Time to Give the “Golden Shield” a “Golden Shower”?

In today’s Washington Post, Anne Applebaum has an excellent column on how U.S. companies like Cisco, Yahoo and Microsoft are helping countries like China suppress democracy movements (disclaimer: I own stock in Cisco). In particular, she examines Western corporate cooperation with Chinese police and internal security in a project called "Golden Shield," a high-tech surveillance system that has been under construction for the past five years. But, after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 the United States passed a law prohibiting U.S. firms from selling "crime control and detection" equipment to the Chinese. It remains to be seen whether or not Cisco and other companies are violating this law, but Congressman Dan Burton is looking into it.

Beyond legality, of course, there’s morality. And here the judgment of history will prove more important than whatever Congress does or does not do today. Sixty years after the end of World War II, IBM is still battling lawsuits from plaintiffs who accuse the company of providing the “enabling technologies” that facilitated the Holocaust. Sixty years from now, will Microsoft, Cisco and Yahoo be doing the same?