Free Republic

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – Falungong members are suing Cisco Systems for custom-building "Golden Shield" Internet technology used by China to track down devotees of the spiritual movement. Cisco dismissed the case Monday as being without basis and vowed to "vigorously defend" itself. Cisco "designed, supplied and helped maintain a censorship and surveillance network known as Golden Shield" used by Chinese officials to identify Falungong practitioners who were detained, tortured and sometimes killed, a lawyer for the group said in court documents filed last week. Cisco established a China Network Technology Corp. subsidiary in Beijing in 1998 that went to work...

Cisco Systems, which designed a computer program enabling the Chinese government to inflict human rights abuses on members of the Falun Gong religious sect, apparently won’t be held liable for those abuses because China didn’t bring its victims to the United States to be tortured. Cisco sold a system called “Golden Shield” to the Chinese government, touting its ability to uniquely identify members of Falun Gong and as “the only product capable of recognizing over 90% of Falun Gong pictorial information,” according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

When it comes to censoring the Internet, China is a the leader in terms of filtering questionable political content. But politics is not what causes most nations to interfere with Internet use. The most frequent reason for net censorship is the search for pornography and questionable religious content. Another popular government ploy is not trying to keep their citizens from certain kinds of Internet content, but rather eavesdropping on who is saying what to whom. In all, we're talking about some three dozen nations here that meddle with Internet use. In China, 30,000 Ministry of Public Security employees man the...

A couple of columnists in the Sun chain of newspapers, Peter Worthington in Toronto, and Ezra Levant in Calgary, have taken pot-shots at Microsoft, the giant American software company. Apparently, Microsoft’s sin is that it won a large contract with the Chinese government to provide software that would control the language content used on individual blogging sites in China. Certain words are zapped, including "freedom, democracy, and human rights." Also on the bleeped list are specific political references, such as "Dalai Lama" and "Tiananmen Square", as well as a number of sexually graphic words and phrases.