Falun Gong Sues Cisco

schwit1 submitted a story from CNet. From the article: "Cisco Systems designed a surveillance system to help the Chinese government track and ultimately suppress members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, according to a lawsuit the group filed against the network equipment maker. The lawsuit, which was filed Thursday in Federal District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose, alleges Cisco supplied and helped maintain a surveillance system known as the 'Golden Shield' that allowed the Chinese government to track and censor the group's Internet activities. As a result of Cisco's technology, Falun Gong members suffered false imprisonment, torture, and wrongful death, according the lawsuit, which was filed on behalf of the religious group by the Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Law Foundation."

Comments

Religions

[mms3k]

It's once again religions that is causing problems. Not only this, but since religions were invented. Religion was basically a way to control people without valid reasoning. It sounds a lot better to go to war "for the god" than if the king admitted he just wants more power, gold and lands. When Falun Gong started mass gathering on the streets of China, of course the Chinese government saw a problem with that. It's an absolutely HUGE nation with more than 1,3 billion people and huge land area. Combined with poverty a religious movement taking a stand will cause huge problems. Most of the Chinese also understand this.

What I do, however, see interesting that Falun Gong takes aspects of Buddhism. As I see it Buddhism is the one religion that makes most sense and is actually good for people in general. It doesn't tell people that they should spread Buddhism via forced violence like Christianity and Islam does. It tries to tell people to accept people the way they are. This is extremely visible in South East Asian countries where it's not uncommon to see men who have always felt like they should be women actually be so. Buddhism accepts that instead of just man and a woman there is four genders - man, woman, ladyboy and hermafrodites. Transsexuals are still far from accepted in western countries where the religion has generally been Christianity. Christianity as a religion is really closed minded and promotes forcing people to think the same way you do. Buddhism on the other hand is based on the belief that you should be kind to others and let them be the way they are if it doesn't hurt other people. By being like this you get karma and in future you might be in better position.

Re:Religions

[Anonymous Coward]

s/religion/sect

Re:Religions

[CRCulver]

At first I thought "Wow, the 50 Cent Army got their post in here really quickly", but then I was thrilled to see that the Ladyboy Hermaphrodite troll is back. We've missed you, sir.

Re:Religions

[Anonymous Coward]

wish I could give you some karma for that inventive off topic tanget *just* to work in ladyboys in a post about cisco

Re:Religions

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at Sri Lanka, Buddhism there hasn't been very nice to Hinduism. All religions are bullshit because they tend to be repressive, same with the Communist government in China.

Re:Religions

[Wyatt Earp]

Blame the victims, always a good side to take.

Actually, religion had an important role in the ancient world, establishment of moral codes that were conductive to building a community and society. The Ten Commandments for example really aren't about control without valid reason, but a good basis for society.

The first few are about there being only one religion, that keeps sectarian violence to a minimum, then a break/worship day - even for slaves. Honor your elders, no murder - leads to revenge killing, takes valuable members of the community away, no adultery - those lead to honor killings, outcasts and revenge killings, no theft, no lying about your neighbors.

Really how are those guidelines bad things?

Re:Religions

[Skapare]

No, it is the Chinese government that is the cause of problems in China.

Re:Religions

[Anonymous Coward]

You are missing what you should not be missing and without it you have nothing.

It is Christianity and Buddhism that do not agree.

Christ and Buddha would likely find far more accord.

The movement is not the message; do not confuse the wax and the flame or you are liable to get burned.

Human rights is everyone's "problem." If religion is trying to spread basic human rights is that not a stand worth taking? Were those not the stands both Christ and Buddha took?

It's once again religions that is [sic] causing problems! Said the Brahmins... Said the Romans...

Re:Religions

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying is the competition of belief systems leads to war, poverty and death and we should all have one dictated by...?

See right there is where your reasoning becomes "religious".

If anything it's the competition of religion that leads to peace and prosperity because it forces literally everyone to come to the realization that there's more than one way to think and believe. If you have Muslims and Christians trying to save your soul, Jews trying to enslave you for being Goyum cattle, Bhuddists trying to teach you rubbing budda's belly is good luck, Indians talking about freaky 6-armed elephant chicks that you pray to while facing east, Two different Islamic dudes one saying strapping a bomb on your chest and running into a restaraunt is jihad, the other saying a pious life is jihad both saying you get 70+ virgins when you die, and on the streetcorner is some "African American" individual in full W-T-F Garb dancing and singing in the most nuerotic way possible to make it rain (or maybe just get some change), THAT my friend, is when you might begin thinking "you know these guys are all kinda nuts maybe I'll just go have a taco".

Heaven forbid the Chinese government ever takes over all 1.3 billion people. You want to know why? Because it doesn't matter WHAT religion is out there, once one of them gets a majority, you my friend had better join them and hope they find your hair color and shape of your pinkie toe to your liking because otherwise you're fertilizer like the rest of us.

I'm not an athiest or a christian exactly, but FFS, if God gave me common sense (and some gun money, thanks lord!) why not listen to it for once?

BTW, there's a reason Christianity gets the most nukes.

The real WTF is they're trying to sue a company for what they did on foreign soil. GL/HF, nothing is gonna happen there.

Re:Religions

[siglercm]

via forced violence like Christianity

The 12th century called. They'd like their Crusades back, please.

Re:Religions

[CTU]

It is a shame all religion can't be like that. Still I guess I am like that myself, just because i may not agree with somebody belief, but I accept it as long as it does not harm anybody else.

Tho now I do want to know more about Buddhism.

Re:Religions

[Grishnakh]

What's bad is that you have to make up cockamamie stories about gods and burning bushes to push a moral code on people, and here, thousands of years later and after the development of academic philosophies, instead of just adopting these codes because they make for better societies, we have to keep trying to get people to believe in myths and fairy tales.

Re:Religions

[Archangel Michael]

It depends on your perspective.

I find having people make shit up as they go along to be a very poor method of creating laws. Having one guy in a black robe thinking he(she) knows better than everyone else to be just as offensive. We all believe in myths an fairy tales. You just happen to believe that man can rule over other men, even as man has proven he cannot even rule himself.

Re:Religions

[rickb928]

There is the small detail of delivering these people from slavery, you know, the plagues, parting the Red Sea, blah blah blah.

And the whole point of "keep trying to get people to believe in myths and fairy tales.", such as government programs that will solve the problems of healthcare financing and of course security against terrorism that threatens our Constitutional protections.

You see, it's all a matter of which side you're on...

Re:Religions

[Archangel Michael]

No, it is the Athiest Chinese government that is the cause of problems in China.

FTFY.

If some duche bag wants to drag religion into this, then it is fair game to point out that officially, China is Atheist (No God but the State). They don't like any religion, but tolerate some more than others.

Re:Religions

[Wyatt Earp]

With the advent of cities and societies following the end of the Ice Age there had to be moral codes, now how do you establish those? With stories of how and why the God(s) everyone believes in gave us these laws, or through dictatorship.

Explaining to Stone and Bronze Age man that he shouldn't kill his neighbor, steal the neighbor's wife and sell the neighbor's children into slavery for the good of the society isn't going to get much traction. Telling SaBA man that God forbids the killing of his neighbor, lusting after the neighbor's wife and selling the neighbor's children into slavery is more likely to get the guy not to do those things.

While I'm not and never have been religious, I understand why it was needed to create frameworks for society.

Re:Religions

[Entropius]

It is not the Chinese government's atheism that leads them to do horrible things. Most ardent atheists do not agree with the suppression of religious ideas by force.

Re:Religions

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi there, informed person. I'd like to spread the Christian faith with a kalashnikov or an m16, but I can't find suitable directions in Christ's reported words and example. Can you help me find 'em, I start ASAP.
Besides, to counter your steering of topic from abusive governments in bed with corporations to religion, what you write about China's government fits my idea of "People's Republic" perfectly. :D

Re:Religions

[Grishnakh]

Having one guy in a black robe thinking he(she) knows better than everyone else to be just as offensive.

Right. That's why laws are made by legislatures in most civilized places, and have been for many hundreds of years (how long as England had a Parliament?). Legislatures consist of a large group of people who represent the people, not just one guy in a black robe. Thus this group of people can argue and come to a consensus before any new law is enacted.

You just happen to believe that man can rule over other men, even as man has proven he cannot even rule himself.

Who else is going to rule over men? Aliens from another planet? Or a god? Where is this god? I haven't seen any, nor any credible evidence of any. I have read stories about some god or gods (it's hard to tell which because they don't seem to have the same personality in all stories) that appeared about 2000 years ago, but then disappeared and haven't been seen since except by a few crackpots. I certainly haven't seen any stone tablets with any laws that we're supposed to follow, only a crazy-sounding story (involving a parting of a sea, clearly an impossible phenomenon) about some stone tablets which are now conveniently missing. Believing that story makes about as much sense as believing that all humans' mental problems come from "body thetans" which are disembodied souls brought here by Xeno on a space-faring 737 airplane and blown up in a volcano by an atomic bomb.

Re:Religions

[CRCulver]

after the development of academic philosophies, instead of just adopting these codes because they make for better societies

Academic philosophies are divided between utilitarianism and various forms of natural rights theory. They are so gridlocked that choosing one as the best is essentially a religious choice and not much different than just accepting whatever some religious body teaches as the best way to go.

Re:Religions

[Anonymous Coward]

are you a chink

more of a chunk....

Re:Religions

[Grishnakh]

Choosing one means having to argue about which one is better for building a better society. Obviously, everyone's going to have a different opinion on that, but a discussion on that is a whole lot better than arguing about which god is more powerful or which god really exists (when none of them have left any real evidence, and certainly aren't appearing in person saying "here I am!!").

When you go shopping for a car, do you compare the different features and performance attributes of the different models available, or do you look through ancient mythology books to find clues to help you decide which car is better? The same applies here: if the object is to adopt an ethical framework upon which to base society and its laws, then the discussion should be about which framework is better and why, with people arguing for their proposed system and others debating that. Why do we need a bunch of made-up myths involved?

Re:Religions

[bhcompy]

r/religion/sect

ftfPICK

Re:Religions

[gandhi_2]

suppression of religious ideas by force

True. The prefer to do it with mod points.

Re:Religions

[ImprovOmega]

Choosing one means having to argue about which one is better for building a better society. Obviously, everyone's going to have a different opinion on that

And there's the problem. Everyone has a different opinion about how best to make society work. Absent an absolute authority figure, who is to say that one moral code or theory is better than any other? Ultimately everyone's personal moral code would boil down to: "get everything that I can for me and screw everyone else". Because anything less is begging to be taken advantage of by people with more sociopathic tendencies.

Now if you introduce the concept of an absolute authority (God) and eternal punishment/reward (hell/heaven) then even some of the sociopaths will take notice out of self interest and try to do those things that would actually benefit society.

I wouldn't be so quick to try to get people to abandon religion. It's helped glue societies together for many years. It only gets epically hosed when people take control of it and replace the ultimate authority with themselves. But I think the good outweighs the harm there, even from a strictly secular rationalist mindset. I mean, Hitler and Stalin didn't need religion to butcher millions. And the ethnic cleansings that we've seen have had *much* more to do with culture than religion.

Re:Religions

[SquirrelDeth]

In Canada Members of Parliament are only accountable to Parliament not the people they claim to represent.

Re:Religions

[Grishnakh]

So they can't be voted out?

Re:Religions

[MightyMartian]

Well, competition can lead to religious freedoms, but it can also lead to the eradication of one religion in favor of the one with the greater political and military backing, or at least the marginalization of the lesser defended religion. Don't see a lot of priests to Aphrodite or Odin these days. These religions fell to Christianity, much as Zoroastrianism has all but disappeared in its homeland, the Arabic polytheist religion was eradicated and so on and so forth.

The reason for the secular compromise in the West is the gift of the Enlightenment, and in large part men like Locke were inspired to essentially invent it because of the horrors of the Thirty Years War, where two branches of the same bloody religion tried to wipe each other out.

Re:Religions

[SquirrelDeth]

The Senate can not be voted out they are appointed.
As for MP's they get elected promising their constituents to vote a certain way they they change sides after they get elected. An MP can help pass lots of bills in 4 years. Not being elected in the next term does not undo what they did while elected. And a nice cushy private sector job to start when they don't get elected and a government pension for their time spent not representing their constituents.

Re:Religions

[Grishnakh]

I don't know much about Canada's government, but it sounds a lot like America's before 1900, crossed with Britain's. Here, the Senators were appointed by the States before a Constitutional Amendment made them popularly elected. You say your Senators are elected; I'm guessing it's the same way? With Provinces appointing them? Again, it might not be direct, but they still answer to the people, as the people in each region vote for the politicians who appoint the Senators. The extra layer there serves as a buffer to keep the quickly-changing popular whims from affecting government too much, which is a good thing, but it doesn't make them totally unanswerable to the people, it just makes it take longer before they get voted out.

As for undoing what MPs did, again I imagine it's similar to here. A subsequent Parliament can change laws any time they want, right? Obviously, the new legislature has to have enough agreement in its ranks to do so, but if the people vote correctly, this shouldn't be too hard.

If the People are doing a poor job of electing people to represent them, that's the Peoples' fault.

Re:Religions

[migla]

I'm sorry, but aren't insults supposed to be just a little clever or witty in some way? Armature.
--
Turning to a Linux advocate for thoughts on Microsoft is like asking Hitler how he felt about the Jews.

Don't beat yourself up about it, RMS Eats Toejam. In time you too can be able to emulate wittiness after hanging out with all the geeks here.

Ps. Your sig, is a nice attempt at a witty insult, but it fails because it is so obvious that it would be a better analogy if you swapped the words Jews and Hitler with each other. (You see, Hitler was the powerful one who wanted to destroy the Jew minority and the Jews would rather have had freedom).

Anyway, keep up the good work. You can do it!

Re:Religions

[Bongo]

People's perspectives evolve and change according to life's problems and circumstances.

Yes, at the end of the day, it is just a perspective. Like, I like chocolate, you like vanilla. But humanity has also grown and changed through many generations of people experiencing problems, suffering, calamities, etc., and trying to find a better way to deal with those problems.
Einstein said, words to the effect, you can't solve a problem at the same level of thinking [perspective] which created it.

The general broad picture [perspective] we have today is that humanity evolved. So for say, 100,000 years we were all just disparate tribes. This was fine: "my perspective is tribal", "I am linked by blood", "my tribe is my blood" etc. But eventually, those tribes started competing, and the tribal perspective said, "they are not our tribe, not our blood, so it is ok to kill them." So say we had 50,000 years of tribal wars. Any tribe that comes into contact with another tribe easily starts a war. "Invade their village, kill their men, batter their babies' bodies against rocks, steal and rape their women, make them our blood so our tribe will be bigger and more powerful."

Sooner or later, that perspective is creating more problems than it solves. General suffering increases, all tribes are losing out.

So, somehow, someone has a new idea that all tribes should be united, but the problem is, they have different blood, and different kings. So somehow, we don't know how, a new perspective appears, perhaps just because evolution is always trying random shit, and the new perspective is, "we are all united under one leader who is not one mortal king but a higher king, a king that can be king of all tribes."

The new "king" is basically an idea, an image, and perhaps because humans were evolving cognitively and were becoming more able to handle images and concepts, and so they realised in their new perspective that they could unite tribes not under one mortal king (who would die, and start blood feuds for succession) but under something that could never die a mortal death: A CONCEPT.

So yes, now that we are living 10,000 years later, such myths about gods and stuff and divine rules are silly. They are silly because our modern rational cognition gives us a much higher perspective, ie. we understand it is just a myth.

But at the time, when the ability to create concepts was still an innovation, it was the god concept, the king of kings, that could unite as a percpective in tribal minds, could unite separate tribes and thus, REDUCE bloodshed.

Today we are struggling with shifting from a nationalistic perspective to a truly global perspective, again as a way to reduce unnecessary suffering.

But remember, each new perspective is gradual and builds on top of what came before. And the whole planet isn't all living in Western style households where it is safe and they can sit and watch TV and study and learn and get educated at university. Much of the world is still very poor but also very tribal. This is why things like Christianity and Islam are spreading in Africa, even as Europe has growing Atheist population.

Yes, man can hardly govern himself, and that's a modern perspective from the quiet safety of the Freudian couch, but before you get anywhere near a safe stable neighbourhood, humans have to grow through several perspectives, and one of the earliest is the tribal perspective.

Go to a poor run down area, like northern Pakistan, or some inner city Western ghetto, and you see tribal warlord gang culture, ie. perspectives.

They are just perspectives, but given humans only have perspectives with which to handle life as they perceive it, we have to take a lot of interest in how perspectives develop from one to another, how someone goes from becoming a gang member, who views everyone as an enemy, to a perspective where someone feels that their neighbours are their friends, to a perspective where people feel secure enough to start a business and even trade with stra

Re:Religions

[flyneye]

Sounds like interesting speculation.
People who know nothing about religion regurgitating the usual stuff atheists use to convince themselves to feel better through repetitious pseudo-rationalization.
Pity, some actual coursework and you might have words of your own. With the proper background in Anthropology, you would know .at least, what science knows about religion. With actual religious studies, you would see the whole come together as Houston Smith did. You might even get a little Yoga in.
'Til then, I just hear a bunch of Charlie Brown teacher babbling...wah,wah,waaah,wawa,waah,wah.

Re:Religions

[Archangel Michael]

Who else is going to rule over men?

This is the reason why we should have LIMITED governance. Because the result is always going to be tyranny if we don't. Right now, the US has a semi restricted government, however that has been being eroded by both (R) and (D) proposals. From TSA Grope and Feel sessions to increasing surveillance society. We live in 1984, only most people don't know it yet.

I'll rule over myself, thank you very much. Of course that doesn't sit well with the control freaks that want to control everyone else.

Re:Religions

[Grishnakh]

This is the reason why we should have LIMITED governance.

Well, of course. The problem is that there's no way to guarantee limited governance. Even when you set up a system designed to have limited governance, it gets eroded over time unless the people are vigilant about making sure the politicians don't keep grabbing more power. Many governments in history have been this way, and have fallen. Just look at the Romans: they started out as a Republic, but turned into an empire with an emperor, and eventually crashed after spending too much money on conquest. Sound familiar?

I'll rule over myself, thank you very much.

You can say that and believe it if you want, but when other people come along with greater numbers and more guns than you, they'll be ruling over you.

Re:Religions

[Archangel Michael]

Live Free or Die (a slave).

When life becomes more valuable than freedom, you will have neither.

Re:Religions

[Rakarra]

The first few are about there being only one religion, that keeps sectarian violence to a minimum

Yes, outlawing personal choice is certainly one possible way to lower violence.

Re:Religions

[Wyatt Earp]

Legislatures are a modern mechanism for lawmaking, the oldest legislature, Iceland's Althing dates to 938 CE or 1073 years ago, while the oldest continuously inhabited city is 11,000 years old.

Actually the parting of the Reed Sea/Sea of Reeds is quite possible and feasible, the Red Sea myth is the result of mistranslation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_Sea
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yam_Suph

Re:Religions

[Rakarra]

If some duche bag wants to drag religion into this, then it is fair game to point out that officially, China is Atheist (No God but the State). They don't like any religion, but tolerate some more than others.

The Chinese government is ok with religion as long as it doesn't interfere with their vision of society or their power hold on the people. The Chinese government is vehemently opposed to anything that can threaten their role of being all-powerful and all-authoritarian in their country.

Re:Religions

[Wyatt Earp]

If Ireland had remained all Catholic, the Troubles would have been alot less violent.

Yes outlawing personal choice is bad now, but in the ancient Middle East with tribalism, religious difference, inter and extra clan fighting, taking one of the variables out leads to more stability.

Look at the Beduins, they have a saying - "I against my brother, my brothers and me against my cousins, then my cousins and I against strangers". Without a religion to bind the tribe, it would add another thing to fight over.

Re:Religions

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that you can't survive long in your little business if the perspective of most of those around you is that rather than trade, they can just steal it all from you. The perspectives have to grow into the whole culture, and the whole culture needs to grow. There's about 8 main stages/perspectives, see Spiral Dynamics.

Yeah, but unfortunately that perspective seems to have been adopted by a bunch of guys on Wall St. They just manage to turn things around so that a few can steal from most of the rest of the population.

Cisco or China?

[matthew_t_west]

The real issue here is how China is treating those it thinks are part of the Falun Gong movement. Cisco's equipment is one of the tools used to track the movement, but it doesn't seem that Cisco orchestrated the capture, detainment, torture, and deaths of innocent people. China did.

M

Re:Cisco or China?

[halfEvilTech]

This isn't much different than families of murder victims suing gun manufactors. People want to place the blame somewhere and in this case they think they stand a better chance suing Cisco instead of their own government. It would be safe to assume that if they sued the Chinese government instead, there would be no trial just jail and death sentences for those doing the suing.

Re:Cisco or China?

[guspasho]

It is pretty different. The suit alleges that Cisco was actively complicit in the persecution of the Falun Gong. It wasn't like the Chinese gov't bought a bunch of their product made for general use and Cisco had no idea what it was going to be used for.

Re:Cisco or China?

[cfalcon]

Exactly this. A gun can be used for many things, as can a router. But if you are supplying a known assassin with tech support about how best to pick off preschoolers, you have crossed the line from supplying a product into aiding and abetting a crime. Almost all guns are NOT used for crimes, ever. The same is true of routers- but NOT of routers sold to China to help setup their oppressive firewall.

That's the big difference here.

Re:Cisco or China?

[man_of_mr_e]

One might as well sue IBM for supplying tabulation equipment to the germans, so they could track "guests" at jewish concentration camps.

While I don't think this suit will succed for a variety of reasons, such as it happening under non-us jurisdiction as well as the plaintiff not having standing in the case.

Re:Cisco or China?

[Anonymous Coward]

> This isn't much different than families of murder victims suing gun manufactors.

It wouldn't be, if the gun manufacturers also trained the killers and showed them how to find and kill their victims.

Re:Cisco or China?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Cisco merely provided cost effective dissident detection solutions to global partners, for profit!

Re:Cisco or China?

[poity]

Compared to commercial gun manufacturers, Cisco probably had a much clearer idea of who they were dealing with and the consequences involved in being complicit -- unless we change the comparison to companies selling guns to known criminals.

Re:Cisco or China?

[siglercm]

Do you really think that Cisco is stupid enough or greedy enough to willingly develop technology for and in partnership with the Chinese government specifically targeted at tracking down and persecuting and killing members of Falun Gong? Hey, you might be right, but I doubt it.

Re:Cisco or China?

[Anonymous Coward]

Manufactor?! English as the third language is very tricky...

Re:Cisco or China?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, around these parts felons can't buy guns.

Re:Cisco or China?

[the simurgh]

they did sue IBM for this and other actions. they won. now how do i add that little r symbol to the name IBM on here

Re:Cisco or China?

[matthew_t_west]

Yes, except this is a sovereign government hiring a network company to help them set up a network. Layer 2 and 3 don't need to know what applications are running on top of it.

M

Re:Cisco or China?

[matthew_t_west]

Calling all police forces: need to catch your bad guy? We can detect all potential threats for you, so all you have to do is cuff 'em and let the legal system sort it out. PoliceNet, a Cisco Product.

M

Re:Cisco or China?

[migla]

This isn't much different than families of murder victims suing gun manufactors. People want to place the blame somewhere and in this case they think they stand a better chance suing Cisco instead of their own government. It would be safe to assume that if they sued the Chinese government instead, there would be no trial just jail and death sentences for those doing the suing.

But did the gun manufacturers knowingly sell the guns directly to known murderers that were widely presumed to almost certainly be murdering again?

Isn't doing business with ruthless oppressive regimes supposed to be bad?

The other week there was some news here in Sweden about Volvo getting to sell a lot of nice black cars to the Chinese government. Some Chinese boss of some magnitude at Volvo was posing with a Chinese official in front of a row of new Volvos on Tienanmen square and some Swedish boss in the corporation was interviewed, saying how good it was for Volvo in China to be seen driven by party brass.

Shouldn't he instead have been trying to cover his face, whimpering "Don't look at me! Don't look at me...?"

Re:Cisco or China?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the point is that they did know. Not only did they know but they actively helped the government to set it up and track the victims. It's not like they just ordered a bunch of equipment from a catalog and that was the end of it.

Re:Cisco or China?

[Anonymous Coward]

Logical only if you can show that Smith & Wesson is knowingly and actively helping criminals be criminals. Cisco knows that it is helping stifle dissent and trample human rights.

Re:Cisco or China?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is what the court system is for. To find the facts and remove doubt.

Re:Cisco or China?

[PraiseBob]

And arms dealers that have sold weapons and ammo to Libya should also be shocked and appalled that a man who has been implicated repeatedly in the murder of innocent civilians across the world would actually turn those weapons on innocent civilians in his own country.

Cisco knew with 100% certainty that its products would be used to suppress free speech, hunt dissidents, and enforce the great firewall. Whether they are legally obligated or have any culpability is up to the courts to decide.

Re:Cisco or China?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kind of like how IBM had nothing to do with the calculation of German census data used to help the Third Reich wage genocide against the Jews. Am I right?

I suppose it would be completely fine, In Your Humble Opinion, if I chose to supply the genocidal maniacs in Africa with weapons to help them wage genocide?

This is the weight of your sentiments: That I may personally profit from the torture and deaths of my fellow man and be sound in heart; so long as I don't personally commit the torture and murders myself?

Can you spot the flaw in your reasoning?

Re:Cisco or China?

[Anonymous Coward]

Following this logic you should sue every country that exports weapons. Including US that supported Afghanistan in war with Russia.

Question is did they actively participated in the hunt. There is a difference between here is a gun and here is a gun and I think I see a deer over there.

Re:Cisco or China?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really think that Cisco is stupid enough or greedy enough to willingly develop technology for and in partnership with the Chinese government specifically targeted at tracking down and persecuting and killing members of Falun Gong? Hey, you might be right, but I doubt it.

As a chinese, I do, since they have been doing this for years. Banning the FLG and the set up of the GFW did cross paths, at least chronologically.

Re:Cisco or China?

[guspasho]

The summary and the article both make it pretty clear that Cisco's complicity goes beyond just setting up a surveillance net.

"Cisco Systems designed a surveillance system to help the Chinese government track and ultimately suppress members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, according to a lawsuit the group filed against the network equipment maker.

"The lawsuit, which was filed Thursday in Federal District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose, alleges Cisco supplied and helped maintain a surveillance system known as the 'Golden Shield' that allowed the Chinese government to track and censor the group's Internet activities.

"The lawsuit, which seeks class-action status, alleges that Golden Shield--described in Cisco marketing materials as Policenet--resulted in the arrest of as many as 5,000 Falun Gong members. Cisco "competed aggressively" for the contracts to design the Golden Shield system "with full knowledge that it was to be used for the suppression of the Falun Gong religion," according to the lawsuit."

This is not to say that the case has any merit, but just to point out that the lawsuit is not the same thing as "families of murder victims suing gun manufactors (sic)".

Re:Cisco or China?

[rickb928]

"Yeah, around these parts felons can't buy guns."

Worth repeating...

Re:Cisco or China?

[guspasho]

They are absolutely greedy enough, their investors expect nothing less. As for stupid, this is just the opposite. The Chinese government is a huge, *huge* client, and Cisco stands to make massive amounts of money if it impresses the Chinese govt with their performance of this contract.

Unfortunately, business is just set up to be nearly completely amoral (not immoral, though that is often the result.) The idea that markets will always result in the best, and most moral results is a fantasy.

Re:Cisco or China?

[cowboy76Spain]

Publicity.

You can't sue China because it is a sovereign state (the lawsuit would be thrown out immediately).

Suing Cisco they get a lot of press coverage where they will center about the HR situation in China and were Cisco will be secondary. That's the primary aim, and they get it even if they lose the lawsuit.

Re:Cisco or China?

[matthew_t_west]

Yes, but Cisco also provides these services to businesses.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6712/index.html

The extent at which Cisco helped them is not publicly known. Cisco does not admit to anything other than selling hardware and software services.

"Cisco does not operate networks in China or elsewhere, nor does Cisco customize our products in any way that would facilitate censorship or repression," the representative said in a statement, adding that the company sells the same equipment in China that it sells in other nations in compliance with U.S. government regulations."

Hard to say... but either way private multi-national corporations only operate for one thing: profit.

Re:Cisco or China?

[matthew_t_west]

So true. Media attention is still attention to a cause.

M

Re:Cisco or China?

[Eponymous Hero]

you type ampersand & then reg then a semi colon. '®' how is it you know whether IBM® was sued for actions in WWII but you can't look up an html entities table? by the way, if you're not publishing adverts for IBM, or if the registration mark for the brand already appears on the medium once, the mark is not required again. once is all it takes.

Re:Cisco or China?

[timeOday]

Unless this lawsuit is successful, there is nothing stupid about helping the Chinese do this, from a business perspective.

Re:Cisco or China?

[geekmux]

This isn't much different than families of murder victims suing gun manufactors. People want to place the blame somewhere...

Uh, wrong.

Families of murder victims don't sue gun manufacturers. Their lawyers do, going after the deepest pockets. Who the hell in their right mind would put fault on the fork for making someone fat? A lawyer would, not the victim, because they know how screwed up the legal system is.

Victims don't want to put the blame "somewhere", they want to put the blame and find justice where it SHOULD be, which is why so many victims end up finding their own justice, because they know how screwed up the legal system is.

Re:Cisco or China?

[hedwards]

Right, and you typically can't access any of that information without a court order. This will go through the discovery phase and maybe it will pan out and maybe it won't. But if they don't file suit they're almost certain not to get any information.

Re:Cisco or China?

[Velex]

Victims don't want to put the blame "somewhere", they want to put the blame and find justice where it SHOULD be, which is why so many victims end up finding their own justice, because they know how screwed up the legal system is.

No, no, no. Let me guess. The legal system is "screwed up" because it lets the person you simply think did it go free because nobody could actually prove that he did it?

People like you need to live through being falsely accused of something to knock you back down a few notches.

Re:Cisco or China?

[siglercm]

Didn't know to whom to reply, so I replied to myself. So sue me.

specifically targeted at tracking down and persecuting and killing members of Falun Gong?

"Specifically targeted at... members of Falun Gong" is the nexus of this case. It may be morally wrong to sell arms. It may be morally wrong to sell censoring or 'net tracking equipment and technology. But this is not a case of moral law. It's one of law, as in court of law. If they can't prove they specifically targeted the plaintiffs, there is no case. Of course, this also addresses the voluminous holier-than-thou "arms dealer" expressions of moral outrage. Good for you!

Not saying what they did is right. Just saying the lawsuit is crapola. It doesn't stand a chance. As someone wrote below (and perhaps above), this is likely something akin to a publicity filing.

/. -- Proving the "wisdom of crowds" is often suspect since 19-whatever.

Re:Cisco or China?

[billcopc]

There is a particular difference though (puts on bullet-proof cape):

Guns serve only one purpose: to shoot people (or perhaps animals). Sure, you can shoot at tin cans, but that's not the intended purpose. Now, I don't care which moral faction is using the gun. Good guy or bad, they're gonna shoot someone, presumably to critically wound and/or kill them. No one at Smith & Wesson is oblivious to the fact that violent defense is the primary usage of their products.

Cisco, on the other hand, sells products that move information around. The only way you can kill someone with a Cisco product is by grossly misusing it, e.g. dropping a CRS-1 on the victim's head. When they being operated normally, nobody is supposed to die.

To use the Falun Gong's broken logic, they should be suing everyone that has enabled the people who track and suppress their members. If Cisco can be blamed, then so can Dell for providing the desktop workstations and displays, DuPont for the halocarbon fire extinguisher, APC for the UPS, McDonalds and Red Bull for feeding the sysadmin... It's the same fallacy that was hypocritically used after 9/11 to crack down on so-called terrorism supporters. If the Falun Gong considers the Chinese government a terrorist organisation, then by extension they would blame everyone that has had any involvement whatsoever with the government. Did you pay taxes in the last 5 years ? Then you funded the enemy.

What the Falun Gong should be doing is spreading awareness, and I don't mean standing around with their banners, looking all pitiful and shit. That hasn't worked. Suing random companies isn't going to help either, it only creates resentment. If anyone gets laid off at Cisco, as a result of this bullshit lawsuit, chances are those ex-employees won't be too sympathetic to the cause. Ultimately, if they can amass enough support to seriously menace the government, they will have a chance to enact positive change. If not, well, tough tits. Revolutions don't happen while you sleep.

Re:Cisco or China?

[guspasho]

The services described on the webpage you referenced do not come close to resembling the alleged activities quoted above. That undermines the argument that Cisco sells this sort of thing to just anybody without knowledge of what is done with it.

And of course Cisco is denying all allegations. Would anyone expect anyone less? I'm not saying Cisco is obviously guilty, I'm saying the case and the allegation is more than just "families of gun violence victims are suing gun manufacturers", because the allegation is that Cisco is complicit with full knowledge of the purpose of their collaboration. Clearly you don't think they are, and that's fine - Cisco could be completely innocent - but that will be for the courts to decide.

Re:Cisco or China?

[billcopc]

if guns are not used for crimes, then what ARE they used for ? Don't get me wrong, in Canada we do a lot of recreational hunting, but a gun is a tool designed to shoot living things and make them unliving. The only difference between a hunter and a murderer is their choice of target.

Contrast with a Cisco router, which is designed to move information over data cables. No matter how you try to hack the router, it's not going to magically blow someone's brains out the back of their head.

Another important point here is the router does not care what kind of data it is transferring. A packet is a packet is a packet. Packet comes in, packet goes out. It is a neutral tool that does its job, regardless of content or purpose. China is using these to monitor and suppress dissent, but that's China's fault, not Cisco's. It sucks, but the Falun Gong is living under an oppressive, totalitarian, anti-civil-rights regime. If they want to be respected as human beings, their choices are:

1. fix the government, either by social awareness, coercion or good old-fashioned violent uprising
2. move the fuck out to a nicer place. Canada's still pretty friendly, if they can tolerate the weather.

Anything else is a futile waste of time and effort. Blaming random people will not fix China, nor will it buy them a green card to a free country. It will only create even more enemies, what the Falun Gong needs is allies.

Re:Cisco or China?

[billcopc]

Repeat after me:

Computers don't kill people. People kill people; typically using guns.

Re:Cisco or China?

[MightyMartian]

Gun manufacturers essentially build a generic product; a firearm. Cisco wasn't just selling routers to China, from what we can tell, Cisco was an active participant in creating the Great Firewall. It would be the equivalent of Smith and Wesson going over to the Columbine killers' houses and designing custom firearms for them. In such a case, the manufacturer is very much complicit.

Re:Cisco or China?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way you can kill someone with a Cisco product is by grossly misusing it

Same with a gun. If your intent it to kill someone, you will use a weapon, that could either be a gun or CRS-1 on someones head. If a person wants to kill another one, they will stab, beat to death, strangle, electrocute, run them over, throw off a bridge, shoot, poison, etc.. The gun is one of the many choices. You make it sound like if there were no guns, no one would ever kill anyone. The person kills, not the gun. The only gun I own is a small $70 pellet gun that I shoot cans and targets with once or so a year so I am not some gun nut with some twisted view of weapons. Another hobby of mine is mixing various metals and making small colorful explosive devices as a hobby (although the US Justice Department is making it harder and harder to buy them and they WILL send letters to your house letting you know they know you are buying them) so I know just use toilet bowl cleaner (hydrochloric acid) in a plastic bottle with some aluminum foil. Why? Not do hurt or threaten people, I do it because it is cool and a hobby and I have a bunch of plastic bottles laying around. That is the same reason a lot of people choose to own and shoot guns and the reason people race their cars. The fun of it.

Re:Cisco or China?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe most guns just aren't used all that much. Also, most term life insurance policies are never collected on, most smoke alarms only go off if you're doing a bad job of cooking, and most highway guardrails will never stop a car from falling off the edge of a cliff. Even on the stock market, most options contracts expire unexercised. Doesn't mean they're not plenty useful. People are risk-averse.

Re:Cisco or China?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but they did it for the money. Capitalism trumps everything"

I said, "Trumps everything."

Re:Cisco or China?

[plover]

Another important point here is the router does not care what kind of data it is transferring. A packet is a packet is a packet. Packet comes in, packet goes out. It is a neutral tool that does its job, regardless of content or purpose.

The allegation is that Cisco altered the routers to add functions custom tailored to aid the Chinese police in tracking suspects. As far as the data goes they may be "specific crime neutral" but they're definitely "oppressive police state friendly."

From http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/security-management/2006/06/01/amnesty-condemns-tech-firms-over-human-rights-39272429/

However, in a testimony in April to the US House International Relations Committee, Ethan Gutmann, a former business consultant in China, alleged that Cisco had sold a specially designed firewall to the Chinese government and deployed a "Policenet" for the state security forces.

"Cisco... denies selling any special configuration. Chinese engineers who actually worked on the firewall project are equally adamant that it was custom-made," Gutmann told the Committee.

"By 2003, Cisco's 'Policenet' was deployed as the Internet backbone of the Chinese State Security system... Zhou Li, a systems engineer from Cisco's Shanghai Branch, explained to me that... a policeman or PSB agent using Cisco equipment could now stop any citizen on the street and, simply by scanning an ID card, remotely access his danwei (work unit files): political behavior, family history, fingerprints, and other images. The agent could also access his surfing history for the last 60 days, and read his email. All in real-time," said Gutman.

Gutmann claimed this has led to the arrests of pro-democracy campaigners and other peaceful protest groups.

"Any assertion that Chinese censorship is purely a government-to-government issue is premature until these companies dare to — explicitly and systematically — test the limits of Chinese laws. And until they perform that test, they should not be viewed as simply following Chinese law, but as working for Chinese Communist Party objectives," Gutmann said.

Amnesty has laid into Cisco's human rights record in the past, claiming in November 2002 that Cisco had provided "important technology which helps the Chinese authorities censor the Internet". Nortel was also alleged to be supplying technology to enable deeper packet inspection.

Re:Cisco or China?

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical anti-firearm propaganda. Off the top of my head:

Hunting
Target shooting
Competitive shooting
Concealed/Open Carry with a permit
Self Defense

On average, a firearm is legally used every 13 seconds for self defense (based on a 1994 study). I look at this as a life saved. 2.5 million lives saved a year, by lawful owners of the firearm in question. That alone is enough reason to keep them legal.

As for a firewall used solely for "evil" purposes, name me one reason why THAT should be lawful?

Re:Cisco or China?

[Anonymous Coward]

if guns are not used for crimes, then what ARE they used for ? Don't get me wrong, in Canada we do a lot of recreational hunting, but a gun is a tool designed to shoot living things and make them unliving. The only difference between a hunter and a murderer is their choice of target.

//snip//

No If I shoot some scumbag who is trying to break into my abode, it is NOT murder, it is self defense. The PRIMARY rational behind the US's Second Amendment. Especially when that scumbag IS the government.

Re:Cisco or China?

[jroysdon]

Yup, I was going to point out IBM and the holocaust. This really is just history repeating itself, and greed for the almighty dollar more important than human life and freedom.

"China that it sells in other nations in compliance with U.S. government regulations." I bet IBM did as well.

Re:Cisco or China?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. fix the government, either by social awareness, coercion or good old-fashioned violent uprising
2. move the fuck out to a nicer place. Canada's still pretty friendly, if they can tolerate the weather.

I'm going to skip the form letter with the check boxes here.

1. Been tried a few times unsuccessfully.
2. You think China's going to let them leave?

Re:Cisco or China?

[superdave80]

Except that it would be illegal to sell weapons to minors. I'm trying to figure out what exactly Cisco has done that is illegal.

Cisco was an active participant in creating the Great Firewall.

The Great Firewall was never mentioned in TFA. From TFA:

Cisco "competed aggressively" for the contracts to design the Golden Shield system...

Re:Cisco or China?

[AHuxley]

It really depends on how open or closed the system is. Was it like some dumb 1980's unit that did math really fast? A country could get them in for "agriculture" with most going for nuclear dreams after been wired up.
In the 1980's that dual use import trick would work.
But for people sorting or telco work, anyone bought in to help install the system would have some idea.

Re:Cisco or China?

[modecx]

if guns are not used for crimes, then what ARE they used for ? Don't get me wrong, in Canada we do a lot of recreational hunting, but a gun is a tool designed to shoot living things and make them unliving. The only difference between a hunter and a murderer is their choice of target.

That's one man's philosophy... An incomplete philosophy, in this man's eyes. In the United States, we have A LOT of recreational shooting, most of which isn't even hunting related...and therefore guns engaged in this activity aren't set out to purposefully kill any living thing which casts a shadow. Paper targets, clay pigeons and soda cans, on the other hand? Their days are numbered! I imagine ammunition used to this end outweighs that used for hunting, and also in crimes, by orders of magnitude. Unless you're one of the irrational sort who count such benign activity as a crime, in which case this is all wasted energy.

No...a firearm designer can only ask a few things of his creation; chiefly, that it operates as reliably as possible, so that when the user asks it to work, it does, and that it operates within other design parameters, such as consistency (a necessary component of accuracy). In the end, these goals are not so different any other widgets' designer.

Cartridge goes in, speedy thing goes out. Packet goes in, packet goes out. Gasoline goes in, mileage goes out. Any of the tools described can be used for any number of good, lawful conclusions, and also any number of nefarious purposes. Did you notice the adjective? Used. Utilized. Employed for a purpose. These things are all useless, inert lumps of metal and plastic without a user...to use it.

If it comes out that Cisco had reasonable knowledge that their products would be used to hunt people down, it would be analogous to a gun dealer selling a pistol to a guy who said his wife was cheating, and that he intended to shoot her--morally reprehensible, and liable. On the other hand, if Cisco had both the knowledge and actual involvement in making their products better suited to hunt down and persecute such people, it would be analogous to aiming the gun and letting the Chinese government pull the trigger--and then claiming innocence of any ill-deed.

I would say that American companies should be beholden to American ideals, but it would be rather redundant, considering American ideals now include "profit at all cost, full speed ahead!", and "damn the consequences!"

Re:Cisco or China?

[Anonymous Coward]

Repeat after ME:

People using computers and guns can kill vastly more people than without; typically using computers and guns.

Re:Cisco or China?

[mjwx]

It is pretty different. The suit alleges that Cisco was actively complicit in the persecution of the Falun Gong. It wasn't like the Chinese gov't bought a bunch of their product made for general use and Cisco had no idea what it was going to be used for.

Given the fact that Cisco consulted the Chinese government on this, the correct analogy is, suing a gun manufacturer that not only sold a gun to a known mass murderer but also found a crowded shopping centre, stored, maintained and loaded the weapon for him.

Re:Cisco or China?

[bye]

On average, a firearm is legally used every 13 seconds for self defense (based on a 1994 study). I look at this as a life saved.

Why do you look at this as a "life saved"?

There are plenty of countries with virtually no firearms in public hands that have (much) lower homicides per capita than the US.

Couldn't firearms be used every 13 seconds just because people in the US know that lots of other people around them have weapons (including criminals) and thus they fear for their lives more often? I.e. couldn't this just be a self-reinforcing cycle of violence - even if those gun uses are 'legal'?

Re:Cisco or China?

[bye]

No If I shoot some scumbag who is trying to break into my abode, it is NOT murder, it is self defense.

So, since you acknowledged that most guns are not used for crime, are you claiming that you want to use your gun to shoot a very likely unarmed person , whom to you, in the middle of the night, appears to be a 'scumbag trying to break into your abode'?

Wow. Talk about you being the judge, jury and executioner who decides life and death in one split second, in the middle of the night.

Do you accept that others might have a legitimate problem with your concept?

Re:Cisco or China?

[MightyMartian]

I meant Golden Shield, good catch. And you don't have to break a law to get hauled into civil court.

Re:Cisco or China?

[Narcogen]

The services described on the webpage you referenced do not come close to resembling the alleged activities quoted above. That undermines the argument that Cisco sells this sort of thing to just anybody without knowledge of what is done with it.

And of course Cisco is denying all allegations. Would anyone expect anyone less? I'm not saying Cisco is obviously guilty, I'm saying the case and the allegation is more than just "families of gun violence victims are suing gun manufacturers", because the allegation is that Cisco is complicit with full knowledge of the purpose of their collaboration. Clearly you don't think they are, and that's fine - Cisco could be completely innocent - but that will be for the courts to decide.

Why would Cisco need to know that?

A surveillance system exists to allow one group of people to watch another group of people. The Chinese government need not tell Cisco that the Falung Gong are among the people it intends to watch. Exactly how would that impact the design specification anyway?

What statute are they pursuing this under? FCPA? If it is legal under Chinese law for the Chinese law enforcement agencies to use the system they asked Cisco to design for them, in what jurisdiction does Falung Gong seek redress from Cisco for the Chinese government's use of the system?

Re:Cisco or China?

[Concerned Onlooker]

"Do you really think that Cisco is stupid enough or greedy enough to willingly develop technology for and in partnership with the Chinese government specifically targeted at tracking down and persecuting and killing members of Falun Gong?"

Are you really naive enough to think they wouldn't be perfectly willing to do that for money? I'm sure they thought up a great rationale for it before they did it, however.

Re:Cisco or China?

[superdave80]

since you acknowledged that most guns are not used for crime, are you claiming that you want to use your gun to shoot a very likely unarmed person

1. The poster never said that most guns are not used for crime.

2. Even assuming the poster did say that, how in the hell do you jump to the conclusion that an intruder is 'very likely unarmed'?

3. If someone attempts to break into your house, what is your course of action? Let it happen, and hope that the intruder leaves you and your family alone?

Talk about you being the judge, jury and executioner who decides life and death in one split second, in the middle of the night.

The intruder can avoid this situation by not trying to break into someone's house. The intruder has no one to blame but himself for the outcome.

Re:Cisco or China?

[TheLink]

The leaving is usually not the big problem. The staying in Canada bit is the difficult part.

Despite what he says about Canada being friendly, I doubt millions of Chinese would be welcome in Canada. Shanghai and Beijing combined have more than the entire population of Canada. And even if they were welcome, I doubt Canada would accept them as citizens with voting rights ;).

Re:Cisco or China?

[advocate_one]

Isn't doing business with ruthless oppressive regimes supposed to be bad?

didn't do IBM any real harm...

Re:Cisco or China?

[sjames]

There's a big difference between S&W selling a handgun to someone who turns out to be criminal and S&W contracting to build a custom weapon for mass killing in a shopping mall environment with someone who has a record of criminal violence.

If they did the latter, being sued by families would be the least of their legal troubles.

That difference is that the handgun has a perfectly legitimate purpose and, in fact, most people who own one never abuse it (however, S&W could still get into trouble if it directly sold a gun to someone with a felony record). The mass mall killing device has only one use and it's a bad one.

Re:Cisco or China?

[sjames]

Cisco is a corporation. I think they'll do whatever China wants for enough cash. They won't think of it in those terms, of course. They'll likely be willfully blind to the worst of it, telling themselves it's just "law enforcement" and the people it catches will be "helped" to be "better citizens".

Re:Cisco or China?

[TubeSteak]

Cisco does not admit to anything other than selling hardware and software services.

Hence the lawsuit.
I seriously doubt Cisco's internal e-mails (which will be subpoenaed) are going to admit only to "selling hardware and software services"

Re:Cisco or China?

[Anonymous Coward]

Without government intervention (time limited and unlimited monopolies, cartels, graft, mass violence, etc) markets often create the most moral results. In this instance the problem is not markets.

Re:Cisco or China?

[jambox]

Reminds me of the alleged business IBM did with the Nazi party in creating automatic systems to help with its "population census".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust#IBM_business_relations_with_the_Nazi_regime

Re:Cisco or China?

[Serpents]

The difference being that someone who sells you a rifle does not know whether you are going to hunt deers or your co-workers, while Cisco knew what kind of a system they were designing and whit it would be used for. It's a bit like saying "I knew he bought the gun but I'm innocent because he was the one, who pulled the trigger"

Re:Cisco or China?

[rohan972]

There are plenty of countries with virtually no firearms in public hands that have (much) lower homicides per capita than the US.

England, for example, has a lower murder rate than the US. However, in the past England had a much higher rate of gun ownership. In fact, the 2nd amendment to the US constitution is based on English law (the Bill of Rights 1689). During the time firearms were common and freely available in both England and the US, the murder rate in England was still much lower. To the best of my knowledge, the current difference in availability of firearms is not significant in the difference in murder rates between these countries.

Anything I have seen that claims a reduced murder rate from firearms bans only claims reduced "firearms murders", not murder rates overall, which seems pretty pointless unless you would be distressed at a murder committed with a gun but ok with murder committed in some other way. The exception is my country, Australia, which has had a decreasing murder rate, but we already had a decreasing murder rate before the gun laws were introduced. It seems difficult to demonstrate that gun restrictions have actually contributed to the decreased murder rate.

Most Australians seem ok with how our laws are, it is not an election issue, for example (well, not mainstream, there is a shooters party but it is pretty small). I grew up in a rural area where everyone had guns and nobody thought anything about it. There were no militia types, all very ordinary, just a tool of the trade in farming and of course you would use it for self defence if that ever came up, but it never did for anyone I knew.

Most "information" from both sides of the gun debate is just propaganda and emotional hype. Your neighbours are probably not murderous villains stopped only by their inability to legally purchase a firearm and you are not a rugged individualist who will overthrow your oppressive government or fight off a horde of attackers.

Nevertheless, we do have some court cases where women have been found not guilty after killing people with guns based on self defence, yet self defence is not a legal reason to acquire a firearm here. That is clearly a legal absurdity. Either firearms must be available for self defence or people who use them for self defence should be convicted even if they are women.

Re:Cisco or China?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would Cisco need to know that?

A surveillance system exists to allow one group of people to watch another group of people. The Chinese government need not tell Cisco that the Falung Gong are among the people it intends to watch. Exactly how would that impact the design specification anyway?

c'mon! what do you think they need such a system for? it's not like they no one has ever heard of the stuff they do to anyone they don't like

Re:Cisco or China?

[AmiMoJo]

Well at the very least Cisco must have provided training and technical support to them, and it is hard to see how they could give out advice on tracking people down based on their surfing habits to the Chinese government without having some idea of what it would be used for.

If I sell guns to a government that has a history of shooting dissidents then to me that is very clearly a morally wrong thing to do, and probably illegal too. We should ban the export of this sort of network hardware to certain countries in the same way we ban the sale of arms to them.

Re:Cisco or China?

[Anonymous Coward]

Blaming random people will not fix China, nor will it buy them a green card to a free country.

But it will make supporting the Chinese gov't an unprofitable endeavor, force them to cope such problems by themselves and make it that much more difficult to persecute people they don't get along with. Unless, of course; you are one of those people, who claim that morality should not get in the way of profit.

Re:Cisco or China?

[Machtyn]

The idea that markets create the best results is not fantasy. Moral valuation, as you've stated, is not a business decision, businesses are amoral.

The idea of the free market being able to produce the best results is dependent on the consumer having complete knowledge of all the available options. Obviously, advertising (lack thereof or deceptive), apathy, and a whole host of other anti-competitive, anti-market practices reduces the availability of complete knowledge and best results.

Re:Cisco or China?

[GooberToo]

"Cisco does not operate networks in China or elsewhere, nor does Cisco customize our products in any way that would facilitate censorship or repression," the representative said in a statement, adding that the company sells the same equipment in China that it sells in other nations in compliance with U.S. government regulations."

Providing consulting services which basically implement and possibly operate is not the same thing as officially "operating a network." I suspect they did exactly that as consulting services are big bucks for Cisco. For Cisco, their line item and contract probably says, "Consulting", but that likely included operation oversight, training, configuration, and assistance in tracking. This would be the standard expectations of many consulting gigs. I don't know why China would be any different.

Re:Cisco or China?

[drinkypoo]

Guns serve only one purpose: to shoot people (or perhaps animals). Sure, you can shoot at tin cans, but that's not the intended purpose.

I own several guns. Only wne was made to shoot people, by some very dedicated Belgians in the 1920s. Then it was made to do it cheaper by some very talented Peruvians in 1935. I have no idea if it ever killed anyone — probably not — but I do know it has killed deer (optionally, since.) There are plenty of guns made for shooting targets, specifically. One might argue that nearly any modern, small-caliber, long-barreled pistol falls into this category. And there's lots of accessories meant specifically for target shooters, especially grips.

If Cisco can be blamed, then so can Dell for providing the desktop workstations and displays, DuPont for the halocarbon fire extinguisher, APC for the UPS, McDonalds and Red Bull for feeding the sysadmin...

Frankly, I don't see what's wrong with that when you know the end results of your actions. These awful things are only possible because of the people who decide that their life is more important than the lives which will be lost if they carry out the job. I don't know for certain that I'd made a different decision than they did; I might well be there building the gas ovens the next time something like Nazism rolls through... but I don't think so. I hope most sincerely that I never need to find out.

Re:Cisco or China?

[matthew_t_west]

Yes, you may be correct. Who knows if this is a publicity stunt or a legitimate lawsuit? I would be surprised by neither, but I hadn't heard of the Falun Gong religion until yesterday... Like most things in life, the issue is grey. I hardly doubt it went down like this:

China: "Cisco, please help us tamp down the Falun Gong with your cool tracking and surveillance hardware and software."

Cisco: "FAA-LOON GONG, ya say? Sounds like terrorist talk to me. How much of that American money you willin' to pay me?"

Re:Cisco or China?

[matthew_t_west]

Cisco did nothing illegal so far:

"Cisco solutions and products containing 64-bit or less encryption may be delivered to most end users worldwide, except to entities or end users in the following countries: Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria."

http://www.cisco.com/web/about/doing_business/legal/global_export_trade/general_export/contract_compliance.html

I don't see any other trade embargo against China for encryption, so I doubt there is one for tracking and surveillance software and hardware. As well, AFAIK, China is a sovereign entity and it's government can do whatever they want on their soil. I doubt there is a case here, even if Cisco helped China.

Re:Cisco or China?

[AmiMoJo]

Yeah, that was my point really. It wasn't illegal, but it was morally wrong. We should make it illegal, but we won't because we rely too much on trade with and loans from China.

Re:Cisco or China?

[matthew_t_west]

Yes, I agree with you. Totally wrong, but not illegal. The US needs to get our priorities straight... Humanity doesn't stand a chance against the all mighty buck.

M

Re:Cisco or China?

[geekmux]

Victims don't want to put the blame "somewhere", they want to put the blame and find justice where it SHOULD be, which is why so many victims end up finding their own justice, because they know how screwed up the legal system is.

No, no, no. Let me guess. The legal system is "screwed up" because it lets the person you simply think did it go free because nobody could actually prove that he did it?

People like you need to live through being falsely accused of something to knock you back down a few notches.

No, I think the system is screwed up because we no longer have a "justice" system, we have a "legal" system, slammed full of loopholes and bad case precedent. THAT is why it is screwed up. Being wrongly accused is but one small facet of that.

And to be quite honest with you, I have been wrongly accused before, which took voice recognition to exonerate me. Regardless, statistics of personal justice taken out on the wrong person are barely measurable when compared to the painfully guilty walking on a technicality or loophole in the law.

Re:Cisco or China?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect CISCO are telling porkies. For the right price they will provide hardware that performs functions that they don't advertise. This is only a guess, however, but I know for a fact that one of the companies that sells CISCO microprocessors sells CISCO precisely this functionality that they coincidentally also don't advertise.

I forget when my NDA expires, so posting cowardlily.

Re:Cisco or China?

[Anonymous Coward]

NYT
The suit claims that additional Cisco marketing presentations prove that it promoted its technology as being capable of taking aim at dissident groups. In one marketing slide, the goals of the Golden Shield are described as to “douzheng evil Falun Gong cult and other hostile elements.” Douzheng is a Chinese term used to describe the persecution of undesirable groups. It was widely used by the Communist Party in the Cultural Revolution.

Re:Cisco or China?

[bye]

since you acknowledged that most guns are not used for crime, are you claiming that you want to use your gun to shoot a very likely unarmed person

1. The poster never said that most guns are not used for crime.

He certainly implied it. Look, if most guns are used for crime then the best course of action would be to bring them off the streets, don't you agree?

2. Even assuming the poster did say that, how in the hell do you jump to the conclusion that an intruder is 'very likely unarmed'?

I went to the logical conclusion to combine the "most guns are not used to commit crimes" fact with the "most burglaries are unarmed" fact (a burglar is generally not so stupid to bring a gun with himself and be convicted of robbery and armed assault. The whole rational point of burglary is to avoid having to use a gun. I do not claim that there are never any armed burglars, I just say that they are rare).

3. If someone attempts to break into your house, what is your course of action? Let it happen, and hope that the intruder leaves you and your family alone?

Correct. That's the best course of action even if you have a gun and confront a burglar.

If the intruder is armed then he is likely both better prepared (he planned the burglary in advance, while you learned about it just in that very second) and he is probably better at using arms against a real human (again, if he is in the profession of armed burglaries he is more likely to be trained at this 'using arms at night' business as well - even if you have excellent guns training you probably never shot a real human being, did you?).

Remember, burglars will generally just try to flee when they are discovered. Burglary 101 and stuff.

Put your Chuk Norris male reflexes aside and save your family from the sight of a shot burglar or a shot family member. (Even if the victim survives, both types of incidents will traumatize them a lot more and a lot longer than a few missing items.)

Talk about you being the judge, jury and executioner who decides life and death in one split second, in the middle of the night.

The intruder can avoid this situation by not trying to break into someone's house. The intruder has no one to blame but himself for the outcome.

After a lot of preparation we get to the meat of the argument.

Why do you assume that this split second decision, which seems to correct and obvious to you in the middle of the night, is in fact correct?

How do you know that the 'burglar' is not your teenage daughter , late home from a party? (real story, she died)

How do you know that the 'burglar' is not your neighbour who came in by mistake? (real story, he died)

How do you know that the 'burglar' is not your wife , who was trying not to wake you up? (real story, she died.)

There's a reason human civilization generally tries to put some amount of 'time' between the various steps of accusing someone, finding him guilty and executing him. (Just for the off chance that he didn't do it, you know.)

There's a real human price of your "freedom to shoot suspicious strangers at night", and you do not seem to be even aware of it!

Re:Cisco or China?

[bye]

The exception is my country, Australia, which has had a decreasing murder rate, but we already had a decreasing murder rate before the gun laws were introduced. It seems difficult to demonstrate that gun restrictions have actually contributed to the decreased murder rate.

Well, but homicides (not just gun related homicides) are at historic lows in Australia.

You obviously cannot prove that this historic low murder rate was only achieved through gun restrictions (in any complex country there are multiple complex processes going on, you cannot separate them out easily), but it certainly blows a large hole into the "gun restrictions will make crime worse , because criminals will ignore gun restriction laws!" argument, right?

Anything I have seen that claims a reduced murder rate from firearms bans only claims reduced "firearms murders", not murder rates overall, which seems pretty pointless unless you would be distressed at a murder committed with a gun but ok with murder committed in some other way.

It certainly gives us a part of the picture - no argument about that.

But why would it be 'pointless' to point out such outcomes? One of the popular argument against gun restrictions is the "criminals ignore laws, they will just own a gun illegally!".

As it turns out, when guns are banned in general, the number of both legal and illegal firearms goes down and thus the number of firearms related murders (and the number of accidental deaths and injuries) goes (way) down as well.

Which is also a pretty common-sense outcome.

Good luck.

[wcrowe]

I don't think it will work, but it is an interesting case. The implications would be staggering if they won. Of course, the 1% would never allow that.

Re:Good luck.

[CannonballHead]

Why should it work? Shouldn't China be held liable, not Cisco?

Maybe Cisco can sue China in turn, but at the moment, this sounds like someone that got attacked with a kitchen knife suing the kitchen knife maker.

Re:Good luck.

[Anonymous Coward]

Then based on what are e.g. chem companies held responsible for simply selling compounds that can be used for making explosives or psychoactives? Simple (by now used-to-be-) everyday-compounds that can be equally used for making anything else, so that industries built on making anything else now suffer the extra costs of this?

Re:Good luck.

[guspasho]

How could China possibly be held liable? Everything the Chinese gov't does within their own borders is basically legal by definition. What can a US judge do to them? For all they care you might as well be suing Mother Nature. Cisco, on the other hand, is a US company and may be in violation of laws prohibiting certain activities overseas (if such laws exist, I've no idea) and more importantly, they can actually be tried and held liable here, unlike the Chinese.

Re:Good luck.

[guspasho]

Also, you missed the critical part of the summary that was even helpfully underlined and hyperlinked for you. They plaintiffs allege that Cisco was contracted for the specific purpose of committing the persecutions, it even had a name. So no, it isn't like a kitchen knife maker being sued, it's more like the guy driving the getaway car being prosecuted, even though he never even stepped in the bank that was robbed.

Re:Good luck.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not speaking about that experimentalists by now as an implication are simply forced to give up their hobbies, as natural citizens have no legal ways of obtaining a bunch of fundamental chemicals. Sure children are not interested in natural sciences any more, as physics and chemistry can indeed be boring on a blackboard/sheet. No experiments, no scientists. Is that what we want?

Re:Good luck.

[amiga3D]

If a guy walks into a store and says "hey I need to cut my neighbors head off, which knife do you have that would be best for the job?" You then go, "yes sir, this one right here should work nice, the serrated edge should cut right through the neck without the blade turning on the bone!" Well then you might could sue the guy who sold him the knife. I think they are alleging that this is essentially what Cisco did.

Re:Good luck.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Chinese gov't already has a well known and well earned reputation as a group of people not fond of people disagreeing with them or being kind to said individuals. Cisco is being held to account for dealings that would most likely cause capture, detainment, and likely torture and murder of dissidents. This is more like giving a knife to a person already in the act of stabbing someone or catching them and holding them for a knife wielding maniac than just offering an innocuous product that might be used for nefarious ends. There was willful and active participation on Cisco's part.

Re:Good luck.

[Lally Singh]

The results of Discovery will be *awesome*.

Re:Good luck.

[CannonballHead]

Point conceded. Where's the "retract comment" button...

Re:Good luck.

[subiculum]

And what about the knife manufacture who regularly creates this same knife with the same description, without specifying the certain target, or they just specify a technically identical vertebrate as the target - and the shopkeeper is an expert on his products, as we expect him to be... ?? Is this considered as an active contribution to a criminal act?

Re:Good luck.

[Kennon]

You are comparing a single person to a government that represents billions of people. Using your rationale people in Libya should all sue the hundreds of various companies that manufacture all the military equipment that NATO has been using to blow them up. Silly.

Re:Good luck.

[amiga3D]

huh? I think you've got it backwards. I'm saying that if Cisco actively participated knowing in helping provide equipment, services and knowledge that they were helping to catch political dissidents for the chinese government.....they might could be sued. If they just thought that some chinese civil service IT guys wanted to build a network then probably not. Suing a government is a little more problematic. I am sure that if say, General Dynamics sold some kind of guided bomb to Libya and the Libyan government's representative asked them to help them with problems targeting civilian populations hiding in city basements and General Dynamics reprogrammed the weapons to aid in the killing of said civilians......civil suits would be the least of General Dynamics problems. The key here is that they claim that Cisco actually worked with the chinese government to make the equipment more effective in helping to catch the persecuted dissidents. If they went further than just selling some items off the shelf and I was on the jury I'd bust 'em.

Re:Good luck.

[adavies42]

it's more like the guy driving the getaway car being prosecuted, even though he never even stepped in the bank that was robbed.

and if a security guard is shot dead during the robbery, that's felony murder in most (all?) states for the driver, a crime which carries the death penalty in at least some states. i for one wouldn't have a problem with a "known or should have known"-type standard being applied to corporate actions like this is alleged to have been, with a corporate death penalty being totally on the table as a possible consequence.

Re:Good luck.

[MightyMartian]

Haven't US companies been sued in US courts over ill deeds committed overseas before?

Re:Good luck.

[guspasho]

If we're going to treat corporations as individuals, it would be nice to see the death penalty applied once in a while. Lord know some companies deserve it.

Where the buck stops

[hilldog]

When it comes down to business and making a buck or human rights business wins every time. It's always business as usual no matter the human rights record. This has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with human rights and companies making poor choices.

Re:Where the buck stops

[PopeRatzo]

It's always business as usual no matter the human rights record.

Corporations, by design, do not recognize "human rights".

As long as we're all going to go along with the fiction that the corporate structure is still useful in the 21st century, we're going to continue down this destructive road.

The notions that corporations have any "rights" is just ridiculous.

As long as the attention is on Cisco selling police state technology to China and not on Apple building iPhones in murderous sweatshops, everything's going to be peachy. As long as we don't have to examine our own complicity in the world's problems, we can all still pretend we're really good people. As long as we're going to continue to allow our own consumption patterns benefit the worst people in the world, we're going to keep getting what we've got.

Re:Where the buck stops

[drinkypoo]

As long as the attention is on Cisco selling police state technology to China and not on Apple building iPhones in murderous sweatshops, everything's going to be peachy.

you just reminded me of a deep thought I had last night. I doubt I'm the first, but here we go: To retain respect for porn and iPads, one must not watch them in the making.

Phalus Dong

[Anonymous Coward]

I always thought they hide something ...

If you are breaking the law...

[davevr]

... then it is not false imprisonment. Not to say that the law shouldn't be changed, but hey, get your terms straight...

Re:If you are breaking the law...

[cowboy76Spain]

... then it is not false imprisonment. Not to say that the law shouldn't be changed, but hey, get your terms straight...

Not that I side with just another sect, but a government can impose an unlawful imprisonement. This goes like that:

1. Chinese Government sets a set of laws (even dictatures have laws).
2. Group or individuals read the laws, and try to get their objectives being careful of not breaking any.
3. The government notices, and the state security imprison that people even if they didn't break the laws. To avoid making it too obvious, usually the detainees disappear until they have been punished enough, or forever.
4. Any investigations about the fate of that people is stopped in its tracks, and the officers responsible are rewarded.

There have been news about chinese "unofficial" prisons. So yes, you could have unlawful imprisonment by the state. Anyway, in China the laws that apply are Chinese law, so it should be a Chinese judge who investigates this and issues veredict (I would not count about that). This lawsuit is just a publicity stunt, they are suing Cisco because if they sued China it would be dismissed almost immediately.

Re:If you are breaking the law...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with your statement is that in China, unlike in most Western countries, people can be and are arrested and imprisoned without being charged for breaking any laws. That is why they say false imprisonment.

Re:If you are breaking the law...

[Anonymous Coward]

... then it is not false imprisonment.

It is when the charges are trumped up, as in this case.

Re:If you are breaking the law...

[adavies42]

So yes, you could have unlawful imprisonment by the state.

does anyone know what the "official" chinese law on the typical western civil rights is? i know the USSR had a huge pile of constitutions and guarantees which, if taken seriously, would've made it (at least) as free a country as the USA--they were just blithely ignored by the authorities. (iirc, claiming legitimacy under those laws was one of the primary tactics various dissidents used to gain support.) i wouldn't be terribly surprised if china has a law on the books that says something like "freedom of expression is guaranteed", but just ignores it; otoh, i also wouldn't be surprised if it read "freedom of expressions is guaranteed, except when it disrupts the harmony of society".

Re:If you are breaking the law...

[MightyMartian]

The Chinese legal code means as much or as little as the leadership decides it means. While China is making some strides in the direction of rule of law, it remains essentially a state without universal rule of law. If you're deemed a threat, regardless of whether you have not broken any statute, you will end up in the security net of the Chinese state.

Oh boy...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

This is going to be one to watch: The US is supposed to be all against repression and lovey-dovey about religious freedom and stuff; but there is No Fucking Way that they would let the precedent be set that corporate quislings executing illegal state activities are in any way culpable(see also retroactive telco immunity...) because that would cut into their own ability to wiretap whatever they want with the full connivance of basically anybody who is anybody.

Awkward. Hopefully publicly so....

Re:Oh boy...

[DigiShaman]

If I had to guess, the Judicial branch will let it slide because such products and services were not endorsed by the Federal Government. Carry on Cisco, business as usual.

However, the aftermath of this might involve legislation to prevent future exportation of technology to be used in this manor...exceeeeeppt, you can still sell it inside the US.

See? We can have our cake and eat it too.

Re:Oh boy...

[amiga3D]

Actually the US govt. exempts itself from legal suits and all kinds of laws many, many times. In at least one case a US president (Jackson I think) actually just ignored a Supreme Court ruling. He completely blew it off.

Re:Oh boy...

[guspasho]

Whatever the Chinese gov't does in China is legal. By definition, considering the type of government they have. Does the US even have any laws that prohibit US companies from participating in such oppression?

Re:Oh boy...

[tnk1]

I think it is more likely to be decided on whether there is a law that covers this sort of cooperation.

It's a fact that Cisco did something legal in China. The Chinese government was their customer.

However, a company can still face trial for indulging in certain sorts of business practices. It doesn't matter if it happened in China and was sold in China only. You can still be in violation of US law. The US may not be able to reach out and take you from your country of origin, but it's technically not illegal for the US to outlaw someone who has never stepped foot on US soil or even had dealings with the US. There's nothing preventing it from declaring all French people guilty of being French and thus subject to the death penalty. Admittedly, not very diplomatic, or practical, but a sovereign country can pass any law it wants to, and it will apply to you unless you stay out of their clutches.

So, yes, Cisco could be held accountable if there is a law, and if Cisco broke that law. I don't think such a law will be read as apply to China, since laws like this tend to have opt-out clauses where the Executive branch either creates a list of "evil countries" or it has the power to create a list of exceptions to human rights regulations. You can expect that China (and Cisco) will likely get a pass on this one.

Re:Oh boy...

[drinkypoo]

How far do you go back with this, anyway? If such a suit were to succeed then the followup would be Jews vs. IBM.

Re:Oh boy...

[Doc Ruby]

There are plenty of people alive with standing to sue Cisco for actual damages, including wrongful death of family members they personally lost.

Those Jews still alive with that same standing in damages by IBM's work for the Nazis have a case. Dead people are arguable.

Re:Oh boy...

[Eponymous Hero]

excellent point.

there are a lot of things that are not explicitly law because we've either never encountered the situation, or because it's assumed that we all know better. thank god, too, because we don't need laws that say things like "don't stick your hand in the garbage disposal." it's common sense that we should not have to be told not to enable torturing and oppression of any peoples. we all know that's bad, right? all men (not just men (and women) born in America) are created equal, right?

there is no point of saying you, as a country called the United States of America, believe in equal rights among humanity, but somehow condone these violations simply because they're not in America. that's hypocrisy, and negates any stand we take in preference of human rights.

they say that all it takes for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing...but if good men do nothing, are they still good men? silence is acceptance. silence is complacence. Cisco may not have any legal obligation not to oppress groups from other countries, but if they have a corporate charter that grants them the same rights as humans, then i reserve my right to criticize them as a human, and say that they are, as a corporation, a bad person.

Cisco could have set an example for the world, and made it that much more difficult for China to acquire quality products and services to carry out their oppression. instead they chose to do evil and make a short-term buck in the name of capitalism.

Re:Oh boy...

[jrumney]

Whatever the Chinese gov't does in China is legal.

Not necessarily, under International Law.

Re:Oh boy...

[gmhowell]

Whatever the Chinese gov't does in China is legal. By definition, considering the type of government they have. Does the US even have any laws that prohibit US companies from participating in such oppression?

Richard Nixon said something similar once...

Re:Oh boy...

[gmhowell]

How far do you go back with this, anyway? If such a suit were to succeed then the followup would be Jews vs. IBM.

IIRC, they've sued Damiler-Benz and VW. If they didn't sue Dehomag, I'm pretty sure they have sued IBM.

Re:Oh boy...

[adavies42]

However, the aftermath of this might involve legislation to prevent future exportation of technology to be used in this manor

now that's what i call corporate feudalism....

Re:Oh boy...

[subiculum]

It's real, in the news in Hungary we can often read about action for damages lawsuits by American Jewish interest groups suing the Hungarian state, the owner of the successor companies of the Hungarian State Ralways with allegations that they actively contributed in the holocaust, by assisting deportations of Jews. In total their demands sum up to multi-billion dollars. It is real. We can also read about that they are at many points, armed with pretty much distorted historical data, and if you bring it down to employees of the railway company, Hungary can prove that there's no data on railway workers providing any kind of violent assistance... The Jewish are claiming away a sum close to Hungary's yearly budget, it sounds crazy but it's true.

Re:Oh boy...

[pdabbadabba]

Yes. It is called the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA).

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Tort_Claims_Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doe_v._Unocal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosa_v._Alvarez-Machain

Re:Oh boy...

[guspasho]

Excuse me. For all intents and purposes in a Chinese court it might as well be legal.

Re:Oh boy...

[mad_minstrel]

International Law is only as good as the troops you're willing to send to uphold it.

Re:Oh boy...

[heathen_01]

and it will apply to you unless you stay out of their clutches.

That is an increasingly difficult thing to do.

charity starts at home

[Anonymous Coward]

I suggest the Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Law Foundation, on behalf of native Americans, sue Winchester Firearms, Colt Industries, and Smith & Wesson for designing systems to help the white man suppress the Indians.

Re:charity starts at home

[Doc Ruby]

That actually sounds like an excellent idea. In fact, I'd love to see that lawsuit's penalty phase confiscate the land that your great-grandpappy stole from a tribe of people he helped genocide. Anonymous Whitey Coward.

Woosh! There goes to the point you are missing!

[Anonymous Coward]

Falung Gong is sueing cisco not because it's right, but it's because it's sensationalism.They want to bring attention to their presecution in china. You can't sue china in china, you can't sue china in the US. So you sue Cisco for providing the equipment to China.

Of course they will lose, but it gets the point across. People in China are being persecuted because of their religion and Cisco is an accomplice. It's not about holding cisco liable for anything lawfully wrong, it's about pointing the morality spotlight towards cisco and china.

Should Falung Gong do this? Hell yes! At most some lawyers get rich, but it is a shot at getting the discussion of religious freedom started.

Re:Woosh! There goes to the point you are missing!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure Falung Gong is in the rightful position to be pointing moral sportlights.

To me Falung Gong is like Scientology, it's a damn cult that started off as a money grabbing scheme that feeds on stupid people willing to part with their money for supposed immortality. While the western media like to rose tint this cult, I've personally known a few who did believe in the nonsense of Falung Gong and had done really stupid things like reject medical therapy/treatments and just practice the Falung Gong exercise (not similar to Christian kooks just praying to Jesus for their illness to go away). The fact that the founder took a few million dollars and fled to the US for protection and that he flip flops his stance on whether that Falung Gong is a religion (originally he claims to be Buddha re-incarnated, then he claims to be a prophet, then he claims Falung Gong is a "spiritial movement") says a lot about this cult's roots. Even now that it has be morphed into a slightly different beast that *may* have a human right's angle to it, I still say that the overall influence of the Falung Gong movement is poisonous, especially in a country with low education and highly suspecting to superstition. It's especially interesting in /. where usually people are quite hostile towards cults and religion in general that when it comes to *China* the stance completely flips.

While China's handling of the "students" is highly questionable, I hardly see Falung Gong to be the right man to be pointing fingers.

Re:Woosh! There goes to the point you are missing!

[Local ID10T]

Falung Gong is sueing cisco...

No, Human Rights Law Foundation Inc. of Washington, D.C. is suing Cisco Inc. on behalf of some people half way around the world who have never heard of the Human Rights Law Foundation Inc. of Washington D.C.

Its a handful of lawyers who pretend they are helping people who have never heard of them by suing some company.

Only a lawyer could believe in such a farce.

Re:Woosh! There goes to the point you are missing!

[heathen_01]

So because they are nutcases its ok to hunt them down, imprision, torture and kill them? Your ad hominem attack is obvious and irrelevant.

For those who think this won't work

[troll -1]

I suggest reading Jay Feinman's excellent book Law 101 - Everything You Need To Know About The American Legal System which covers, among other things, the McDonald's Hot Coffee case and explains how you can sue anyone for just about anything in the US under civil law even if it didn't happened here.

Nokia, Samsung, Cisco. Just sue them

[Anonymous Coward]

Nokia, Samsung, Cisco and a bunch of smaller, less known businesses.
Just sue them for the same reason.

This is one reason I've never incorporated

[blair1q]

I don't for a second believe that "Cisco" did anything. I can easily believe someone in Cisco's employ did something stupid and/or evil.

When you have people working "for" you, they're going to fuck you over eventually, either deliberately or negligently.

Re:This is one reason I've never incorporated

[guspasho]

If that is the case then when can any behavior ever be attributed to a corporation rather than its employees? Since all corporations are comprised of people, this argument can be used to absolve every corporation of everything ever.

Re:This is one reason I've never incorporated

[cowboy76Spain]

Well, but they were obeying whose orders? And who was not checking the stupid ones?

An intelligent boss won't tell you to do something illegal. He will tell you "I want more deals with China, you work out the details". Then he'll go golfing, not because he likes to but because when thing begin to get hotter, he can then show his horror at your misbehaviour and lament that "if I only had known about that, I would not have never approved of it."

Re:This is one reason I've never incorporated

[blair1q]

1. Never. Corporations are not entities in fact. They are artificial aggregations of entities to serve a collective purpose. The way we treat them as individuals is stupid.

2. "comprise", not "are comprised of".

3. Absolve the corporation, but only if you can identify the individuals responsible, and if you can't then the one responsible is the CEO, the board, and the shareholders. As things are now, the corporation shields these people against the consequences of their decisions.

Re:This is one reason I've never incorporated

[blair1q]

And that is why I won't put myself in that situation. Because in reality you don't control people even if you employ them, and by the time you can fire them they've fucked you on your own dime.

Re:This is one reason I've never incorporated

[guspasho]

2. Wow, I have no idea how I managed to get that wrong for so long! Thanks.

Re:This is one reason I've never incorporated

[tpholland]

You didn't. See this Language Log post.

Re:This is one reason I've never incorporated

[blair1q]

The fact that the OED documents misuse of a word does not make misusing it correct usage.

Dictionaries exist to assist you in decoding language. They are rather useless in helping you encode it. See any number of malaprops in the English documentation for products that come from Asia.

The fact is, comprises sounds like composes but unequivocally means includes. 150 years of dunces can't change that.

Re:Related lawsuit filed against second U.S. corp.

[Anonymous Coward]

If Ford had provided technical assistance on which model of vehicle would be best for transporting the Falun Gong members to labor camps, and provided marketing documents indicating that "you can fit three dissidents comfortably in the back seat," maybe then it would be the same.

Maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

Honor your elders, no murder - leads to revenge killing, takes valuable members of the community away, no adultery - those lead to honor killings, outcasts and revenge killings, no theft, no lying about your neighbors.

....which very few people followed because maybe, just maybe, they saw them as just capricious rules with set to control them? On the other hand, if there was a leader-philosopher that explained in a reasoned way why those things - like revenge killings - were not a good idea, people would follow them more often?

I don't know about you, but when the reasoning behind a rule or law is explained, I have a much greater chance of accepting it and following it.

God says NO! Is a shitty and superstitious reason to me.

Since the parent brought up Buddhism, in that "religion" you are encouraged to prove to yourself that the teachings are correct. "If you see the Buddha on the side of the road - kill him!" is the metaphor used.

Mostly I agree: religion was a way for primitive man to teach moral codes. We should be beyond such backward thinking by now. Unfortunately, in 2,000 years, we haven't progressed very much - except for fancier tools.

Re:Maybe

[Wyatt Earp]

Humans were and are violent Great Apes living in giant societies that are alien to what our species lived like for the majority of it's time on the planet. Why would we be beyond what we were 2000 or 5000 years ago?

The fact that we don't throw feces at each other during arguments is real progress.

Re:Maybe

[SquirrelDeth]

The fact that we don't throw feces at each other during arguments is real progress.
No we just lost the ability to poop on command.

Re:Maybe

[ImprovOmega]

On the other hand, if there was a leader-philosopher that explained in a reasoned way why those things - like revenge killings - were not a good idea, people would follow them more often?

You mean, like Jesus? I mean, he was a great moral teacher (this apart from whether you believe in Christian doctrine or not) and a lot of what he said made great sense and would lead to people living harmoniously in society. But then again, most of the great philosophers like Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle, espoused great moral teaching that would have lead to harmonious societies. No one will follow them for their own sake except for a handful of rationalists who are quickly overrun by the rest of humanity going after whatever it can get.

Religion is the tool that equalizes that and gets even the common man to concede that helping to build society may be in his own best interest. No amount of strictly secular thought is going to overcome that impulse in a sufficient percentage of the populace to make a society function properly.

So here's the deal. If you can apply a strictly secular moral code to yourself, then congratulations, go for it. But don't lose sight of the fact that religion is what's keeping the rest of the barbarian hordes from just up and taking all your stuff and leaving you for dead on the side of the road. Even if it's not for you, don't knock it for the other 95% of the population.

Re:Maybe

[MightyMartian]

I don't buy this at all. We're a social animal. One way or the other we're going to create codes of conduct, because that's what social animals do. Religion is one way to do that, but no one can tell me that before the cognitive hardware was in place for religion that our ancestors were living in chaos. Our nearest relatives don't live in anarchy, and so far as we can tell they have nothing like religion.

This idea that humans need the Great Lie is the last bastion of the religious advocates (a sort of behavioral Pascal's Wager), and I think it's just pure bunk. Religion certainly plays its part in organizing a society and just as importantly as a tribal marker and enforcing dominance hierarchies (look that up, that's how the great apes, including humans, organize themselves).

A society would not descend into violence and anarchy without religion. It would simply find some other way of justifying its moral codes.

Re:Maybe

[geminidomino]

The fact that we don't throw feces at each other during arguments is real progress.

Well, except every 4 years or so.

"Mud" is a euphemism.

Re:Maybe

[Gilmoure]

The fact that we don't throw feces at each other during arguments is real progress.

*golf clap*

Re:Related lawsuit filed against second U.S. corp.

[amiga3D]

I think that one misses the mark by a sight more than the cisco one. Cisco deliberately built systems to aid in the hunting down of dissidents while ford just sold cars and trucks for Officials to ride around in. I'm not buying this one at all, the first was iffy enough.

I wonder if Westerners can join it?

[WindBourne]

Seriously. Cisco has helped Chinese leaders and their minions attack loads of western computers and steal money,info from them. Perhaps, if a group lawsuit is done, this could be taken on in a large way. Ideally, it would lead Cisco to pull out of China.

Re:I wonder if Westerners can join it?

[DaMattster]

Seriously. Cisco has helped Chinese leaders and their minions attack loads of western computers and steal money,info from them. Perhaps, if a group lawsuit is done, this could be taken on in a large way. Ideally, it would lead Cisco to pull out of China.

I think I'd sooner hit Cisco, where it counts, the wallet. There are now viable open source alternatives to Cisco routers: OpenBSD's OSPF/BGP implementation and Vyatta. Both can do VLANs, VRF, VRRP, and MPLS. Both can effectively be drop in replacements. I run a small business on the side and all of my infrastructure is OpenBSD-based.

Re:I wonder if Westerners can join it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you want to join it? It is just a more moronic version of scientology.

Re:I wonder if Westerners can join it?

[Geminii]

It's actually a bonus from Cisco's point of view. If the morality heat gets turned up high enough, someone's going to pass a law saying that American networking companies can't sell kit to China. As long as _no_ American companies can sell to China, Cisco's going to be less concerned about its marketplace position than if only _they_ can't sell to China.

Of course, at that point it simply becomes a case of feeding the black market. The Chinese government pays triple for its networking gear and doesn't even notice, a bunch of shady people get very rich, and the market rolls on.

Anyone can sue anyone, merit is not required

[guspasho]

Whatever the Chinese gov't does in China is legal. By definition, considering the type of government they have. Does the US even have any laws that prohibit US companies from participating in such oppression? I think that would determine whether this case has any merit to begin with.

Re:Anyone can sue anyone, merit is not required

[Anonymous Coward]

"Whatever X gov't does in X is legal."

So... The Nazis were right after all?

Sorry. I had to be "that guy".

Re:Anyone can sue anyone, merit is not required

[Josir]

Nazis also did "legal" treatment to jews and other minorities. Were they right ? This case remembers me the IBM prosecution that helped Hitler to do the jew census. This also remembers me the documentary "The Corporation"

Re:Anyone can sue anyone, merit is not required

[geekmux]

Whatever the Chinese gov't does in China is legal. By definition, considering the type of government they have...

Uhhh...so what is the excuse of the US Government? They certainly seem to have the same cavalier attitude about doing whatever, regardless of some pesky documents that SHOULD be getting in their way (cough, Constitution, cough)...

Re:Anyone can sue anyone, merit is not required

[Doc Ruby]

No, even in China their mafia government official has laws that limit and prohibit many actions by the mafia government. They're often ignored. But those acts are still illegal. The problem is getting the Chinese government to officially recognize that they're illegal, and punish them according to the law.

Hence suing in US court, which has laws against US corporations violating foreign laws, international laws, US laws, and all kinds of other laws. And where people suing still have some chance of seeing even a powerful corporation or a powerful foreign government found guilty, and even actually punished by the US government.

Not a safe bet, not nearly reliable justice. But far better odds than in China.

Re:Anyone can sue anyone, merit is not required

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably. There are laws making it illegal for a US company (and its foreign subsidiaries) to bribe foreign officials, even if all the bribery takes place in the other country. There are laws making it illegal to leave the US with the purpose of engaging in pedophilia in another country, even if what they do is legal there. There very well could be laws regarding a US company helping a foreign country oppress its citizens. Seems like the kind of law that would have been passed post-WW2, Re: IBM. If nothing else, if Cisco helped the Chinese government do any tracking that involved accessing computers in the US (say, a laptop that someone used on a trip to the US), they could be liable here, depending on how much they knew.

And let's face it: half of this lawsuit is to find out how much they knew. The other half is to publicly shame Cisco for what it did (like shaming IBM for selling database infrastructure to the Nazis that was really, really good at personnel tracking...). And if things go really well, Falun Gong and the Human Rights Law Foundation might get a couple hundred bucks each to help further their respective missions.

Re:Anyone can sue anyone, merit is not required

[ImprovOmega]

The U.S. certainly has laws to punish its citizens for transgressions abroad (these were implemented primarily to stop the practice of "sex tourism" to places like Thailand that have lower age of consent laws). I wonder how well those would apply to corporations?

Re:Anyone can sue anyone, merit is not required

[starcraftsicko]

If Cisco were a Chinese company that maybe sent the odd salesman to the US or maybe had a subsidiary division in the US, this would not be an issue.

Whatever the Chinese gov't does in China is legal. By definition, considering the type of government they have.

Yes. If they do it in China. The real legal question will be whether they did any of it in the US. Were the US executives aware of the sale? Engineers? Did they know or should they have known how the equipment would be used? What did they do when their knowledge was undeniable?

Does the US even have any laws that prohibit US companies from participating in such oppression?

The better question is whether they have laws that shield companies in ways that they wouldn't shield individuals. We know that the US is willing to prosecute individuals for crimes, attempted crimes, and planned crimes abroad (think pedophiles in S/ SE Asia for a prominent example). IANAL, but I believe that the critical act granting jurisdiction is planning in the US.

I think that would determine whether this case has any merit to begin with.

If they planned it; if they knew what was being planned; if what they planned would have been illegal if if done in Denver; or PLANNED for Denver; if any of that can be proven, this might be interesting if anyone cares in 30 years when Cisco is done filing pretrial motions.

Re:Anyone can sue anyone, merit is not required

[guspasho]

I'm not saying that what China does is moral or right, merely that attempting to sue China is futile. I'm just wondering whether this suit has a chance of succeeding.

Re:Anyone can sue anyone, merit is not required

[guspasho]

"They're often ignored."

Exactly. It is as futile to sue the Chinese government in China as it is in the US.

So what US laws might Cisco be violating? That's what I'm wondering.

Re:Anyone can sue anyone, merit is not required

[adavies42]

"Whatever X gov't does in X is legal."

So... The Nazis were right after all?

had they won, they would've been. "international" law is whatever stronger countries impose on weaker ones.

Re:Anyone can sue anyone, merit is not required

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever the Chinese gov't does in China is legal. By definition, considering the type of government they have. Does the US even have any laws that prohibit US companies from participating in such oppression? I think that would determine whether this case has any merit to begin with.

Interesting question. Congress has specific power granted to it, by the Constitution, to raise and maintain armies. Running guns becomes a bit of a gray area in comparison to the specific grant. "Laws that prohibit" have a flip side for Politicians: What's in it for me (defending you) ? Unfortunately for Cisco, the answer is not very much at all.

Re:Anyone can sue anyone, merit is not required

[Josir]

I understood your point. But I think that any peaceful method to bother them is valid. Any method to wake up chinese people somehow is valid. The evil countries are not North Korea or Libia or Iran. All this 3 countries are poor and they have any single technology or strategic advantages. The real danger comes from China and Saudi Arabia. But while they continue to buy US Bonds, they will continue to commit atrocities against their own people.

Re:Anyone can sue anyone, merit is not required

[MightyMartian]

That's why they're suing Cisco.

Re:Anyone can sue anyone, merit is not required

[MightyMartian]

There are other prohibitions than sex tourism. US companies can't bribe foreign officials. Mind you, this is a civil suit, so it's quite different, but the underlying concept that US citizens and US companies cannot act with impunity in foreign lands, even if what they're doing is legal or par for the course in said lands.

Re:Anyone can sue anyone, merit is not required

[guspasho]

Cisco is a US company and can be sued in US courts. China is not and can not be sued in a US court. That's why they're suing Cisco. I don't know what law they hope to prove that Cisco broke, that's what I'd like to know.

Re:Anyone can sue anyone, merit is not required

[MightyMartian]

It's a civil suit. They don't have to demonstrate Cisco broke any laws, they have to demonstrate that Cisco aided in the imprisonment and possibly death of Falun Gong members.

Re:Anyone can sue anyone, merit is not required

[guspasho]

US presidents get to appoint federal judges. The only check on that is the appointment challenge by the senate. But if the president and the party that controls the senate both favor expanded government power then it's remarkably easy to find a judge that will also favor expanded government power.

Re:Anyone can sue anyone, merit is not required

[guspasho]

Two-party rule is better than one-party rule by only the slimmest of possible margins, and results in tyranny only slightly more slowly.

Re:Anyone can sue anyone, merit is not required

[Doc Ruby]

Note that Falun Gong isn't suing China, it's suing Cisco. Not so futile to sue Cisco in the US.

The Alien Torts Law under which Falun Gong's DC human rights org is suing Cisco prohibits US companies like Cisco from violating international laws and "norms".

There are also US laws that Cisco would have violated if it had been accessory to false imprisonment, murder etc as specified in the complaint.

Re:Anyone can sue anyone, merit is not required

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever the Chinese gov't does in China is legal. By definition, considering the type of government they have. Does the US even have any laws that prohibit US companies from participating in such oppression? I think that would determine whether this case has any merit to begin with.

As you noted in your subject, this is a civil case. Anyone can sue anyone; US laws only matter inasmuch as they allow an aggrieved party to seek redress from another party.

Re:Anyone can sue anyone, merit is not required

[sabt-pestnu]

I disagree.

Like the US, China has laws that affect even the government.

Unlike the US, China has proven willing to actively harass people (including lawyers) who attempt to enforce particular of those laws.

The US, on the other hand, adopts a more defensive strategy: Sovereign Immunity, State secrets privilege and the occasional Selective enforcement incident.

This does not mean that what it does is "legal", either by international standards or even the laws of the nation itself. It just means that the government has the power to avoid the laws.

Re:Related lawsuit filed against second U.S. corp.

[guspasho]

Except that Ford accepted a special order from China to design, manufacture, and operate vehicles specifically for the persecution of Falun Gong members. So yeah, in that way the analogy would work.

Jurisdiction?

[Un pobre guey]

How is this litigable in a US court?

Re:Jurisdiction?

[mortonda]

Yeah this was my first question. Exactly who has legal standing to bring the case?

Re:Jurisdiction?

[andb52]

Jurisdiction comes from the Alien Tort Statute. There have been a number of recent cases of aliens suing corporations in the US because of violations of international law. Whether what Cisco did in China was legal under Chinese law does not matter; the ATS is all about whether norms of customary international law have been violated. Torture is the primary example. This is not some crazy lawsuit; it is a tried and true method of punishing corporations for their complicity in human rights violations.

Re:Jurisdiction?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up! However, the problem is that very similar cases such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Tort_Statute#Kiobel_v._Royal_Dutch_Petroleum have ended badly for the plaintiff. The Falun Gong case was filed in a different circuit than Kiobel, though, so maybe it will get a different result.

Re:Jurisdiction?

[Anonymous Coward]

A US company breaking US laws? Everyone knows corporates are immune to legal action!

Re:Jurisdiction?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's look at it from a different point. The US has laws that prohibit providing munitions to specific countries. And they determine what is considered munitions. As such anything involving encryption can be considered illegal to export. So if in another country (such as China in this example) encryption equipment is being provided that causes some form of harm then US courts would be the perfect place (or jurisdiction) for the suit to take place. (This is just an example!!!)

So in regards to this case, I guess it really depends on what if any laws are being broken. Cisco (supposedly) didn't just sell them equipment. They actively participated in the process. Does the US have laws that allow / forbid companies participating in the torture of citizens in foreign nations? Have any export violations taken place? There are a lot of things in play that could make it a candidate for it to be in US's jurisdiction.

Re:Jurisdiction?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this litigable in a US court?

The same way I can spill coffee on myself, sue someone else, and win.

Welcome to the USA. You might want to read one of the best blogs on the subject.

Re:Jurisdiction?

[Anonymous Coward]

If Cisco is an American company headquartered somewhere in the US (which I don't know for sure but would think is the case) or it conducts business in the US (which is certainly the case) then the US has jurisdiction. It probably has at least some jurisdiction in further scenarios (e.g., it has a large proportion of US stockholders, it conducts businesses with US companies -even if those businesses happen entirely overseas-, its business activities are regulated by some sort of international treaty of which the US is a signatory, etc.)

Re:Jurisdiction?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently the lawsuit will be dropped quickly, right after Beijing starts dumping the US foreign debt bonds she holds and the value of USD starts to fall like a brick tied to a hot iron. China cannot allow the USA to mess with chinese internal politics and this Cisco lawsuit is a direct threat to Beijing's authority. Expect to see new, more powerful North Korea nuke tests, as Beijing helps its satellite state with mil tech to harass the US and her asian allies more and more. Expect even more complete disregard for US intellectual property in chinese economy. Expect even tighter chinese cooperation with the russkies in the fields of mil tech, aviation and software development.

Otherwise, the Alient Tort Statue of USA is most often used to steal invaluable works of art, mostly paintings, from helpless little european countries like the neutral Austria. The axis of New York - Tel Aviv comes forward with fake jews who claim whatever holocaust ordeals and demand their paintings back, even though those paintings have been hanging in the austrian state gallery of art since 1925 and Hitler was a nobody until 1933 and didn't occupy Austria until 1938. The jew-packed US court then gives right to the paintings for the jews and the USA diplomatically and economically blackmails Austria to hand over the paintings, even though the verdict has no jurisdiction in Europe. The fake jews then sell the painting at half the nominal price to US art galleries, so it is essentially a looting of european art heritage in the end result.

Austrian people are so repulsed they now openly venerate the Mossad-assassinated far right politician Jorg Haider and some even proposed to hang the pic of Adolf Hitler in place of the paintings that were raptured by the amero-zionists. The mean and stingy greed of jews once again creates increasing repulsion in Europe and many people are now pro-palestinian. Even the germans who see many millions of mostly turkish muslims living and working among them, start to open their eyes and shed their artificially imposed sense of guilt towards the jews, because the greed of jews and the brutality of the zionist regime open their eyes. Today only USA and UK remain faithful servants of the zionist entity that occupies the Holy Land.

Re:Jurisdiction?

[tehcyder]

Jurisdiction comes from the Alien Tort Statute. There have been a number of recent cases of aliens suing corporations in the US because of violations of international law. Whether what Cisco did in China was legal under Chinese law does not matter; the ATS is all about whether norms of customary international law have been violated. Torture is the primary example. This is not some crazy lawsuit; it is a tried and true method of punishing corporations for their complicity in human rights violations.

I assume you're using the word "alien" in the legal rather than Roswell sense?

Re:Jurisdiction?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then lots of companies working within China with any tie with Chinese officials or government, should be incriminated too!
Example Huawei, leader of domestic routing hardware, managed by Chinese government officials and some from the Red Army. sue them too. Ridiculous

Not the same as suing gun manufacturers

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more like the criminal prosecutions of Madoff's software engineers. Sure, they weren't the ones running the scam, but they knew about it, and wrote custom software to enable it to happen.

Most guns are not actually used to commit crimes. They are certainly not tailor-made for specific criminals, who have specific criminal intentions.

IBM and the Nazi government (n/t)

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

Companies

[DaMattster]

These days companies do what is in their own best interests, making money. It is a shame that the world has become so unprincipled as to accept money knowing it would be used for doing harm. I was raised to be aware of social issues and with a sense of ethics. Had I been an executive at Cisco, I would have told the CCP to go fly a kite and that I would not be complicit in assisting them with potential civil rights abuses. No amount of money would make up for the guilt I would feel knowing that my products would be used to potentially arrest and torture a member of a peaceful protesting movement only seeking to better their own lives.

Re:Companies

[subiculum]

Maybe the decision on the tender was split between multiple independent leaders, just like business processes relevant to the same purchase order/investments are nowadays purposely isolated (like according to the methodologies that the Sarbanes-Oxley act implies), to decrease corruption and increase transparency, so Cisco might argue that the deciders one by one were deciding about this without seeing the full picture... So when they get to know about it, it's done already and they can easily ignore the distributed guilt, saying "I have just talked to that officer about setting up the software on our equipment", "I've just installed the front-end software and set up the IP ranges they've told me" etc..., or they might even argue that they were totally misinformed about what kind of group they really have to surveil on, and the stuff was ready and handed over by the time they realized that it's against a peaceful group (which I think can even turn out to be possible). I wouldn't blame the whole Cisco company, instead I would carefully find the particular employee (if there is any) who was well informed about the plan, and only prosecute him/her. Because every business communication at companies like Cisco should be transparent, especially international ones, they surely can find something that points to a certain few people. If they can't, they should look for black holes in this transparency and raise concerns against those, and go for signs of white collar corporate crime. Would you feel guilty say as an IT pro of a company like say Union Carbide, if you would have been helped (say) a HR executive employee as a part of a bigger shake-up project, to set up the new stuff on her PC, who - imagine - a day later had fired 10 maintenance workers according data in the new system, that had led to training issues of the new employees failing to do their jobs well at the Bhopal plant, leading to the industrial disaster?

Re:Companies

[cdrguru]

OK, but what do you think should be done about architectural firms that design US prisons? Clearly these buildings were not designed to be safe or else there wouldn't be such problems in prisons.

How about cell phone manufacturers? Any idiot could have foreseen that if "texting" is possible in a moving vehicle there will be drivers that recklessly endanger others by driving while distracted. The cell phone manufacturers didn't listen to their idiots and released phones that enabled this kind of behavior without any warnings whatsoever. Even gun manuacturers sell things like trigger locks and provide copious instructions about how NOT to kill people accidently.

What about chemical companies that continue to make lead-based paint, thus allowing its use on children's toys?

Once you start holding people and companies responsible for secondary effects of their products there is no end to the list of wrondoers you can find.

Re:Companies

[drinkypoo]

These days companies do what is in their own best interests, making money.

This has always been more common than not. What's [relatively] new is public corporations with the rights of persons, which are able to amass and exert influence out of proportion to their benefit. In the case where a single person controls a company there is at least a chance that they will be an ethical and/or moral individual. When the corporation is run by a board and beholden only to shareholders, and criminal liability is virtually certain to be deflected from any individual employee engaging in anything other than embezzlement (against the shareholders, of course) then all manner of bad behavior is encouraged.

No amount of money would make up for the guilt I would feel knowing that my products would be used to potentially arrest and torture a member of a peaceful protesting movement only seeking to better their own lives.

Unfortunately, our legal, financial, and indeed social systems generally support the brilliant sociopath above all others.

In defense of Religions

[ron_ivi]

In defense of Religions, they seem like an effective structure to stand up to governments and corporations.

Leads to a nice balance-of-power.

Scientologists in Germany

[LynnwoodRooster]

I guess they now have a model to sue Germany as well, for religious prosecution...

Re:Scientologists in Germany

[Doc Ruby]

How? China isn't being sued, so Germany wouldn't fit this model. And how have German Scientologists been systematically sureveilled, suppressed, falsely imprisoned, beaten and jailed?

Your guess is supported by neither facts nor logic.

Re:Scientologists in Germany

[myowntrueself]

I guess they now have a model to sue Germany as well, for religious prosecution...

and Falun Gong really is the Chinese Scientology; their leader believes that humanity is being corrupted by aliens. Etc.

Though I wonder if Scientology has a CIA connection/backing?

Re:Scientologists in Germany

[tehcyder]

And how have German Scientologists been systematically sureveilled, suppressed, falsely imprisoned, beaten and jailed?

I don't know, but I'm willing to help out.

Re:Scientologists in Germany

[misophist]

I think it's quite likely that the CIA would back FLG. They're desperately trying to find some way to destabilize China.

Evildoers

[Anonymous Coward]

"Cisco" didn't do this. China did this, apparently with the assistance of some Cisco employees, most likely Chinese national employees of Cisco in China.

Suing Cisco over this is as ridiculous as suing a car battery company for making car batteries that were used by Saddam Hussein to torture people in Iraq.
Or suing American Airlines over the 9/11 attack on the twin towers.
Or suing Kool-aid because of the acts of Jim Jones.

They cannot sue the people actually responsible (Chinese government), so they go after anyone who might have deep pockets. That is twisted and evil, and actually furthers the cause of those actually doing the evil. The Chinese government no longer becomes the focus. That righteous outrage is redirected against a corporation, and ultimately diluted. Just another stupid and greedy move by ignorant people who do not understand the global consequences of their stupidity.

Congratulations. You are going to sue a company which makes possible the global communications which allow you the chance to know that there is a better alternative than the oppressive communist regime which you struggle against. The company which helps communicate your plight to the world. idiotic and futile. The more they win in the fight against Cisco, the more they stand to lose. They may even get the Chinese government to declare Cisco "evil", and to replace all of their infrastructure with the Chinese national alternatives......because those wouldn't have any backdoors built in.

duh.

Re:Evildoers

[Renraku]

If Cisco employees did it, then Cisco did it. It'll be up to Cisco to prove that their employees did it of their own volition and not at the direction of the company. Your analogy is false, however.

This is a case of suing a car battery company because they specially designed a battery at the request of an organization known to torture people with car batteries, to make it easier for them to torture people with car batteries.

Re:Related lawsuit filed against second U.S. corp.

[grcumb]

The Chinese group, through further assistance of the Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Law Foundation, has filed a multi-billion dollar US lawsuit against Ford Motor Corporation. They have documented the use of numerous models of Ford vehicles by Chinese government officers in the arrest of members of the religious group, leading to their false imprisonment, torture, and wrongful death.

Oh, for crying out loud, moderators! Quit punishing people you disagree with through the mod system. If you had any balls^H^H^H^Heven half an intellect you'd be able to demolish this argument in a sentence.

Down-modding is intellectual cowardice.

Not According to MSNBC

[Doc Ruby]

Googling ("falun gong" cisco site:msnbc.com) returns no pages. But MS-NBC does cover cisco and Falun Gong (though not very much at all).

I notice that Cisco is such a tight "partner" with MS-NBC that its news shows feature a Cisco telepresence monitor with prominent logo in most shots of the newsreaders, even when the monitor isn't doing anything Cisco, and the logo is superimposed in the video whenever telepresence is running. And that General Electric owns MS-NBC.

There's that "liberal" media: self-censoring news that's inconvenient to its corporate sponsors and powerful foreign countries.

Re:Not According to MSNBC

[Elbereth]

Maybe because you did it wrong.

Try "site:msnbc.msn.com", instead.

Re:Not According to MSNBC

[Doc Ruby]

You're right, I did it wrong. Though the msnbc.com results fooled me.

all hail capital whores

[unity100]

living and operating outside a FREE country, producing and selling censorship materials for finding, repressing and silencing freedom in other countries.

whores have integrity at least. they conduct their trade.

Open source firewalls?

[jcam2]

Couldn't a similar suit be brought against the developers iptables or squid if those applications are used by an oppressive government? Just answering a question from a user with .cn email address could be turned into "assisting the censorship of dissidents" by an enterprising lawyer..

Re:Open source firewalls?

[guspasho]

The allegation that I gathered from the summary is that Cisco was hired by China specifically for the purpose of persecuting the Falun Gong, not that China happened to use some Cisco product that China purchased with no questions asked.

Re:Open source firewalls?

[MightyMartian]

No, because those are generic tools. The accusation here isn't that Cisco just sold equipment to the Chinese government, but rather that it was an active participant in creating the networks used by the Chinese government to suppress and arrest Falun Gong members. If the writers of iptables or squid had gone over to China and had developed or modified said systems, then they too could be accused of collaboration.

Now...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that I agree with China and their policies....if you do something that breaks the law in your country, well, you're doing so willingly and should have to face the consequences. If ya don't like it, leave the country.

Re:Related lawsuit filed against second U.S. corp.

[siglercm]

Ha! /. mods are, more or less, developmentally challenged. Not fans of satire? Oh, sorry, IQ not high enough to comprehend satire. Sheesh.

It's a really nice idea... but,

[cdrguru]

The problem with this sort of thing is the fact that laws are actually different in different places.

See, Falun Gong is an illegal organization in China. The members are breaking the law by simply being members. After that, the punishment for being a member is perhaps severe, but nonetheless, it is punishment for being a member of an outlawed group.

Similarly, it is illegal in modern-day Germany to belong to the Nazi party. This group is outlawed and membership in it is illegal. While you might not rate much torture or death, such membership is going to be frowned upon severely by the German government. Up to and including imprisonment.

In the US it is difficult to point to an organization that is illegal to belong to, but I suspect openly disclosing that you are a member of Hamas or Hizbollah could rate you at least a swift deportation and might cause problems in gaining entry to the US if you went about it in the conventional manner. Currently in the US it is not illegal to belong to a group that is exclusively formed for the purposes of committing crimes, such as street gangs, motorcycle gangs, or the Mafia.

While it might be all noble and such to say that China should just let groups that violently disagree with their government exist in peace, it isn't happening. China seems to be highly motivated to make the lives of people that want to change (forcibly, if not violently) the government a living hell. Sort of discourages revolution when the potential leaders are imprisoned. While we may disagree with this policy, they are being nothing if not consistent in their treatment of members of illegal organizations. Cisco has very little to do with the policy and its implementation. Had they simply refused to be part of the implementation someone else would have stepped up. When we make individuals and companies liable for such downstream actions I am all for going after Cisco but first I think we better start thinking about architectural firms that design prisons. Then we can talk about cell phone manufacturers making driving-while-distracted possible.

Maybe in 50 years or so after we deal with all of the other problems, we can get around to Cisco.

Re:It's a really nice idea... but,

[OrangeTide]

It's simple. American companies need to keep their fingers out of controversial foreign politics. Especially when the policies they are helping to enforce are counter to the US Constitution.

I would like to see broader enforcement of American standards on American companies that operate abroad. Policies on pay, discrimination, child labor, workplace safety, disposal, right to privacy, etc. They need to meet or exceed many of the same standards that American works enjoy here in America. If you want to outsource, great, but you don't get to abuse people, cooperate with corrupt governments (unless it's our corrupt government), etc.

But that will never happen, because treating the rest of the world like shit is way too profitable. And building up a good reputation for American business is not seen as worthwhile by anyone really.

Re:It's a really nice idea... but,

[Anonymous Coward]

WOW, comparing falun gong to the nazi party...and then going on to imply that falun gong is some violent revolutionary sect. Is yoga equivalent to the nazi party in your eyes too!?!?!?! You...are...FUCKED.

Re:It's a really nice idea... but,

[Anonymous Coward]

We want to be nothing if not consistent...

Re:It's a really nice idea... but,

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe in 50 years or so after we deal with all of the other problems, we can get around to Cisco.

No, because it's just business. Cisco has a responsiblity to shareholders, and helping oppressing others makes it okay.

Re:It's a really nice idea... but,

[mjwx]

In the US it is difficult to point to an organization that is illegal to belong to

Al Queda, the Taliban.

You don't even need to be in the US or a US citizen fro the US to punish you without due process or a fair trial for being a member of these organisations.

Re:It's a really nice idea... but,

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US it is difficult to point to an organization that is illegal to belong to

NAMBLA?

Re:It's a really nice idea... but,

[Anonymous Coward]

"Similarly, it is illegal in modern-day Germany to belong to the Nazi party."

Yeah, but Falun Gong is in no way similar to the nazi party.
Otoh, somewhat similarly, the nazis legally persecuted Jews.

Just because no-one seems to have said it yet: laws can be immoral.

Re:It's a really nice idea... but,

[MadLad]

That's interesting... but the argument in your last sentence -- which I acknowledge doesn't represent the whole gist of your comment -- is a version of the infamous Pol Pot Defence (in which Pol Pot says "What, criticise me? What about Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Satan? I'm not as bad as them. Go criticise them.")

If Cisco knowingly supplied equipment to suppress Falun Gong, make them pay now, not in 50 years' time. They're as good a place to start as any. Set a precedent, then carry it through to all the other bastards.

Re:It's a really nice idea... but,

[Anonymous Coward]

The comparison about Nazi parties being illegal in Germany is not very good or correct. While you can't have advertisements with swastikas, The NDP is a party that released a statement saying 'Africa conquers the white house', regarding Obama's election, and suggesting that it was a conspiracy between jews and black people. Yet they hold about 1-3% of gov't seats depending on how you are looking at it. They are described and self-described as a neo-nazi party. No one is getting arrested for belonging to this party, although it's legality was disputed and the gov't ruled that it would be unconstitutional to make the party illegal

Re:It's a really nice idea... but,

[Anonymous Coward]

"Falun Gong is an illegal organization in China"

But we do not work that way in western society. If they want to be "global", then here it is. This lawsuit makes perfect sense.

Re:It's a really nice idea... but,

[PraiseBob]

I'd just like to go over some history. Falun gong is more like Scientologists than Nazis. They dont "violently disagree" with anyone, but are in fact completely non-violent and are forbidden to kill living things for any reason. They basically have some weird beliefs, and the Chinese media was making fun of them. They had a small protest in a park because they resented being made fun of. The Chinese police responded by clubbing protesters, and arresting several. So, they held a bigger, silent protest outside party headquarters, and the Chinese government responded by banning the group, arresting everyone they could find, and torturing and killing the leaders.

How would you feel if the US govt arrested anyone associated with scientology, executed Travolta and Cruise for being part of it to dissuade others from joining, and Cisco helped make it happen? Falun Gong had NO problem with the Chinese government. They were protesting being killed by their government for no reason, and wanted that to stop. Is that really an extremist request?

Re:It's a really nice idea... but,

[Anonymous Coward]

This is how we end up with corporate compliance with truly awful effects. The problem is we don't hold corporate officers to any ethical standards, and we're repeatedly told well if it wasn't me, then it would be someone else. Let it be someone else then. Why do we hold corporate actions to such a low standard of ethics and integrity. Corporations don't have nightmares or guilt, or anything resembling a conscience, so why are they allowed to make decisions that effect so many human lives

Re:It's a really nice idea... but,

[Anonymous Coward]

Torture is against international and U.S. law. Cisco is US based, and sold equipment in China. It's pretty simple to understand.

False imprisonment

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that meant that government agents have been painting false bars on Falun Gong members' bedroom windows to trick their simple brainwashed minds into thinking they are in prison.

Cisco saw this as an opportunity

[blanchae]

Cisco knew perfectly well what the purpose of the Great Firewall (Golden Shield) of China was and that it was to target the Falun Gong.

Re:Cisco saw this as an opportunity

[blanchae]

Here's the leaked Cisco presentation that was shown to the Human Rights Commission in 2008.

Re:Cisco saw this as an opportunity

[blanchae]

Page 57 of the presentation: Combat evil "Falung Gong" religion and other hostiles

Re:Cisco saw this as an opportunity

[MadLad]

Well. That is pretty damning.

Before you start defending Falun Gong...

[Anonymous Coward]

...you should read up on what they actually believe and stand for. It's all publicly available on their various national homepages.

Some of the highlights, for those of you who can't be bothered:

* The leader of the movement is perfect, and cannot be questioned in any way.

* Women, homosexuals and non-chinese are all lower forms of life, not yet (as in "not in this life") worthy of the wisdom of the cosmos.

* If you get sick, it's because your spirit is unclean.

* If you are sick and don't get well using only meditative stances and movements, then your faith and willpower are lacking.

* Modern medicine is dangerous and pollutes the body and spirit, because they don't encourage you to use the proper meditative techniques.

* Fun fact: The swastika, infamous logo of the Nazi party in Germany, is profusely used in Falun Gong symbolism. Just sayin'.

So, for a quick recap: Falun Gong is an elitist, leader-worshipping, woman-hating, anti-gay, superstitious, anti-science, disease-spreading, evil cult.

The chinese may have a ways to go before they get the hang of treating people in a civilized manner - but when it comes to Falun Gong, they actually have a pretty good policy.

Re:Before you start defending Falun Gong...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, sounds almost like a religion.

Re:Before you start defending Falun Gong...

[MightyMartian]

No doubt. But still, Western companies should not be involved in suppressing people in other countries in this way. I could care less about Falun Gong, I care about a Western company aiding the Chinese regime in pursuing them. That may be legal in China, but I think we should make it unlawful for our companies to take part in the suppression.

Re:Before you start defending Falun Gong...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much everything you mentioned already existed in some form in China. It's the issue of being a new religion, no originality. Still, you'd support violent torture, execution (and if FG is to be believed, organ harvesting), for the above reasons? Also, fun fact. The swastika is a symbol that's wildly used in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, and appears all over Asia and India. ~ Another Anon

Jurisdiction? Legality?

[Anonymous Coward]

So now the legal status of foreign actions are measured against US laws? Can you point me exactly to where in the constitution or otherwise other binding document is that US law applies to the world?

Whatever China does, it does according to Chinese laws, as I see it no Chinese law was violated, so there is no case. It might be very bad that china is not a democracy, or maybe not, who knows if they're not better as it its? The point is, unless you are thinking of invading china, there is nothing unlawful about it.

Cisco if true

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope they get sued completely out of business.

About the time

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not fun of any religious groups, religions are stupid and harmful, I do however agree with action taken against an American corporation that directly profits from helping a country that has clearly has outrageously bad human rights record - China. Why is it helping Hamas is not OK but running business in China and paying taxes that is pay for support of oppressing regimes is ok?

Re:About the time

[hackus]

Making generalizations that religions are stupid our harmful doesn't help your argument.

-Hack

Re:About the time

[tehcyder]

Making generalizations that religions are stupid our harmful doesn't help your argument.

-Hack

What, not even if it is true that all religions are stupid and harmful?
Ecrasez l'infame.

Don't do business with them.

[superdave80]

If Cisco can't sell network/detection/whatever technology to China, then we shouldn't be allowed to trade with China at all. If they are that bad, then what the hell are we doing even associating with them? Every item we sell to them could potentially be used for bad things, and every dollar they make off of us could be used to fund bad things.

I would also like to point out that Cisco sold this technology to catch members of an illegal group within China (AKA, criminals). Just because we don't like the definition of criminal in China doesn't mean we should beat Cisco up over it.

CISCO and its Infamous dealings with Butchers

[hackus]

I have been writing about CISCO for a long time.

The company itself has a lot of explaining to do, and has more skeletons in its closet than a quest to the bone pile in Razorfen Downs.

Anything for a buck, even if it has to sell out the very political system that allows its existence.

I don't buy anything from CISCO anymore, and when I am confronted with customers or equipment with CISCO on the label, my first action is too immediately budget a replacement.

The company needs to be outed for the people murdered, sentenced to life imprisonment. Lets be adults here, China's human rights issues are infamous. Any company would have to be head quartered on Mars not too know setting up and selling security gear to the Chinese will mean lots of things.

All bad for human rights.

-Hack

Did you ever read them ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. Right. Not about control. (sarcasm)

"You shall have no other god than me"

"you shall not worship idol" (parphrased)
"you shall not work on sabbath" (paraphrased).

At least 3 out of them are definitively commandement controlling the behavior of believer and having nothing to do with moral.

I think they have got a point

[Anonymous Coward]

Recently they put a guy behind bars at the age of 90+. He was a security guard for Nazi camp. The courts argument reasoning was , "I followed the order" is not an excuse, you knew that you are doing wrong and helped killing Jews.

I guess it was as legal to kill Jews in Nazi Germany , as legal it is in China to kill Falun Gong member.

From that perspective, CISCO is as guilty as the John Demjanjuk is. In fact CISCO may be more guilty because John had an obligation to follow the order as he was a soldier while CISCO did it voluntarily, without any such obligation.

Big deal

[misophist]

This is just like the US gov persecuting the Free Men or Randy Weaver. Wish they'd persecute the Scientologists similarly. The FLG are a cult! Nothing more.

If you know anything about qigong, you'd know that their teachings are bunk and will harm a practitioner eventually.

Re:Big deal

[MadLad]

Well, I guess the fascists were going to crawl out of the woodwork eventually.

From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong#Beliefs_and_practices):

Falun Gong aspires to enable the practitioner to ascend spiritually through moral rectitude and the practice of a set of exercises and meditation. The three central tenets of the belief are 'Truthfulness' (, Zhn), 'Compassion' (, Shàn), and 'Forbearance' (, Rn).[28] Together these principles are regarded as the fundamental nature of the cosmos, and are held to be the highest manifestation of the Tao, or Buddhist Dharma.

Truthfulness, compassion and forbearance? Holy mother of god, how horrible! We should suppress these people asap. Quick, call Cisco.

Re:Big deal

[tehcyder]

Well, I guess the fascists were going to crawl out of the woodwork eventually.

From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong#Beliefs_and_practices):

Falun Gong aspires to enable the practitioner to ascend spiritually through moral rectitude and the practice of a set of exercises and meditation. The three central tenets of the belief are 'Truthfulness' (, Zhn), 'Compassion' (, Shàn), and 'Forbearance' (, Rn).[28] Together these principles are regarded as the fundamental nature of the cosmos, and are held to be the highest manifestation of the Tao, or Buddhist Dharma.

Truthfulness, compassion and forbearance? Holy mother of god, how horrible! We should suppress these people asap. Quick, call Cisco.

Just sounds like a bunch of pseudo-Buddhist mind-wank to me. How come people in the West will happily criticise their own religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) but go all teary-eyed over equally preposterous fairy tales from China, India or Japan?

Re:Big deal

[MadLad]

They criticise what deserves criticism and give credit where it's due. Almost all religions teach compassion, which is a good thing. Some of them have dubious metaphysical tenets or practices, which deserve criticism.

One reason for the distinction you raise is that many people regard the Buddhist metaphysic and its emphasis on individual empirical investigation as far more plausible than the Christian metaphysic and the Christian emphasis on faith.

But that's a separate issue from calling on the government to suppress something because it's a "cult", or "mind-wank". People should be free to mind-wank as much as they like, as long as they're not harming others. That's freedom of religion.

Re:Big deal

[misophist]

Yeah, wikipedia is the end all be all of truth. It can't be wrong. Research it and you'll find FLG is a cult. Jim Jones preached all that good stuff too man. Look it up.

Re:Big deal

[MadLad]

If you're so keen to convince me, why not provide a few links of your own? We can go link for link -- I'll stand you the Wikipedia link.

Here are a few on the cult issue specifically:

http://www.religioustolerance.org/falungong3.htm
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,165166,00.html

Re:Big deal

[misophist]

As a practitioner of qigong learned from teachers of traditional Chinese martial arts I know what I know. These are guys who hate the Communist Chinese government by the way. I will give you some pieces of data to google below.

As a presumably ignorant white guy who believes whole heartedly in wiki crapia and google be not evil, you should continue seeking and not be brainwashed by a cult that brainwashes ignorant Chinese housewives. This whole religious tolerance thing is bullshit. FLG is a cult selling bogus techniques which harm people for money and influence. Do you know their propaganda arm such as New Tang Dyansty television network and Epoch Times? How about their yearly propaganda Chinese Cultural Extravaganza? A cult twisting Chinese culture to make money and fool unwitting idiots. The biggest shame is that the Chinese government didn't kill Li when they had the chance. And look up the idiots in China who cut their bellies hara kiri style in order to find the Wheel of Justice twirling around in their insides. What wheel? They sensed it after having practiced a wrong and deviant form of qigong. Look up qigong psychosis.

We can continue the chat after you've learned proper qigong and felt for yourself the flow of qi in your body. Or maybe even if you meet up with a real practitioner who will wave his hand from across the room and make you feel the qi flowing across your skin like a heavy fog. That would be the real deal. Li is bunk, my friend. Not a religion. It's Bunk.

Re:Big deal

[misophist]

It is mind wankery. So are all the evangelical (to some extent or other) Ibrahimic faiths you mention. In this case FLG is a home born, Western grown cult. It should have been snuffed out at the very beginning. The Chinese are under siege from Ibrahimics and from scores of these home grown cults. The Chinese government will hopefully keep both under check. Why do Chinese need foreign money grubbing, brain washing religions? The Boxers had the right idea. Just as the tribals do in India when they conduct their missionary bbqs.

anyone here thinking the US is not using this?

[kubitus]

remember there are export restrictions - the real hot stuff is used in and by Gods own country!

feed your paranoia!

Export controls.

[drolli]

I think actually, some technologies should fall under export control laws. Like weapons. But as long as its legal to sell it there is little point to this.

oh spare me....

[Anonymous Coward]

Falun Gong is an extremist cult intent on overthrowing the Chinese government. Maybe Al-Qaeda should sue Cisco too? Get tha fuck outta here! Money grubbing lawyers will do anything to get a buck.

I doubt this will pass...

[Syberz]

I don't see anyone suing Beretta when a gang-banger shoots a cop and I don't see anyone suing Ford when a drunkard runs over a child either. Although I don't agree with how the Cisco tools were used, Cisco doesn't really have a say as to how others use their stuff... SONY should pay attention here...

Re:I doubt this will pass...

[drinkypoo]

I don't see anyone suing Beretta when a gang-banger shoots a cop

that's because the gang-bangers and the cops both shoot glocks.

ObDisclaimer: I really have no idea whether there's more berettas or glocks in the hands of cops but I know which way I'd guess and it's not on expensive berettas. I'm quite certain which is more likely in the hands of a banger.

and I don't see anyone suing Ford when a drunkard runs over a child either.

Now THAT makes me wonder what kind of vehicles are most involved in DUIs. A quick google turned up nothing illuminating...

Cracking down on organised religion

[Anonymous Coward]

The PRC are doing something right at least.

Cisco sells to PLA

[Anonymous Coward]

Cisco sells to PLA.

Re:Cisco or China or U.S. / Us?

[Sir Mouse]

Given the apparent sentiment by some of the posers I would have to suggest that the Falun Gong members extend their suit to include the financial backers of the regime oppressing them, Wal-Mart, Apple, all those who knowingly purchase products built in china (virtually every US citizen), and oh yes, the US federal government. This money eventually finds its way to the Chinese government, supporting all forms of censorship and human injustices they commit. I mean it’s not like these companies and individuals “had no idea what it was going to be used for.” I mean if you’re going to supply a known assassin with the money to finance his operation you have crossed the line from supplying a product into aiding and abetting a crime.

My point here is that while Cisco may bear some small portion of responsibility here, there is a much longer and more significant list of responsible individuals which likely includes many Slashdot posters.

very clear

[Anonymous Coward]

The suit claims that additional Cisco marketing presentations prove that it promoted its technology as being capable of taking aim at dissident groups. In one marketing slide, the goals of the Golden Shield are described as to “douzheng evil Falun Gong cult and other hostile elements.” Douzheng is a Chinese term used to describe the persecution of undesirable groups. It was widely used by the Communist Party in the Cultural Revolution.

Cisco marketing presentations prove THIS

[Anonymous Coward]

Cisco marketing presentations prove
The suit claims that additional Cisco marketing presentations prove that it promoted its technology as being capable of taking aim at dissident groups. In one marketing slide, the goals of the Golden Shield are described as to “douzheng evil Falun Gong cult and other hostile elements.” Douzheng is a Chinese term used to describe the persecution of undesirable groups. It was widely used by the Communist Party in the Cultural Revolution.

Cisco marketing presentations prove

[ruhla.seeyou]

The suit claims that additional Cisco marketing presentations prove that it promoted its technology as being capable of taking aim at dissident groups. In one marketing slide, the goals of the Golden Shield are described as to “douzheng evil Falun Gong cult and other hostile elements.” Douzheng is a Chinese term used to describe the persecution of undesirable groups. It was widely used by the Communist Party in the Cultural Revolution.

Re: Cisco marketing presentations prove

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. I'd love a link to that quote, even if it is in Chinese. My institution spends a whole hell of a lot of money with Cisco, and something like this might change our mind in the future.

Thanks,

M