Cisco Memo: China Censorship = More Sales

An internal Cisco document (.pdf) leaked to reporters on the eve of a Senate human rights hearing reveals that Cisco engineers regarded the Chinese government's rigid internet censorship program as an opportunity to do more business with the repressive regime.

The 90-page document is an internal presentation that Cisco engineers and staffers in China mulled over in 2002 as the central government was upgrading its local, state and provincial public safety and security network infrastructure. Under the category "Cisco Opportunities," the document provides bullet point suggestions for how it might service China's censorship system called the "Golden Shield", and better known in the West as the Great Firewall of China.

The document is the first evidence that the networking giant has marketed its routers to China specifically as a tool of repression. It reinforces the  double-edged role that Americans' technological ingenuity plays in the rest of the world. Companies including Cisco, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google have faced criticism for cooperating to various degrees with the repressive Chinese regime, and the document leak on Monday came one day before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing into U.S. technology companies' participation in foreign government censorship programs.

"If you know ahead of time that a sale could lead to human rights violations, and there's no way of mitigating that, maybe you shouldn't offer it to that entity," says Arvind Ganesan, a director at the nonprofit Human Rights Watch, who called on Cisco to conduct a global audit for similar marketing behavior.

One of Golden Shield's stated goals in the Cisco presentation was to "combat 'Falun Gong' evil religion and other hostiles," -- a statement that was attributed to Runsen Li, the Chinese government information technology chief in charge of developing the project.

Mark Chandler, Cisco's senior vice president of legal services, said during the Tuesday Senate hearing that he was "appalled" and "disappointed" when he saw that quote in the presentation.

"It is very regrettable that one of our engineers quoted directly from Mr. Runsen Li, the Chinese government's head of IT for the Golden Shield project in this internal presentation," said Terry Alberstein, a senior director of corporate communications at Cisco. "They do not represent Cisco's views, principles or its sales and marketing strategy
or approach. They were merely inserted in that presentation to capture the goals of the Chinese government in that specific project, which was one of many discussed in that 2002 presentation."

Cisco went on to sell about $100,000 worth of routers and switches that became part of the Golden Shield
project, Alberstein said. But he insisted the company did not customize them for China's censorship needs.

The Tuesday hearing was chaired by Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, who said during his opening statement that U.S. companies have a "moral obligation to protect freedom of expression."

The senator's staff is exploring the possibility of introducing legislation that would attempt to tackle the issue, said Max Gleischman, Durbin's press secretary.

In December, the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved HR 275, a related bill. Its sponsor, Republican congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey, wants the House to pass the legislation before the Olympics commence this August in Beijing.

Among other things, the proposed law would make it a crime for U.S. companies to turn over their customers' personal information to repressive governments.

by Sarah Lai Stirland for Wired.com

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