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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."
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
Browse at 1. You'll thank me later.
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?
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.