In July 2023, dormant litigation against Cisco for helping the Chinese government to find and torture members of Falun Gong was revived in the Ninth Circuit.
Michael Gennaro of Courthouse News Service reports:
According to the plaintiffs’ 2011 lawsuit, Cisco Systems developed a surveillance software called Golden Shield and sold it to the Chinese Communist Party. The software was designed specifically to help the Chinese government track down members of Falun Gong, and the plaintiffs say Cisco developed Golden Shield even though it knew the software would be used to commit human rights violations.
Writing for the majority, U.S. Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon concluded that if the allegations made by the plaintiffs are true, they “are sufficient to state a plausible claim that Cisco provided essential technical assistance to the douzheng of Falun Gong with awareness that the international law violations of torture, arbitrary detention, disappearance, and extrajudicial killing were substantially likely to take place.” (Douzheng, “struggle,” is a way of characterizing the targeting and abuse of political opponents.)
The case had been dismissed for purportedly failing to meet an international standard for what counts as “aiding and abetting.”
The plaintiffs are members of Falun Gong, a religious group that the Chinese government has deemed inimical to state interests. Cisco is hardly the only U.S. firm to have technologically abetted China’s tyranny.
