Networking equipment maker Cisco and its top executives were sued last week in San Jose, Calif., for allegedly providing censorship and surveillance technology to China in violation of the Alien Torts Statute.
The Alien Torts Statute allows individuals to file claims in U.S. courts over violations of the law of nations or a U.S. treaty. It has become a tool by which victims of torture seek redress for human rights abuses, particularly those alleged to have occurred outside the U.S.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Chinese practitioners of Falun Gong, a religious group that faces ongoing persecution by Chinese authorities. In addition to Cisco, the complaint names CEO John Chambers, and two Cisco China executives, as well as other unspecified defendants.
The complaint charges that Cisco “designed, supplied, and helped maintain a censorship and surveillance network known as the Golden Shield in collaboration with Chinese Community Party and Chinese Public Security officials, knowing and intending that it would be utilized [by authorities] to eavesdrop, tap, and intercept communications, identify and track Plaintiffs as Falun Gong members for the specific purpose of subjecting them to gross human rights abuses.”
Cisco disputes these claims. “There is no basis for these allegations against Cisco, and we intend to vigorously defend against them,” a company spokesperson said in an email statement. “Cisco does not operate networks in China or elsewhere, nor does Cisco customize our products in any way that would facilitate censorship or repression. Cisco builds equipment to global standards which facilitate free exchange of information, and we sell the same equipment in China that we sell in other nations worldwide in strict compliance with U.S. government regulations.”
China has proven to be a problematic market for many foreign companies, particularly those in the U.S. In 2005, a Chinese court sentenced Chinese journalist Shi Tao to 10 years in prison for revealing state secrets. Yahoo provided Chinese authorities with critical evidence about Shi Tao’s email communication. The incident prompted a widespread outcry against Yahoo and tarnished the company’s reputation. Two years later, Yahoo offered financial support to the families of Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning, another jailed dissident, and then-CEO Jerry Yang delivered a public apology to Shi Tao’s mother at a Congressional hearing.
Google in 2006 acknowledged how difficult it was to provide adequate service to users in China, but insisted the compromises it had to make to do business there would lead to a more open China in the years ahead. Then in early 2010, the company changed course and severely curtailed its operations in China, citing “a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google” and attempts to hack into the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
This is not the first time Cisco has had to justify its business with in China. Cisco was among several Internet companies that testified on Feb. 15, 2006, before a U.S. House of Representatives International Relations subcommittee on the issue of censorship in China. During the hearing, Mark Chandler, Cisco’s SVP and general counsel, defended his company, asserting, “Cisco does not customize, or develop specialized or unique filtering capabilities, in order to enable different regimes to block access to information.”
Yet the company’s claim that it merely provides neutral technology without being aware of how its products will be used was rebutted two months later in a hearing before the same subcommittee on April 19, 2006, when author Ethan Gutmann cited Cisco brochures from the Shanghai Gold Shield trade show in December 2002 as evidence of the company’s effort to cater to the needs of police authorities.
“Newly translated documents explicitly show Cisco was training the Chinese police in surveillance techniques as early as 2001,” Gutmann claimed.
The lawsuit cites internal Cisco marketing material as part of its evidence, but those documents aren’t public yet and there is no way of knowing if they are the same material cited by Gutmann in his testimony. If such marketing material exists and gets introduced as evidence, it’s likely to play a central role in determining the outcome of the lawsuit.
You may deal with all types at work, but those irritating co-workers who drive you crazy might even be killing you.
According to this Israeli study, your chances of surviving is higher if you work with people you actually like, while the risk of premature death is reduced for people who report high levels of social support at their job.
The study also had some bad news for women in management roles.
According to the researchers, higher levels of control and decision making that come with working as a manager actually increased the risk of early death for women.
With men, it went the other way, but one assumes much of that fits in with the pressures of having to work with people who are not that supportive lower down the food chain.
Here’s a list of some of the most annoying habits our co-workers may demonstrate.
It includes flogging stuff for their children like lollies and chocolates, brown-nosers who are forever sucking up to the boss, people who fill the office with the stench from lunches eaten at the desk, loud mouths who broadcast their conversations all over the office, and the ones who have annoying mobile phone ring tones (especially those that leave their phones sitting on their desk while they’re off doing something else).
Those who smelled like ash trays and the people with annoying nervous habits like forever clicking their pens also got a mention.
According to HR reporter, other annoying habits include sloppy work, gossiping or engaging in office politics, missing deadlines, being constantly late, and presenting others’ ideas as your own.
Then there are the ones who keep interrupting conversations, who eavesdrop when you’re talking to someone or who suddenly have too much work to do when there is a crisis and everyone has to pitch in.
Add to that, the know it all, the attention seeker, the microwave monopolisers, and the people who talk your ear off.
Then there are the ones who spend all their time updating their status on Facebook or tweeting some inanity. And don’t forget those who yell across cubicles and the people who keep coming in to work when they’re sick, spreading their disease.
This is a long list, and office relationships seem to be under more strain than ever before as open plan offices become the norm and people put in longer hours.
So how do we deal with these problems? Some experts suggest talking it through or, if that fails, putting on a set of headphones to drown it out. You might also ask your boss for help, or establish some sort of paper trail.
Wallace Immen at Canada’s Globe and Mail, recommends being patient and only raising it as an issue if the problem persists, choosing your words carefully (“you mightn’t be aware of this but….”), or asking for a desk relocation. He says you shouldn’t hold grudges, assume its a deliberate, or raise it with them when you are angry.
Getaway Driver Listened To Police Traffic, Police Say
MUNCIE, Ind. — A man accused of being a getaway driver in a foiled pharmacy robbery used a smart phone application to eavesdrop on emergency radio transmissions as he waited in his car, police said.
Muncie detective Jim Johnson told The Star Press newspapers that investigators wonder whether 29-year-old Matthew Hale knew to leave the scene by eavesdropping on their conversations.
He said officers believe Hale fled after hearing radio calls saying a security guard in the store had captured his alleged cohort, 23-year-old Brian Franklin.
Johnson said Hale used his smart phone to download an application that allowed him to eavesdrop on police radio transmissions.
Franklin faces a preliminary charge of attempted armed robbery, while Hale faces preliminary charges of attempted armed robbery and unlawful use of a police radio.
It isn’t everyday that you hear this from a former NSA employee: “I should apologize to the American people. It’s violated everyone’s rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world.”
That’s Bill Binney, who spoke to Jane Mayer about Thin Thread, a program he invented to track America’s enemies abroad, but that was used after the September 11 terrorist attacks to spy on countless Americans completely innocent of any ties to terrorism. You’ll recall what happened when The New York Times broke the story, thanks to a leak from a patriotic whistle-blower:
Democrats, including then Senator Obama, denounced the program as illegal and demanded congressional hearings. A FISA court judge resigned in protest. In March, 2006, Mark Klein, a retired A.T.T. employee, gave a sworn statement to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which was filing a lawsuit against the company, describing a secret room in San Francisco where powerful Narus computers appeared to be sorting and copying all of the telecom’s Internet traffic–both foreign and domestic… Soon, USA Today reported that A.T.T., Verizon, and BellSouth had secretly opened their electronic records to the government, in violation of communications laws. Legal experts said that each instance of spying without a warrant was a serious crime, and that there appeared to be hundreds of thousands of infractions.
That was in 2005. In the aftermath of the leak, the Bush administration insisted it had acted legally, and that the methods it used were necessities in the War on Terrorism. But folks inside the NSA new better. One former staffer told Jane Mayer the following: “This was a violation of everything I knew and believed as an American. We were making the Nixon administration look like pikers.” That’s Thomas Drake, whose conscience got the best of him. He leaked information about the NSA to a Baltimore Sun reporter (he insists that he never gave her anything classified). He now faces 35 years in prison for having allegedly retained five classified documents at his house.
Many are alarmed by the government’s behavior in the case:
Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who served in the Bush
Justice Department, laments the lack of consistency in leak
prosecutions. He notes that no investigations have been launched into
the sourcing of Bob Woodward’s four most recent books, even though “they
are filled with classified information that he could only have received
from the top of the government.” Gabriel Schoenfeld, of the Hudson
Institute, says, “The selectivity of the prosecutions here is
nightmarish. It’s a broken system.”
Mark Feldstein, a professor of
media and public affairs at George Washington University, warns that,
if whistle-blowers and other dissenters are singled out for prosecution,
“this has gigantic repercussions. You choke off the information that
the public needs to judge policy.”
During his campaign, President Obama said of whistle-blowers that their “acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled.” Mayer’s story is yet another example of the gulf that separates his rhetoric before he came to power and his White House behavior. Says J. Kirk Wieb, another former NSA employee, “I feel I’m living in the very country I worked for years to defeat: the Soviet Union. We’re turning into a police state.” Maybe he’s being hyperbolic, or he’s got an axe to grind. But I get chills when so many former staffers from that agency are publicly making remarks of that sort.
One wonders what we’d hear if whistle-blowers weren’t made targets of criminal investigations that could imprison them for decades, even as leakers who don’t embarrass the government or have the right friends in high places are seemingly free to break the very same laws with impunity.
Resurrecting a sleepy small-town newspaper is a tough job. But it’s even tougher when Fox News chairman Roger Ailes uses the News Corp. security detail to spy on you. According to Gawker’s John Cook and Hamilton Nolan, Ailes has been doing just that to his staffers at the Putnam County News and Recorder, one of two small Hudson Valley-area newspapers owned by Ailes and his wife Elizabeth, near where they planned to retire. Cook and Nolan write “more than 10 full-time and freelance staffers have left the Ailes’ Putnam County papers in the last 10 months,” including former News and Recorder staffer Joe Lindsey, a former Weekly Standard editorial assistant brought in personally by Ailes to turn the paper around. After Lindsey quit in January, he was driving to get lunch when he noticed a black Navigator following him. Suspicious, he eventually “got a look at the driver, who was a News Corporation security staffer that Lindsley happened to know socially. Lindsley continued on his way and later called the driver to ask if he was following him. The answer was yes, at Ailes’ direction.”
In addition to the car incident, there were other indications the Aileses were tracking the movements of their staffers. In March, Roger Ailes “confronted the three staffers and accused them of badmouthing him and Elizabeth during their lunch breaks” and multiple staffers told Gawker they had “reason to suspect that their e-mail was being read and that rooms in the News and Recorder offices were bugged.”
As if that wasn’t weird enough, try this on for size: per Cook and Nolan’s piece, the Aileses’ redesigned layout of the “single unisex bathroom in the papers’ headquarters features portraits of Elizabeth and Roger on the walls, watching you, while you poop.”
