FITUG e.V. Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft

FC: Amnesty Int'l fingers MS, Sun, Cisco as Chinese censors

------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Wed, 27 Nov 2002 13:00:54 -0500 To: politech@politechbot.com From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Subject: FC: Amnesty Int'l fingers MS, Sun, Cisco as Chinese censors Send reply to: declan@well.com

[Somehow, I don't recall Amnesty International slamming Microsoft, Sun, Nortel, and so forth for selling software to the Feds that can be used for Carnivore deployment. And did Amnesty complain about all those businesses selling legal pads, calculators, and maps to the FBI that were used in the brutal killing of innocents at Waco? Of course not. In those cases, at least, Amnesty appears to have realized that blame for wrongdoing should rest on the shoulders of the government.

I don't mean to say that corporations are never complicit (certainly there have been allegations raised about IBM in World War II), but it seems that that should be a pretty high threshold to meet, and that doesn't seem to be the case here. Amnesty offers no proof beyond hand-waving allegations likely born of an anti-corporate bias. If China orders a few thousand copies of Windows, how is Microsoft to know where they'll be used? It can't, of course, and to suggest otherwise is silly. Amnesty should know better, and focus its otherwise good work on the real culprits: The Chinese government. --Declan]

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http://www.web.amnesty.org/ai.nsf/recent/asa170072002

[...]

Foreign companies, including Websense and Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks, Microsoft,(27) have reportedly provided important technology which helps the Chinese authorities censor the Internet. Nortel Networks(28) along with some other international firms are reported to be providing China with the technology which will help it shift from filtering content at the international gateway level to filtering content of individual computers, in homes, Internet cafes, universities and businesses.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights calls on "every individual and every organ of society" to play its part in securing human rights for all. Amnesty International believes that multinational companies operating in China have a responsibility to contribute to the promotion and protection of fundamental human rights.

[...]

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