China Bosses’ Best Pal: Cisco

It was a dis­gust­ing, when Yahoo helped China jail a dis­si­dent writer in September. But it wasn’t exactly uncom­mon. Lots of American tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies have been help­ing out the auto­crats in Beijing, Legal Affairs notes.
Take Cisco. The com­pany “earns $500 mil­lion a year in rev­enues [in China] and holds 60 per­cent of the Chinese mar­ket for routers, switches, and other sophis­ti­cated net­work­ing gear.“
That includes “the watch­dog router that pre­vents Internet users in China from gain­ing access to banned web­sites.“
And it includes Policenet,
which “con­nects offi­cials of the Public Security Bureau a national agency with local branches that han­dle secu­rity, immi­gra­tion, ‘social order,’ and law enforce­ment to each other and to elec­tronic records that store a wealth of infor­ma­tion on every cit­i­zen in China.”

Cisco mar­keted Policenet at China’s 2002 Information Infrastructure Expo (a trade show for poten­tial sup­pli­ers to the Golden Shield [uber-​​database] project) by tout­ing how the tech­nol­ogy helped police in California match the faces of crim­i­nal sus­pects with images cap­tured through sur­veil­lance cam­eras in depart­ment stores. [Here’s a brochure] It’s hard to get upset about devices that help law enforce­ment offi­cials lock up shoplifters. Yet the tech­nol­ogy itself seems to change when, rather than being oper­ated by police who are sub­ject to the con­straints of search war­rants and evi­dence rules, it is used by secu­rity forces con­cerned pri­mar­ily with sup­press­ing dis­sent. Policenet may be effec­tive against crime in California, but it also lets China’s Public Security Bureau obtain infor­ma­tion about the polit­i­cal beliefs and Internet use of inno­cent peo­ple and their fam­ily mem­bers…
Public law the crim­i­nal and civil statutes and case law that shape cor­po­rate con­duct would be clumsy and prob­a­bly inef­fec­tive in try­ing to [stop Cisco from this kind of thing]. Far more promis­ing would be… share­holder pres­sure and law­suits. Though no law required it to do so, Nike adopted a code of con­duct to improve work­ing con­di­tions at its sneaker fac­to­ries abroad. It suc­cumbed to pres­sure from labor rights groups and from law­suits that claimed the com­pany had com­mit­ted false adver­tis­ing by mis­rep­re­sent­ing work­ing con­di­tions. Boston Common Asset Management, which holds 67,000 of the bil­lions of Cisco shares out­stand­ing, filed a share­holder res­o­lu­tion with the Securities and Exchange Commission in May 2004 demand­ing that Cisco con­sider human rights issues when choos­ing whole­salers for its prod­ucts. The invest­ment firm said it wor­ried that “cor­po­ra­tions doing busi­ness with repres­sive gov­ern­ments face seri­ous risks to their rep­u­ta­tion and share value.” Cisco argued that the human rights poli­cies set forth in its code of busi­ness con­duct were enough to ensure proper behav­ior and asked the SEC to exclude the res­o­lu­tion. The SEC refused, allow­ing share­hold­ers to decide in effect whether Cisco should bal­ance indi­vid­ual free­doms with the goal of earn­ing profits. 

December 19th, 2005 | You can run... | 29825 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2005/12/19/china-bosses-best-pal-cisco/China+Bosses%27+Best+Pal%3A+Cisco2005-12-19+05%3A08%3A56jason You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.