Reference Material: Internet Companies Are Criticized for Selling Sensitive Technologies to the Chinese Communist Regime

(Clearwisdom.net June 26, 2003)

On June 19, two US congressmen attended a press conference hosted by Mr. Harry Wu, the Executive Director of the China Information Center. In the conference, Mr. Wu exposed that some American technology companies are violating the US government's sanctions on China on the banning the sales of military, police and "dual-purpose" technology and equipment since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. The output of surveillance, identification and tracking technologies to the Chinese police actually helps the communist authorities enforce their persecution of human rights.

In 2000, Jiang's regime launched the "Golden Shield" project which "uses advance information and communication technology to strengthen the central police's capabilities of control, response and strike so as to improve the police's efficiency and function." The building of the project has largely benefited with the support of certain western companies such as Cisco in America and Nortel in Canada.

As Mr. Harry Wu introduced, in October 2002, Cisco displayed a set of fully digital monitoring system in the China Information Basic Facility Exhibition in Shanghai. The system could screen out the keywords by the technology such as digital processing and tone identification from signals of user's IP phone, mobile phone, wireless zone net and PD, which then report to the police. The authorities have already established an internet surveillance system at the provincial, city and county levels in order to track dissidents and religious groups. Within five minutes, the system could supply data and images to the database of any county-level police department. The multinational corporations help the Chinese communist authorities by building an "E-police" which seems not to be much of a difference to putting a "digital handcuff" on China.

Mr. Ethan Gutmann, the author of Losing the New China, testified in the hearing that Cisco particularly provided some firewall systems which were used for to block websites banned in China. Some anti-virus software companies such as McAfee and Norton even donated about three hundred kinds of computer viruses to the Chinese Public Security Ministry so as to sell their product in the Chinese market. He strongly suspected PLA had taken advantage of many state of art technologies to improve their rapid response capability.

A senior engineer at Nortel told Mr. Gutmann their equipment could catch 100% of the data packets in the system as long as the bandwidth was enough. In addition, their internet monitoring function was specifically designed to "catch Falun Gong".

The press conference revealed the Chinese authorities ordered to implement a series of rules from October 2000 through May 2001 forcing the internet bars to install self-monitoring software to censor banned news. To make sure the surveillance was working, the authorities demanded the internet business agents to record all of the data from the Chinese users including telephone numbers, login time and the list of visited websites for at least sixty days. The software could also identify and block proxy, a technology for breaking through firewall. Yahoo and AOL all conducted self-monitoring, and AOL might report the dissidents to the Chinese police department.

"During the period of the former Soviet Union, big companies regarded the former Soviet Union as a terrorist and evil country and refused to do business with it. Of course, they don't do business with Cuba's communist authorities today either." said Mr. Harry Wu in an interview.

"But it is very strange that China, a country that has a very bad record of human rights including severe persecution of religions, Falun Gong, ethnic groups, and where workers and peasants have no significant rights, has been singled out to do business. It is claimed that doing business with it is the best way to improve its democracy and human rights mentalities. At present, this theory is very fashionable and in keeping with Beijing's demand," Mr. Wu added that big companies doing business with China is tantamount to "helping the communist authorities stabilize their power" and "extremely short-sighted."

When being asked if these big companies would be prosecuted and punished by the US government, Mr. Wu replied, "It is a very complicated political issue."

2003-6-26