Cisco is in trouble, again, for a reason that many American technology firms should be: for aiding and abetting the tyranny of the Chinese government.
Cisco may have thought it was out of the woods after a lawsuit against it, originally filed in 2011, was wrongly dismissed in 2014. The litigation has just been revived by an appellate court.
The suit pertains to the company’s sale of software called Golden Shield to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Golden Shield is used to track down members of the popular and peaceful Falun Gong spiritual movement so that the CCP can persecute them as subversives (as proved by being part of Falun Gong). For the Chinese regime, all dissent and all activity it disapproves of are threats to national security.
Arrestees are tortured, imprisoned, even murdered, and the lawsuit contends that Cisco knew the ultimate goals that the software would serve. (The culpability of Cisco, Thermo Fisher, Microsoft, and other firms that abet CCP oppression is discussed with sarcastic brio by the YouTube channel China Uncensored.)
Ninth Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon states that the allegations are “sufficient to state a plausible claim that Cisco provided essential technical assistance to the [persecution] of Falun Gong with awareness that the international law violations of torture, arbitrary detention, disappearance, and extrajudicial killing were substantially likely to take place.”
The revival of this lawsuit and its ultimate resolution will deter, I hope, all U.S. firms from helping the Chinazis to systematically destroy innocent people.
