Cisco’s Latest Attempt to Dodge Responsibility for Facilitating Human Rights Abuses: Export Rules
April 19th, 2016Via: EFF:
Cisco custom-built the so-called “Great Firewall of China,” also known as the “Golden Shield.” This system enables the Chinese government to conduct Internet surveillance and censorship against its citizens. As if that weren’t bad enough, company documents also revealed that, as part of its marketing pitch to China and in an effort to meet its customers needs, Cisco built a special Falun Gong module into the Golden Shield that helped the Chinese authorities identify, locate, and ultimately persecute practitioners of that religion by, for example, creating profiles of them that could be used during interrogations and forced conversions (i.e., torture).
Five years ago, victims sued Cisco for the human rights abuses they suffered as a result of the Falun Gong module. The case, Doe I v. Cisco Systems, is currently pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The plaintiffs are Falun Gong practitioners who allege that the company knowingly and purposefully designed and sold specific technologies to the Chinese government that aided and abetted human rights abuses, including torture, against them. We filed an amicus brief in January in favor of the plaintiffs.
Cisco recently submitted its responsive appellate brief (and the plaintiffs filed their reply) and one of its arguments made us do a double-take. Cisco claims that because U.S. export law doesn’t ban it from selling its equipment to China, the company is immune from civil liability for the human rights abuses it facilitated. Cisco even went so far as to argue that the U.S. government’s recent dropping of overbroad proposed rules for regulating surveillance technologies under the Wassenaar Arrangement—rules that EFF strongly argued should be dropped—establishes that Cisco should be immune.
Specifically, Cisco argues that since Congress and the Department of Commerce regulate exports to China of guns and other “crime control and detection” equipment but do not ban the export of the “Internet infrastructure” products that Cisco sells, Cisco should be held completely immune for aiding and abetting human rights abuses.
