Yahoo exec says sorry to Congress

A senior executive at Yahoo Inc. has apologized for failing to give U.S. lawmakers additional information about the company’s role in the imprisonment of a Chinese dissident.

The Internet firm has been accused of helping Chinese authorities identify Shi Tao, a reporter who was sentenced last April to 10 years in prison for leaking state secrets abroad.

In February 2006, Yahoo general counsel Michael Callahan testified at a congressional hearing that Yahoo China, then a subsidiary of Yahoo, had passed information about one of its users to the Chinese government in 2004 without knowledge of why China wanted the data.

It was only in October 2006 that Callahan realized that the order from the Chinese government mentioned a probe into state secrets, Yahoo spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said.

The problem was caused by a bad translation of the 2004 order given to a company lawyer based in the region, she said. The lawyer did not get a correct translation until after the 2006 hearing.

“I neglected to directly alert the committee of this new information, and that oversight led to a misunderstanding that I deeply regret and have apologized to the committee for creating,” Callahan said.

Callahan’s statement comes before a U.S. congressional committee hearing next week to discuss Yahoo’s disclosure of information on the case.