The snitch on the net.

Jiang Lijun and Li Zhi have been serving four-year and eight-year sentences (respectively) for "inciting subversion" against the Chinese communist state since 2003. That's not news. Nor is Shi Tao's 10-year sentence last year on charges of leaking "state secrets." What is news, however, is the revelation by the organization Reporters Without Borders of evidence indicating that all three were convicted with confidential Internet information provided to Chinese authorities by the U.S.-based Internet search engine Yahoo.

And the phony hand-wringing has begun. "It's terrible to feel that ... we were involved with a reason that person went to jail," Yahoo CEO Terry Semel told a U.S.-China business organization called the Committee of 100 in April. Not that he feels terrible enough to put a stop to Yahoo's snitching. A Yahoo press release defended the company's actions a month earlier, concluding: "In this specific case the Chinese government ordered Yahoo China to provide user information and Yahoo China complied with local laws." And the snitching continues.

In essence, Yahoo has become a willing tool of the Chinese totalitarian state. It's not unlike Cisco Systems, whose routers and switches helped to create the world's largest Internet censorship sys tern, the so-called "Great Firewall of China." Yahoo's statement of privacy for the United States is not really much different than it is for China: "We respond to subpoenas, court orders, or legal process, or to establish or exercise our legal rights or defend against legal claims; we believe it is necessary to share information in order to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities."

Google has an almost identical policy that has led the company to appease the Chinese government by censoring the search results obtainable from Google's China-based search site. "We must comply with the local law, indeed we have all made a commitment to the government that we will absolutely follow the Chinese law," Google CEO Eric Schmidt told news services in defense of the company's policies. At the same time, Google lauds the Chinese government, with Schmidt stating: "We look at the rise of China, and we are in awe of what has occurred there ... and we salute the government."

Some argue that Google and Yahoo are still providing a ser vice to the Chinese people by offering them a window of sorts on the rest of the world. This is pure hooey. How is it a service to the Chinese people to offer only government-approved windows, or to give the Chinese Internet police information on who tried to open a forbidden window?

Despite any momentary benefit an individual Chinese Internet user may experience from Yahoo's and Google's limited services, in the end it is the Chinese government which has been aided. The message to the Chinese people is clear: if the Chinese totalitarian state can reach over to America and make "free market" corporations cower before it, then what do you suppose would happen to Chinese citizens close to home who get out of line?

While some Americans will undoubtedly take undue comfort in the fact that we don't have such a malicious government in place in the United States, the Yahoo and Google cases demonstrate how quickly and seamlessly the corporate world can be "flipped" to supporting a totalitarian state. When all that matters is profit and corporate positioning in the "global market," then freedom--and patriotism--become irrelevant to multinational corporations.

Private enterprise is pervasive in free societies; but it by no means guarantees freedom as some libertarians pretend. Free enterprise is always more efficient than the state, but it can be put to use to make totalitarianism more efficient as easily as it can bring higher quality products at lower prices to consumers.

In the United States, the Bush administration has commenced surveillance in much the same way as the Chinese regime. The National Security Agency not only taps telephone calls, but also scans millions of e-mail messages every year without the probable cause and court warrant demanded by our Constitution. Like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google in China, many U.S. Internet corporations (except Google, which, to its credit, is waging a court battle against warrantless surveillance in the United States) have acceded to the U.S. government's unconstitutional and warrantless surveillance demands.

With all of the totalitarian architecture put in place in China, the Yahoo and Google examples prove that not much more is needed to bring totalitarianism to the United States than for a despot to take the helm and flip the corporations. Many have already flipped, in the name of the phony "war on terrorism." They are committed to following "the law," even if that law puts innocent people in concentration camps.

Just because it hasn't yet happened here, doesn't mean it can't happen here. In fact, it eventually will happen here if citizens don't demand that their government officials adhere to the limits of the U.S. Constitution.