Cisco has been released from legal liability for facilitating persecution conducted by the People’s Republic of China.
Litigation revived in 2023 accused Cisco Systems of providing China with surveillance technology that the company allegedly knew would be used to surveil and persecute practioners of Falun Gong and others.
The high court’s ruling ends the 2011 lawsuit brought against Cisco by members of Falun Gong (The Guardian, June 23, 2026).
The justices reversed a lower court’s decision that had breathed new life into the 2011 lawsuit, which was brought under the Alien Tort Statute of 1789….
The Cisco case posed the question of whether the law creates liability for corporations that “aid and abet” human rights abuses, a form of what is called accomplice liability.
The lawsuit accused San Jose, California-based Cisco of knowingly designing and implementing the “Golden Shield”, an internet surveillance system used by the Chinese Communist party to target dissidents. The plaintiffs said China used the system to track and then torture Falun Gong members.
Cisco called the allegations unfounded and offensive….
Falun Gong, founded in China in 1992, was banned by China’s government in 1999 after thousands of members appeared at the central leadership compound in Beijing in silent protest. The group has called for people to renounce the ruling Chinese Communist party. Falun Gong members founded a right-leaning US media outlet called the Epoch Times that has been heavily critical of the Chinese Communist party and supports Trump.
Reuters quotes Justice Amy Coney Barrett, author of the decision: “Courts cannot create new rights of action to remedy violations of international law, so there is necessarily no liability for aiding and abetting such violations. Plaintiffs’ ATS [Alien Tort Statute] claims against Cisco must be dismissed.”
In 2023, the 9th circuit had determined “that the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged ‘that Cisco provided essential technical assistance to the douzheng (crackdown) of Falun Gong with awareness that the international law violations of torture, arbitrary detention, disappearance and extrajudicial killing were substantially likely to take place.’ ”
Courthouse News Service reported in the same year that “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.”
Policenet
In 2011, a Cisco spokesman said: “There is no basis for these allegations against Cisco…. 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 US government regulations.”
Even these few sentences make several assertions irrelevant to what the suit charged. For example, whether Cisco’s work for China was legal under U.S. law at the time doesn’t answer the question of whether Cisco knew the kind of uses to which its technology would be put by a totalitarian government.
Nor is it exactly exonerating that Cisco’s tech for the CCP conformed to “global standards.”
In their lawsuit, plaintiffs argued: “Cisco refers to the Golden Shield system in its internal literature as ‘Policenet.’ As a direct result of the Defendants’ creation, development, and maintenance of the Golden Shield technology with Chinese authorities, Plaintiffs, Falun Gong practitioners, have suffered severe and gross abuses, including false imprisonment, torture, cruel assault, battery, and wrongful death, for which judicial relief is warranted in the form of compensatory and punitive damages. “
If, on any legal basis, Cisco had ultimately been held liable for its role in developing the CCP’s surveillance software, there would have been no reason to limit the finding of liability to Cisco. Many other U.S. technology companies and the U.S. government itself have also helped to create the PRC’s technological weapons of persecution.
Also see:
Associated Press: “Detailed findings from AP investigation into how US tech firms enabled China’s digital police state” (September 9, 2025)
“American tech companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known, an Associated Press investigation found. They sold billions of dollars of technology to the Chinese police, government and surveillance companies, despite repeated warnings from the U.S. Congress and in the media that such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities.”
Associated Press: US government allowed and even helped US firms sell tech used for surveillance in China, AP finds (October 29, 2025)
