Sunday, July 03, 2005

Cisco: abetting evil

Cisco Systems is one of the most active American companies in helping China obtain new technology AND is helping the Chinese government prevent that new technology from opening the marketplace of ideas. To wit: Cisco actively supplies the Chinese government with Internet surveillance and censorship technology thereby both preventing Chinese citizens from obtaining exposure to democratic ideas on the Web AND allowing Chinese police to spy on the more technologically adept citizens.

Rebecca MacKinnon has the details, including Cisco's response denying everything that appeared in Ethan Gutmann's book Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire and Betrayal and Guttman's proof of Cisco's compliance with Chinese censorship and repression.

This is reprehensible and is corporate greed at its worst. Let the amoral French and German companies supply their censorship products to the Chinese. American companies should sell their superior products to India and only sell general, not surveillance, censorship, spyware products for the Chinese market. Some things need to be more important than market share.

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