Science & Tech Quote by Tom Lantos

Lantos opens with a prosecutor’s efficiency: “Let me start with Yahoo.” It’s a sentence that drags a Silicon Valley brand out of the safe realm of innovation-speak and into the dock. The rhetorical move is deliberate. By naming the company first, he refuses the comforting abstraction of “complex geopolitical realities” and pins responsibility to a corporate actor that Americans recognize, use, and implicitly trust.

The line hinges on a moral inversion. The “Chinese citizen” has “the courage to speak his mind,” a phrase calibrated to echo Western civic ideals of free expression, while Yahoo “chose to share his name and address,” the banal administrative details that become lethal under an authoritarian state. Lantos doesn’t need to describe torture or a show trial; the quiet specificity of “name and address” is chilling precisely because it’s ordinary. It implies that repression isn’t only executed by governments in dark rooms, but enabled by mundane compliance in bright corporate offices.

Context matters here: early-2000s optimism about the Internet as a democratizing force was colliding with the reality that platforms could be conscripted into surveillance infrastructures. Lantos, a human rights-focused congressman and Holocaust survivor, is also signaling something sharper than outrage: a warning about complicity. “Chose” is doing heavy work. It strips away the alibi of inevitability and frames the handoff as an elective act, a business decision with a human cost.

The subtext: if American companies want global markets, they inherit global moral liability. The Internet doesn’t automatically liberate; it can just as efficiently deliver dissidents to jail when profit outruns principle.