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Microsoft Violates Human Rights in China
gexen writes "According to this article in The Guardian, 'Amnesty believes Microsoft is in violation of a new United Nations Human Rights code for multinationals which says businesses should 'seek to ensure that the goods and services they provide will not be used to abuse human rights'. The article basically states that 'Gate's firm supplied technology used to trap Chinese dissidents'."
Of course, the article doesn't really pin down what control M$ is offering China that they didn't already have. No specifics to tell us where M$ stopped developing regular software and started aiding in HR violations.
Standing on the shoulders of giants.
Yes companies have to abide by international law too, but no laws were broken here. Amnesty International is just doing this as a publicity stunt.
I mean, did the conversation go like this or something?
China: Hello? We need OS package for five hundred government computer!
Microsoft: Alright, would you like Windows 2000 or Windows XP Professional?
China: Whichever one better for trapping dissidents!
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
was shpping mainframes to Germany to track Jews during WWII, and Ford was a raving anti-semite.
Neither seems to have had any impression on the company over the long haul, unforutnately.
...And in fact, it could be worse in terms of tracking Internet usage!
Does anyone here know about Red Flag Linux and the locally-developed Dragon RISC CPU? Given that both are sanctioned by the Chinese government, you have to really openly wonder does the Chinese government have access to back doors via software and/or hardware that will allow them to quickly track Internet usage with Red Flag Linux and the Dragon CPU-based hardware.
Note that CALEA is about making the technology capable of snooping rather than authorizing that snooping to be done. In the US, it takes further bad legislation like the Patriot act to authorize the snooping. CALEA just makes it (too) easy.
I do think that companies should be held accountable to who the sell to, particularly if they know what it will be used for.
Granted, the company doesn't always know how the user will use it, and can't control that, but if they know what will happen then the ethical thing would be to refuse services. It is really too bad that companies are more worried about the next quarter than how their actions will go into history books.
Would any software or network company think that history would treat them well if they sold software and equipment that was used to round up and massacre dissidents? Heck, many US companies dealt with Germany and in my opinion, openly abetted in human rights abuses, although I will grant, none of those companies caught sufficient hell for what they did, but now is a time to start.
Why would it be so wrong to scale that down to lesser crimes against humanity?
"International Law" is a fiction.
Laws get passed by legislatures & monarchs. We don't have an international legislature or an international monarch, now do we? So, we can't really have international laws.
Maybe someday we'll have a world government but not now.
What we have in the real world are Treaties. A treaty is an agreement between two or more countries. In reality the treaties are almost NEVER symmetrical. As an example, the US/UK pass a tax treaty. Well at the negotiating table, the treaty said W, X & Y. Put when parliament passed it they didn't like W. So, the UK law passed by parliament says V, X & Y. Same type of silliness in the US Congress. They don't like what the negotiators did and pass the US law with W, X, & Z. So, now we have "treaty" but they don't match.
The most important thing to notice here, is that no international law was passed, only 2 national laws. One for the UK. One for the US. I can't go into a US court and sue over the fact that the UK law lets me have rights to V, X & Y, because this is the US and our law says you have rights to W, X, & Z. Vice versa for the UK. I can't go into NZ and sue on either the treaty, the US law, or the UK law. Why? Because the treaty was never a law, it was merely and agreement "in principle" made by bureaucrats. The US law is a US law and therefore unenforceable in NZ. Same with the UK law.
So, you see, the "international law" really isn't very international at all. It is merely a group of inconsistent laws cobbled together from a bunch of countries.
It gets worse, since this "international law" is merely a group of national laws that have no effect outside the jurisdictions of those nation states, any country that doesn't pass a similar law isn't bound by that "international law." And nothing stops a nation from changing its laws. So, if the UK doesn't find the tax treaty to its advantage, it can easily pass a new law revoking the old V, X & Y law. Laws based on treaties aren't any more important than laws NOT based on treaties. If the US doesn't like that the UK revoked the law it really only has two options: change the US law, or suck eggs.
There is no International body that forces a nation to have a particular law. We have a few administrative courts that can "suggest" the types on retaliatory laws passed by the offended country, but no real involuntary enforcement mechanism on an international scale. This is really why armed conflict (one nation imposing its will on another) is still a part of international relations.
So, if the US (or any other country) is "violating an international law," the quickest and LEGAL solution to the "problem" is to just repeal the US law enacting the treaty.
"International Law" is a nice short hand phrase, but so is "treaty." And treaty is closer to what actually happens in the real world. At least a document called a "treaty" was put tighter at some point. No one with any power ever actually wrote something entitled "international law." When someone talks to me of "international laws," I know they either (a) don't know what they are talking about, or (b) have an agenda and are selecting the phrase as part of a rhetorical device and not based on facts.