Cisco, China, and the Reality in a Flat World

Senators can be such pompous grandstanders. Oh, but that's not news. And neither is the fact that Cisco and other U.S. companies make products that other governments use to censor the Internet.

Cisco got hounded by a Senate Subcommittee -- particularly Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) -- for selling products to China which the Chinese government uses as part of its effort to block Chinese citizens from getting to certain sites or content on the Web. This was made worse for Cisco by an unfortunate PowerPoint slide that some employee -- probably 123 levels down from CEO John Chambers -- used in a pitch that implied that Cisco is cheering for Chinese censorship. Such is the danger of technology that anyone can use. (For more about the PPT presentation, go here.)

The truth is, Cisco sells networking equipment to China -- the same stuff it sells all over the world. The equipment can help filter the Web. Some corporations use it to keep employees off YouPorn while in the office. China happens to use it to block information about the Tiannenmen Square massacre. Cisco has nothing to do with either policy. Going after Cisco is like going after Exxon for selling gasoline to China because the government puts some of it in army trucks. Maybe it's a valid point that neither Cisco nor Exxon should sell anything to China that can be used against its people. But that's a different, broader point about global free trade.

The Senate is uncovering nothing new here. A 2005 report from Open Net Initiative laid out the role of U.S. companies in China's censorship. As the report said of Cisco:

The technologies that Cisco sold to China for backbone routing purposes -- Cisco 12000 series routers -- have packet filtering capability, allowing the routers to filter bi-directionally at the packet level and to implement up to 750,000 different filtering rules.36 These systems are designed to combat various Internet attacks, including Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and the spread of worms and viruses. For example, to combat the Code Red worm, Cisco released instructions on how to configure their routers' Access Control Lists to block the spread of the worm.37 These same techniques can be applied to block political content.  

But Cisco isn't even the "worst" offender, if you want to use that label. ONI has named a number of U.S.-based Web filtering companies that have helped governments from China to Saudi Arabia to Yemen block certain sites. I wrote this in 2006 in USA Today:

Internet users in Yemen can't get to beer.com because of technology from a couple of U.S. companies.

Surely this is a human rights violation, keeping innocent civilians from a website devoted to beer and women. Why, the Yemeni Netizens -- all 150,000 of them -- are also blocked from getting to gayegypt.com. They're denied spikybras.com! Which, by the way, ya gotta check out -- it's hilarious, and no more racy than an I Dream of Jeannie episode.

Anyway, all of those websites are on Yemen's blocked list, according to a study to be released Tuesday by OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a research organization formed by Harvard, the U.K.'s Cambridge and the University of Toronto. The report will say that Yemen filters its Internet by using technology from Websense, based in San Diego, and Blue Coat Systems, based in Sunnyvale, Calif.

The political grandstanding and berating executives helps nothing. If U.S. tech companies are going to sell their goods around the world, some of it is going to be used in ways many Americans don't like. So do we want the business -- and the jobs and income? Or do we want to make a point? Let's decide.