The last date Congress put a spotlight on an Web company collaborating with China’s policies of censorship and repression, it was on Yahoo and CEO Jerry Yang. Tuesday, it was Cisco’s turn.

At a hearing before a Senate subcommittee that focuses on human rights and the Net, Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) focused on a PowerPoint presentation that discussed China’s “combat” of “evil religious groups,” such as Falun Gong, which the Chinese government has banned since 1999.

Shiyu Zhou, deputy director of the Global Web Freedom Consortium, testified that it had obtained the presentation titled Cisco Opportunities [in the Golden Shield Project], which showed Cisco working closely with the government on an elaborate scheme to control what info is available on the Web in China.

Smoking PowerPoint

“Cisco offers much more than just routers; it offers planning, construction, technical training, and operations maintenance for the Golden Shield,” Zhou said. “Our research shows that the infrastructure of China’s Great Firewall coincides

with the layouts in Cisco (China)’s PowerPoint document.”

Zhou charged that “Cisco can no longer guarantee Congress that Cisco (China) has not been and is not now an accomplice and partner in China’s World Wide Web repression and, whether directly or indirectly, in its persecution of Falun Gong practitioners and other peaceful citizens in China.”

Cisco general counsel Mark Chandler said he was “appalled” to see the reference to Falun Gong in the slide presentation and asserted that Cisco merely sells generic network equipment to China without customizing it to work with the Golden Shield.

Voluntary Agreement ‘Intolerably Slow’

“We disavow the implication that that (presentation) in any way reflects Cisco’s views,” Chandler said. He added that “employees who would customize our products in such a way as to undermine human rights” would violate the company’s “extensive cipher of conduct.”

The industry has been working for two years on a…

Orginal post by Top Tech News