Cisco and the Golden shield project

A few days ago, we had a little discussion about project "Golden Shield", a mass surveillance system. Just yesterday, Wired had an article about Golden shield and a leaked presentation about Cisco.

From Wired.com:

An internal Cisco document (.pdf) leaked to reporters on the eve of a Senate human rights hearing reveals that Cisco engineers regarded the Chinese government's rigid internet censorship program as an opportunity to do more business with the repressive regime.

The 90-page document is an internal presentation that Cisco engineers and staffers in China mulled over in 2002 as the central government was upgrading its local, state and provincial public safety and security network infrastructure. Under the category "Cisco Opportunities," the document provides bullet point suggestions for how it might service China's censorship system called the "Golden Shield", and better known in the West as the Great Firewall of China.

Read full article.

And to not give the wrong impression of Cisco, another small abstract from the article:

One of Golden Shield's stated goals in the Cisco presentation was to "combat 'Falun Gong' evil religion and other hostiles," -- a statement that was attributed to Runsen Li, the Chinese government information technology chief in charge of developing the project.

Mark Chandler, Cisco's senior vice president of legal services, said during the Tuesday Senate hearing that he was "appalled" and "disappointed" when he saw that quote in the presentation.

"It is very regrettable that one of our engineers quoted directly from Mr. Runsen Li, the Chinese government's head of IT for the Golden Shield project in this internal presentation," said Terry Alberstein, a senior director of corporate communications at Cisco. "They do not represent Cisco's views, principles or its sales and marketing strategy or approach. They were merely inserted in that presentation to capture the goals of the Chinese government in that specific project, which was one of many discussed in that 2002 presentation."

I had a look at the presentation and there are some positive things that they can achieve through the deployment of surveillance and communication systems. It all depends on the wielder and if there will be a someone watching the watcher. I wonder if it will be used to tackle cybercrime?