user, Chinese journalist Shi Tao, was subsequently sentenced to 10 years in prison for divulging state secrets.
