WIRED magazine's "Threat Level" blog has
published a Cisco internal presentation from 2002 that makes the company's intentions look pretty darn bad. Leaked to reporters right before Wednesday's
Senate hearing on the Internet and human rights (which I will write more about in the next few days), the 90-page presentation outlines all the sales opportunities to be found in China's "Golden Shield" project, a collection of plans to upgrade police communications, surveillance, and censorship networks nationwide. The most damning slide is this one:

That slide claims to be quoting a speech by Chinese government official
Li Runsen, who was stating Chinese government goals. Since this presentation was leaked, Cisco has
denied that the company shared those goals. Still, it makes them look pretty bad, as this slide clearly implies that the anti-FLG crackdown is an opportunity for Cisco.
Now, it's important to note that contrary to what WIRED says, Golden Shield does not actually equal China's Internet censorship system known as the "Great Firewall" - the Golden Shield is actually a much broader program that includes many other things like law enforcement's internal communications and data managements systems. Mechanisms to censor and monitor the public Internet are just one part of it. From reading through the whole presentation, it seems to me that the presentation is more about assisting law enforcement communications and operations than about censorship of the public Internet in China; while one can certainly infer that such activities would be included, they are not explicitly stated.
I also have some more background about the Cisco case which may be useful: The leaked powerpoint presentation was made in 2002, the same year that businessman Ethan Gutmann, author of
Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire, and Betrayal, visited a public security technology trade fair and picked up a Cisco
pamphlet in which it specifically marketed its communication
technologies with the aim to sell more equipment to provincial and
municipal public security bureaus. (Note: the focus was on devices for police
communications, not routers for public Internet networks). Gutmann also
wrote in his book about a conversation he had with a Cisco employee who
boasted about a router custom-made for Chinese Internet censorship. In
2005 at the time of the first shareholder resolution by
Boston
Common Asset Management and
Domini Social Investments against Cisco, I republished the relevant book excerpt by Gutmann as well as
images of the Cisco pamphlet obtained by Gutmann. You can read that post
here.
That
post sufficiently rattled Cisco that I was contacted by Cisco spokesman Terry Alberstein (who is also quoted in the Wired article).
Alberstein insisted Cisco had done nothing against U.S. law, that it
had done nothing more than what it does when marketing its products to
police forces all around the world, and that Cisco had never customized
any router specifically for Chinese internet censorship. He was evasive
on the question of whether Cisco employees had ever provided
installation/configuration/follow-up service specifically intended
to help customers configure their routers for censorship purposes. My
blog post summarizing that conversation is
here.The
story got
some press, but didn't ever get big traction in the mainstream media, though I
personally know a couple China-based reporters for major news organizations who
sniffed around to try and confirm Gutman's story. But they never found enough of a "smoking gun" to
convince their editors that they had something to nail Cisco with.
To many reporters who cover China, this debate is reminiscent of
the debate in the 90s about dual-use export controls on computers that
could be used either to save lives in hospitals or to launch
ICBM's... eventually the free-traders won out (with heavy lobbying by
the American Chamber of Commerce) because they argued that if IBM
didn't sell the computers, then the Japanese or Germans or somebody
else would anyway, China's behavior or capabilities would be no
different but Americans would have lost the business.
I find the Cisco case much tougher to argue than the
Yahoo case or even
Google or
Microsoft: At least in those cases the facts of what
employees of these companies did and didn't do, under what
circumstances, and with what direct consequences for whom, were either
clear from the beginning or could be sleuthed out. With Cisco, cold
hard proof of exactly what Cisco employees did or didn't do - and what
their intentions were - remains elusive. We know that their routers
have been used for censorship. Nobody has yet come up with "smoking gun" evidence to back up
Gutmann's account that Cisco was selling a special censorship router. Cisco has done a great job at preventing
anybody from obtaining any evidence that can't be denied or discounted
in some way. This new powerpoint adds a strong data point that makes
Cisco's intentions look really bad. It takes us closer but it doesn't take us all
the way there.
Whatever the truth is, Cisco has not been transparent and forthcoming with the public about their activities in China. And they've failed to engage in the
ongoing effort to set human rights standards for Internet and telecoms companies - as Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo among others have done.
WIRED quotes Arvind Ganesan of Human Rights Watch calling for Cisco to conduct a human rights review of all its activities globally. Others have pointed out that the Cisco situation highlights why Internet and telecoms companies need formal, transparent, and verifiable systems to guide their behavior so that they don't end up being complicit in human rights abuses even if that's not what they intended. The problem is, of course, that if Cisco and other companies cited in
Naomi Klein's recent Rolling Stone article stopped selling to all
police forces in all countries where Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and others have
cited repeated, serious police violations of human rights, they wouldn't
have much business. This is an argument some people in that
industry have made to me privately. Are the Chinese police, they ask,
really
so different from a lot of other police forces? Other than
the fact that they operate in a country led by a regime that runs economic
policies more capitalist than most EU member nations, but which still calls itself
Communist?
At the end of the day, though, Cisco has done a lousy job at explaining itself. We are left with many question marks. Their behavior and statements to date have given us little reason to believe that they care in any meaningful way about human rights.