Cisco Must Be Held Accountable for Aiding China’s Human Rights Abuses
eff.org
eff.org
"Cisco Confidential 57 © 2002, Cisco Systems
The Golden Shield Project:
Public Network Information Security Monitor System
• Stop the network-related crimes
• Guarantee the security and services of public network
• Combat “Falun Gong” evil religion and other hostiles
[Note: Statement of Government goals from speech government offical Li Runsen]"
Then again it's going to be hard to show legally they were doing much more than helping China enforce it's laws. Still at least the embarrassment factor may put companies off from getting involved in this stuff.
I hope the EFF case makes them release documents related to it.
IBM's existant history didn't put Cisco off of doing business with China.
(too late to edit original comment, just realized I missed the link)
"Evil religion", wow. I wouldn't have thought a disbelief in moral relativism could make a government official sound so much like a third grader. I feel sorry for the millions of civilians whose lives are negatively affected by this Li buffoon.
My wild guess is that the original was something along the lines of disorder/troublemakers and got lost in translation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...
The fact that there is even a Wikipedia article with this title is horrifying.
>Falun Gong practitioners in Changchun intercepted eight cable television networks in Jilin Province, and for nearly an hour, televised a program titled "Self-Immolation or a Staged Act?". All six of the Falun Gong practitioners involved were captured over the next few months. Two were killed immediately, while the other four were all dead by 2010 as a result of injuries sustained while imprisoned.
Falun Gong is a peaceful semi-religion. They've never committed violent acts (as far as I can tell), nor have they even tried to subvert China's government. Why in the world is China torturing and killing them? It seems like they're doing it merely out of fear they could maybe one day become a force that would stand against the government. This is very Stalin-esque persecution and paranoia.
Falun Gong exercises (Tai-Chi like) improved the health of their practicioners. The communist party supported Falun Gong practice because it lowered their healthcare costs.
Until there were more members of Falun Gong than Communist party officials. So the latter began hunting the former.
Some Chinese fled China, and that's how the West know about Falun Gong.
Very sad state of affairs.
At least they had learned something from the bloody Tienanmen massacre, and this time instead sending military to murder piles of unarmed civilians carried out the murders a bit more covertly.
The estimates for the civilians killed in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 range from hundreds to thousands - no exact count is available.
In terms of "which side drew first blood", you could say the "side" of the student protesters, though there's no evidence of "blood" in their actions (as they had no weapons).
The morning of June 3, protesters clashed with unarmed soldiers trying to force them out of the square, momentarily forcing the army to retreat. By 10pm that night, the army began firing live ammunition at the protesters and the fatalities commenced.
(Other sources say that there were indeed deaths on the square, but less than five or so, not the main massacre)
But it doesn't really matter where exactly the deaths happened.
Only insofar as it reminds us of the fallibility of the human mind (cf. witnesses in court): many people actually believe they have seen in TV how people were slaughtered on the square, which is demonstrably incorrect.
Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=tiananmen+square&safe=off&cl...
Baidu: http://image.baidu.com/search/index?tn=baiduimage&ps=1&ct=20...
Most estimates I see put the number of casualties in the 1000's, caused by the side that happened to have, y'know, tanks.
Even some famed academy of science fellow believed in "special human body functions". 90s was just a really weird time in China. Chinese government is far from perfect, but I honestly don't know anyone from China who doesn't support the banning of FLG.
Order 66 is Hitler shutting down the SA for the SS.
I just had to "correct" you. Also I do enjoy finding similarities with the empire and Jedis.
They're unscrupulous, including promising terminally ill cancer patients the possibility of healing if they just redirect their remaining wealth toward the cult.
They're the Chinese equivalent to Scientology, but even worse. Their teachings are racing, homophobic, sexist and misogynistic. They preached that UFOs had arrived on earth; aliens had taken over human bodies, and were trying to annihilate humanity through the control of TV and radio.
The troubles seem to stem from "April 1999, when over 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners gathered peacefully near the central government compound in Beijing to request legal recognition and freedom from state interference."
I guess peaceful demonstrations against the state are going to get you tiananmen squared over there.
I could think of several large sects of the big three montothiestic religions that preach most of the above. Apart from racing. Racism perhaps, but not racing.
I'm willing to accept that the claims of them suing various people. But I wouldn't call these cases frivolous per se: They could very well believe that they were denied participation in a parade on a discriminatory basis. I wouldn't necessarily say I think it is the right approach to take but the examples they give are not that absurd in today's world. (And could also be the work of but a small subsection of the group).
They may not be the paragons of virtue they claim to be, but they definitely have done nothing to deserve mass torture and murder. Real cults like Scientology and Aum Shinrikyo have killed their own members, and non-members. Falun Gong hasn't.
The US government (hopefully after it elects a saner president) and other supposedly democratic countries as well, need to come together and 1) make it clear that you can't sell tools which you know are being used for mass censorship and mass surveillance that then leads to torture or assassinations and whatnot (I know, this definition will need to be cleaned up a bit), and 2) punish the companies that still disobey those rules severely. It's time for the democratic countries to act the way they say they are.
Lawful intercept is a specific method of viewing traffic passing through a network device.
It would be straightforward to build something, without it being a standard feature of vendor network devices, using a different standard feature of literally any enterprise level network device: port mirroring. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_mirroring
Port mirroring exists for many reasons and is widely available on switches for things like IDS, troubleshooting, and performance monitoring (e.g. generating netflow on an different device than the switch).
To use Cisco lawful intercept, you must already hold the highest admin privileges on the device.
Cisco almost certainly built this feature for the US agencies. The ones it has been supplying internet routers to since the commercialisation of routers, a short time after the creation of the internet by... US agencies.
I don't know whether to cheer for things like this, though I do support works for improving human rights. For the most part they seem to be drops in the ocean of human rights abuse. And I don't know if it's doing anything to stop those abuses or just a control mechanism to make us feel like we are accomplishing something... while the biggest abusers and their supporters continue scot-free.
In particular the Helsinki Accords, which seemed empty when signed, seemed to wind up being influential a decade or so later. I've been sympathetic to human rights theater ever since.
So when we say companies should refuse to serve customers on moral grounds, we have to be sure just which morals we're talking about.
As it is, countries with weapons manufacturers allow their firms to engage in sales to lots of regimes who ate known to engage in all sorts of rights violations. Only occasionally are embargoes or sanctions imposed. I dont see where Cisco violated any international embargo.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility
Another way evil happens, even more prevalent today, is meddling and invasion on sovereign countries.
The good ole "democracy bringing" routine...
....but if we do that, where will we get routers with backdoors for us.gov from?
Even if Cisco walked away from such deals, there would Chinese companies willing to fill their place. The Party developed hydrogen bombs and spaceships to stay in power. There seems to be little reason why they wouldn't do this themselves, if Cisco didn't play along.
Actually, I would rather a company like Cisco that's partially under US jurisdiction and media scrutiny to do all the nasty work for the Party than an anonymous Chinese company doing the same thing.
Cartoon about our patriotic biases: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/03/glorious-leader-wicke...
That said, it doesn't stop human rights abuses being wrong too.
That's a very bizarre statement, but very telling of why you would defend authoritarian regimes.
We have droned our own citizens.
Scale.
Perhaps people should follow the law of the country they're in to avoid persecution. Don't publish state secrets in the US, don't have sex with other men in Saudi Arabia and don't broadcast anti-state messages in China.