A case initially brought in 2011 against Cisco Systems for selling technology to the People’s Republic of China and revived in July 2023 will now be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court (CNBC, January 9, 2026).
The accusation is in part that Cisco provided technology that the PRC would use to “surveil and persecute members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement.”
The other part is that Cisco’s decision-makers knew what they were doing.
In the 2023 ruling, a court of appeals said 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.’ ”
Cisco’s rejoinder is that its provision of the means to commit these horrors was legal.
Cisco has called the lawsuit, which seeks monetary damages, unfounded and offensive, saying it sold technology to China that is expressly legal under U.S. trade policy….
The Chinese Communist Party saw [Falun Gong’s] growing popularity as a challenge to its rule and banned it after 10,000 practitioners silently protested in Beijing in 1999, calling it an “evil cult” that threatened national stability, and imprisoned some of its members.
The Human Rights Law Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Washington, sued Cisco in 2011 on behalf of a group of Falun Gong members. The lawsuit accused Cisco of designing and implementing the “Golden Shield,” an internet surveillance system used by the Chinese Communist Party to locate and detain Falun Gong practitioners and other dissidents.
The initial plaintiffs included Chinese and U.S. citizens who said they were subjected in China to forced conversion, among other abuses. Some of the plaintiffs said they endured beatings with steel rods, shocking with electric batons, sleep deprivation, and violent force-feeding.
A judge dismissed the case in 2014, saying the alleged conduct did not have a sufficient enough connection to the United States for the case to go forward. The case stalled for many years, in part because of a string of rulings in other Alien Tort Statute cases that made them harder to bring.
If the actions of Cisco Systems were always entirely legal, the legality is a problem, for U.S. policy as well as for the lawsuit. Also a problem is the fact that only Cisco of all the many U.S. tech firms that have provided tyranny-enhancing technology to the People’s Republic is facing the jeopardy of this lawsuit. If it succeeds, though, the outcome may open the door to further lawsuits against other U.S. tech firms.
Perhaps the legal culpability will be swept away. But nothing can sweep away the moral culpability.
Also see:
Britannica: “Great Firewall”
“To gain greater control of the Internet, in 1998 China’s Ministry of Public Security began an initiative called the Golden Shield Project to control the flow of information. The project sought methods to control and monitor citizens’ Internet activity and prevent people from reaching websites that did not conform to the Chinese government’s strict policies. The result of this project was the virtual boundary known as the Great Firewall.”
Associated Press: “US government allowed and even helped US firms sell tech used for surveillance in China”
