p2pnet - rss feed: Cisco refutes China censorship charge
p2pnet news | Freedom:- Who, us?
Cisco has joined Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, et al, in denying it’s involved in censorship in China.
Company senior vice president Mark Chandler (right) yesterday, “found himself dodging some tough questions before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law,” says the Wall Street Journal, going on:
“Chandler denied accusations by human rights groups that Cisco had given Chinese authorities technical help in their efforts to censor the Internet.
“But he could only apologize for, not deny, some controversial language that turned up in a 2002 internal presentation by a Cisco engineer in China.”
Bottom line, Chandler claims Cisco isn’t responsible for what buyers to do with their products.
“Cisco, the world’s largest maker of networking equipment, sells the same products worldwide and doesn’t customize them to help foreign governments censor the Internet, General Counsel Mark Chandler said today at a Senate hearing,” according to Bloomberg News.
Cisco is the world’s largest maker of networking equipment and its routers and switches include basic security features to protect networks from viruses and service interruptions, he said.
Those same features, “without which the Internet could not function effectively,” can, “unfortunately be used by network administrators for political purposes,” he said. “Cisco is not a service or content provider, nor are we a network manager who can determine how those features are used.”
But the company may be offering “censorship training” to Chinese police officials, the story has Shiyu Zhou, deputy director of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, stating.
It goes on >>>
A six-year-old internal company document lists China’s ‘Golden Shield’ censorship project as one of Cisco’s ‘major target customers,’ Zhou told the Senate human-rights subcommittee.
The 90-page PowerPoint presentation cited the Chinese government’s efforts to combat political dissidents and referred to the banned Falun Gong spiritual group as an ‘evil cult,’ Zhou said.
There’s, “enormous competition among telecommunications firms to get a share of the relatively undeveloped but rapidly expanding Chinese telecommunications market – the largest market in the world,” said Greg Walton in his 2001 China’s Golden Shield: Corporations and the Development of Surveillance Technology in the People’s Republic of China.
Naturally, he went on, “the lure of potential billions has attracted every major telecommunications corporation, including US-based Lucent and Cisco, European wireless giants Nokia and Ericsson, and Canada’s Nortel Networks - not to mention countless others. From these companies, China is buying more than US$20 billion worth of telecom equipment a year.
“China is reported to account for about 25% of the world’s market for telecommunications equipment and is expanding exponentially. Much of this growth is achieved through sales by foreign telecommunications companies and by joint ventures with Chinese partners …”
He goes on to say Cisco Systems provided a, “large proportion of the routers and firewalls in China’s network,” continuing >>>
“At Security China 2000 a saleswoman for the computer-network giant Cisco Systems told the group of PSB officials that her company was the world leader in firewalls, and that “China is a large potential market for this kind of technology”.
Meanwhile, “That portion of the 2002 document was a quote from an official Chinese government statement denouncing ‘hostile elements,’ Chandler said, according to Bloomberg, which adds:
“The presentation was prepared by a Chinese engineer employed by the company. ‘We regret that the engineer included that in the presentation, even by way of explaining the Chinese government’s goals,’ he said.
” ‘We disavow the implication that this reflects in any way Cisco’s views or objectives.”
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Wall Street Journal - Rules for Cutting and Pasting, May 20, 2008
Bloomberg News - Cisco Says It Doesn’t Help Chinese Government Censor Internet, May 20, 2008
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