U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos, D-Calif., said on Oct. 16 Yahoo misled his panel at a 2006 hearing about the company"s role in providing the Chinese government with information that sent journalist Shi Tao to jail for a decade. Lantos has scheduled a Nov. 6 hearing about the matter and has asked Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and the company"s chief legal counsel, Michael Callahan, to testify.
"Our committee has established that Yahoo provided false information to Congress in early 2006," Lantos said in a statement. "We want to clarify how that happened, and to hold the company to account for its actions both before and after its testimony proved untrue." Lantos added, "And we want to examine what steps the company has taken since then to protect the privacy rights of its users in China."