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Amnesty Calls Shenannigans on MS, Sun, Cisco
ZurichPrague writes "Amnesty International is claiming Microsoft, Sun, Nortel and Cisco, among others, have broken the law by selling filtering technology to China, helping that country implement its censorship. Is Amnesty right? Making the technology is fine, but if we know that it could be used for ill, aren't we bound to not sell to some countries and companies? C/Net has the story here."
Internet censorship is no better than a Nazi bookburning. Doesn't make a difference if they're blocking printed text or unicode.
There is definitely a moral issue here - should companies help suppress freedom in other countries?
But is there really a legal issue here? I'm not so sure.
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
So, except for MS, Sun, etc. are the search engines also breaking the law?
Well, seeing as how the US courts have given corporations the same status as human beings, the morality question is a bit more clouded. Would we prosecute an individual who created and sold a product used to suppress the same principles held dear by his home country? Of course we would; we'd nail that seditious, un-patriotic bastard to a wall. But if you're Cisco, and you willingly (with your technology *and* consultants) erect the "Great Firewall of China", your stock goes up and you are hailed as a bastion of capitalism. Let's call a spade a spade.
Maybe / maybe not but consider this
Industrial Leaders
It is easy to forget about prominant business men when focusing on figures like Eichmann or Hoss, but the industrialists who were eager to create factories at Auschwitz were perpetrators of the horror too.
Many prominent German corporations, among them Krupp, Siemens and Bayer, were interested in what might be negotiated. Auschwitz began developing a network of outlying subcamps, thirty-four in all. Soon, the prisoners worked at a cement plant, a coal-mine, a steel factory and a shoe factory.
The biggest of these Auschwitz subcamps was the I.G. Farben plant. The plant was known as Buna because its principal purpose was to produce synthetic rubber; its other main installation was a hydrogenation plant designed to convert coal into oil. The Auschwitz factories were the largest in the Farben empire. Conditions at Buna were much like those at Auschwitz. The dawn roll calls, the starvation rations, the labor gangs sent out for twelve hours at a time, forced to work at the gas chambers and furnaces, beaten by guards, harried by giant dogs. The prisoners who died of overwork (dozens of them every day) had to be hauled back to camp at nightfall so that they could be propped up and counted at the next morning's roll call.
Ultimately, around 25,000 people were killed during the construction of the I.G. Farben plant.
Help fight continental drift.
The technology is neither a state secret nor a type of munitions. No law was broken. What is a problem is that the technology was allegedly used to violate human rights. Whether this is right or wrong depends on your fundamental belief of what a corporation's primary goal is: maximizing profits, or benefitting the world.
The other angle is that the technology has legitimate uses (for example, in a corporate setting). If the technology is used for bad purposes, are the creators liable for it? Place the blame where it belongs, squarely on the shoulders of China.
Since I heard about China buying censoring technology from the US, it has bothered me that companies' ethics aren't better. IMO it's a major source of social decay in any country when companies are allowed to do whatever they want. What kind of example are they setting as corporate citizens of the community?
What if I wanted to write software for the mafia? I could just pretend the software wouldn't be used for illegal purposes. Would that be ethical of me? Could I be aiding and abetting (to assist or support in the achievement of a purpose) known criminals? Of course. How is this different than aiding known human rights violators?
Nowhere in that C/Net story does anyone accuse those companies of breaking a law. And what law would they be breaking?
Would AI get bent out of shape if China started using Free/Open Source software extensively in its filtering and blocking efforts? If so, why? By its nature free software is free for anyone to use, even totalitarian regimes who want to use the software to limit the freedom of those they rule.
This whole thing sounds a lot like the old "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument.
Someone you trust is one of us.
You've just stated there is no legal obligation. Probably true. Amnesty's modus operandi is basically to ask governments and corporations to consider the morality of what they do. Further, it can make it a business issue for the company if it doesn't care by making it lose sales elsewhere. Companies, like Apple, were pressured by boycotts to stop selling services to the murderous Burmese junta by that means.
Isn't Yahoo REQUIRED to filter out pro Nazi content on their German site?
Isn't e-bay REQUIRED to prevent selling Nazi artifacts to visitors from Germany?
So limiting peoples freedoms in Germany is OK, but its taboo in China?
- Remember kids, dressing up like Hitler in school is not cool.
corporations exist for one reason: to make money. For good or for ill, there are no moral obligations placed on them.
I must agree. A business's only motivation is, and should be, to make a profit. If people wish to impose morality on a business, it should be done the same way, through profit. Simple answer: If a business is engaging in behaviour that people disagree with, boycott them. If the business loses more money through boycott than it makes from the offending behaviour, then it will stop engaging in the behaviour.Unfortunately, this is probably another issue where people would rather bitch than take action.
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
Anthropomorphizing a group of people. Hmm. Yeh, that is pretty dumb.
[END SARCASM MODE]
I seriously do not think that obtaining the technology is a limiting factor in here. Even though, I have been an amnesty member for some years, I believe this shot goes to wrong direction. Maybe they could have pointed at only the Websense company, whose main purpose is producing filtering technology. Maybe they should not have pointed at any of those companies. When you know that currently you can get killed and tortured for using internet in china I think there is some more concrete issues to concentrate on. Like concentrating all power into freeing those (I heard there were tens of) people) who are in prison because they "used the internet" right now - maybe amnesty could instead make these companies look like saints and request help in this task for them.
I'm not sure if I'm missing something, or C|Net and I read different reports, but the Amnesty International press release is considerably grimmer than what C|Net selectively relates.
To give you a hint, the document is entitled "China: Internet users at risk of arbitrary detention, torture and even execution."
This is censorship with a big rock, not benign filtering, the occasional arrest and whoops a death or two in custody. "Benign" filtering software would probably be useful to track down suspects, a sinister dimension. Change anyone's minds?
This does remind me of the risk of trusting the press; even if the Amnesty report proves to be baloney, C|Net did not accurately describe it, or provide a link to it.
This has nothing to do with being in the US or not since the companies are not directly involved in the violations.
For example, the US constitution guarantees the right to life. However, that does not mean it is wrong or illegal to sell guns just because someone might use those to deprive someone of their right to live.
Technology is a tool. Technology is not evil in itself.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Procmail developers were sued by Amnesty, because they helped in censorship and filtering.
Call me crazy, but Corporations are permitted much of the same legal protections as individuals (IIRC, at least in the US, YMMV). Shouldn't they be expected to behave with some sense of responsibility for their actions?
Yes, I know about "responsibility to shareholders" and all of that mess. Mod me down for naivete, I deserve it for the above statement. What I should have said was "Corporations are given MORE legal protections than individuals..."
So what? You've missed the point entirely. Corporations can't accomplish anything on their own - that's why people work for them. You're right in that a corporation (which is just an abstract legal construct) doesn't have moral obligations, but the people who make the decisions for it sure as hell do.
An executive at Sun, or Microsoft, or whoever else, can't just sit there and say "there was money to be made, who am I to judge?" They had the opportunity to do the right thing, and say no.
Shrugging your shoulders and saying "that's what corporations do" is incredibly callous. The Chinese government is not playing around: people who get busted by these filters aren't getting a warning, or a fine - they're going to jail. Read some of the articles on the issue, like this one. People are being thrown in jail for simply speaking their mind using the net, and some of them have already died in custody.
I don't think Amnesty is attempting a legal argument. I also doubt there is a law on point, though one could be written. The only significant effort to restrict exports that I can think of was the gov't's efforts to contain cryptography. Also, export of many goods to certain restricted countries ("axis of evil") is very tightly regulated. China's not on that list.
As I point out in another post below, the Amnesty allegations go well beyond suppressing freedom of speech, to torture and execution.
Should it be a legal issue? (he asks rhetorically)
Internet censorship is no better than a Nazi bookburning. Doesn't make a difference if they're blocking printed text or unicode.
/. have been so eager to criticize?
These companies might be selling technology that could be repurposed to suppress freedom to an oppressive regime, but the Open Source community is willing to give it to them for free.
If Amnesty had published an article on the Chinese government using ipchains or squid in the Great Firewall, or using Perl to search proxy logs for who was looking at unapproved sites, would
To be technical, true morality is not "placed" on anyone, it is adopted and internalized.
Regardless, you're right that a corporation is an artificial person like Data -- the law does anthropomorphize them for many purposes, for example a corporation may sue or be sued, is taxed as an entity, and can be found guilty of a crime (if not jailed). It enjoys privileges and assume burdens, but is fundamentally amoral. But that doesn't mean that it can't choose to concern itself with corporate responsibility; nor that we can't lobby it to do so; nor that as a bare minimum of good business sense most public companies will at least attempt to comport their activities with public opinion, for fear of damaging share price or customer good will.
So we do place moral obligations on them. They don't have to worry about whether they're going to heaven or hell, but they do need to respond to the world around them, if for no other reason than good business. They don't live in a business school beaker.
The level of responsiveness varies widely. The pressure on companies not to do business in apartheid South Africa, and on univerities and trusts to divest themselves of stock in these companies, was particularly bitter.
"The First Amendment only applies to America."
I'm sorry, but this is a moral relativistic cop out. Free speech is a fundamental human right. End of story. If I were a stock holder in the above companies, I would sell that stock as soon as trading re-opened. It is fundamentally morally backwards to support in anyway the blocking of speech or access to other peoples speech.
If it is not illegal for US companies to help other countries to do things that violate the fundamental human rights of it's citizens, then it SHOULD BE. We shouldn't pass the buck on this stuff, it's how the US gets such a bad reputation.
Burn Hollywood Burn
I saw an interview with the author of this book called IBM and the Holocaust. It strongly ties the capability of systematically killing the Jews to the abilities of the Hollerith machine (run on punch cards) which IBM specifically customized for the purpose of organizing and sorting people.
WWII, I feel, had a lot to do with the very fast development of production, and technology in general at the time. The author, Edwin Black, says the scale at which the holocaust took place would not have been possible without the help of IBM's machines, and their engineers.
This is really not much different, in my opinion. Cisco is a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ, which is a US based stock market. The shareholders (mostly US citizens) should be ultimately responsible, not only for ensuring profits, but also be held responsible for any misdeeds the company commits...
As another poster puts it; its one thing if they are buying the equipment off the shelf and using it for censorship. It is quite another if the companies are tailoring their products to these requirements in anticipation or in response to demand...
corporations exist for one reason: to make money. For good or for ill, there are no moral obligations placed on them.
But companies are made up of humans. So if some people form a company they no longer have to follow any moral code? What kind of reasoning is that?
So companies that did business with the Nazis were ok because they weren't breaking the law?
So... if I start a company, and my company sells nukes to terrorists, there's nothing morally wrong with that, as long as we turn a profit?
You must be American.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
A business's only motivation is, and should be, to make a profit. [emphasis added]
This is utter bullshit.
The only reason we allow businesses and corporations to run is to better society as a whole. Even the Founders had some grave doubts about corporations, but they were seen as a neccessary evil in order to encourage a good economy and a better standard of living for all.
The key words there are "for all", not for the shareholders, not for the employees, not even for the customers, but for everybody.
When a corporation starts going against that, when it actually starts doing harm to some people, that corporation is not fulfilling the reasons it is allowed to exist for.
What is a shame is how few people remember this.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
You must be American.
I think you have hit on the crux of the matter. You only really hear these type of arguments ("profit is all that matters for corporations") from Americans. In the rest of the world, they sound frankly screwed up. But of course since most Americans haven't really experienced countries other than their own, they assume that these sad ideas are normal.
Bye bye Karma.
(Score -1, Unamerican.)
Not quite true.
Leaving aside a discussion as to the definition of evil, the broad lines of the "final solution" were well known from around 1941...
It was well known from before 1933 that anti-semitic groups were active in Germany, and were on the way to taking political control.
Read Address Unknown, first published in 1938, set in 1932 - 1934.
Perhaps many people did not grasp just how enormous the "implementation of the solution" was... Industrial-scale extermination of an entire ethnic group!
Getting back to the topic, why do you think governments legislate to limit which countries can buy certain technologies?
I think you have hit on the crux of the matter. You only really hear these type of arguments ("profit is all that matters for corporations") from Americans. In the rest of the world, they sound frankly screwed up.
WTF? So coporations in other countries are beacons of moral purity and selfless sacrifice? Not hardly. French corporations are implicated in political bribes. South African De Beers does all sorts of evil stuff to maintain their lucrative position. Those are just a couple examples off the top of my head.
There are probably a million similar "scandals" around the world every day, but because they involve less prominent countries or happen in places where corruption is a way of life no one considers them dramatic enough to report. Trying to brush off greed as a purely American failing may make you feel better, but it's just ridiculous.