My latest Cisco post has generated a lot of debate and a fair amount of criticism.
Several people have pointed out that the issue goes far beyond the question of how U.S. tech companies may be assisting Chinese police thuggery and state censorship. As many, including Dan Gillmor point out, there is a much bigger question about the relationship between the tech industry and curtailment by governments of freedom of speech and human rights worldwide. Dan writes:
...Moreover, the issues get even more fuzzy when you consider our own government's race toward creating a surveillance state, or worse. As Congress moves to reauthorize the grotesquely named "Patriot Act," who are we to blame domestic companies for cooperating with repression overseas when we're creating our own version at home?
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On a discussion list, Sasha Costanza-Chock writes of the need for more "ICT for Development" to balance out the extensive resources put by governments into "ICT for War" :
...Now, my point is not to argue about the equivalence or relative levels of state repression of internal dissent in China vs. the USA. And if it comes to that, then we could just shift the conversation to Cisco's role in the US' current multiple wars of aggression and occupation.
But the point is really not about relative levels of state violence, it's about the need to recognize the deep structural links between, not just Cisco, but the IT industry in general and the military-police apparatus everywhere. The IT industry can't be decoupled from state repression and violence by picking a few instances for delinking.
Yet Cisco-DOD contracts are of course funded by the public. So maybe the conversation and strategies are really about how to ensure that public money put into ICT isn't used to enhance state surveillance and violence but instead is used for 'development.' One (small) step for researchers is to be able to demonstrate the comparative spending levels for networked warfare vs. networked development. I'm shocked that, in all the WSIS process, I've barely heard mention of the military (though we did get a clause about information warfare into the CS Declaration at Geneva) and haven't seen 'civil society,' let alone government delegates, make frank comparisons of the budgets for ICT4War vs. ICT4Dev.
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Food for thought.
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