By Herman Lai, posted Aug 16, 2011 at 12:34 PM, 423 views,

Cisco Sued By Chinese Prisoners!

Cisco System, Inc., the networking giant is being sued by a group of 10 unnamed political prisoners through a US law firm, suggesting the company is helping the CCP to implement the Great Firewall of China, and providing the Chinese government with technology to monitor, censor and suppress its citizens.

You can check out the surveillance project in China here.

The US law firm stated (SMH):

“Cisco has, for years now, knowingly aided and abetted the Chinese Communist Party’s ongoing efforts to stifle the free speech and discourse of its citizenry.

“Dating back to the early 2000s, Cisco competed for contracts with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to help design, develop and implement the ‘Golden Shield Project’ – a rather Orwellian euphemism for the Chinese Communist Party’s ongoing effort to monitor, track and censor all internet traffic into and out of China.”

Besides, the court document as noted three of the prisoners:

Mr Du was sentenced to three years in jail, Mr Zhou put on house arrest and Mr Liu has served two months of a 10-year sentence. All three of the men have claimed they have been abused and subjected to torture over articles that they published online.

Cisco rejected the claim and said it is “baseless”, and sought to delay the court case, said that it did not operate networks in China nor it customised its products in any way that would facilitate censorship or repression.

Previously, Cisco has already faced two similar lawsuits in China which accused by religious group “Falun Gong”. With this new lawsuit, Cisco did not comment on any questions yet. And there is an alleged internal company presentation was leaked, which addressed China’s goals of “maintaining stability”, “stop the network-related crimes” and “combat ‘Falun Gong’ evil religion and other hostiles”.

Source: TNW