The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee asked two top officials of Yahoo! Inc. to come and respond to accusations regarding the company's collaboration with the Chinese government which led to a political activist being jailed for ten years. More specifically, the Committee says it has found that they lied about that collaboration in a sworn testimony last year.

"Our committee has established that Yahoo! provided false information to Congress in early 2006," Committee Chairman Tom Lantos said. "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. And we want to examine what steps the company has taken since then to protect the privacy rights of its users in China."

Yahoo! Chief Executive Officer Jerry Yang and the company’s senior vice president and general counsel, Michael Callahan, have thus been summoned before the Committee on Nov. 6.

Republican Congressman Chris Smith said that the company testified in February last year alleging it did not know why the Chinese authorities requested an IP address, log-on history and contents of e-mails for a specific Yahoo Mail account. However, as it turned out, a document from Chinese authorities shows that Yahoo was indeed given a specific reason for the information request. The Chinese police said to Yahoo they sought evidence that pro-democracy advocate Shi Tao illegally provided state secrets to foreign entities. In fact, this appears to be a standard classification of political dissidents.

Beijing police used the information to track down Shi Tao, a reporter at Contemporary Business News in China, who posted information about a government crackdown against the media on an overseas Web site, Democracy Forum, using a pseudonym. He was arrested in 2004 and received a jail sentence of ten years.

Shi has subsequently appealed the verdict to the Chinese Hunan Higher People’s court, arguing that he was unaware that the information was classified and that police used improper procedures in the investigation and arrest. Shi Tao is also seeking damages in U.S. federal court against Yahoo! and its Hong Kong-based subsidiary. At the time, Yahoo China was a Yahoo subsidiary, but it is currently owned and operated by Alibaba.com Corp., following a $1 billion investment in that company and the injection of the China unit in 2005.

"As the Committee well knows from repeated meetings and conversations, Yahoo representatives were truthful with the Committee. This issue revolves around a genuine disagreement with the Committee over the information provided," Yahoo said in a statement.