The Life of a Silicon Valley Rockstar

According to an internal memo posted by boingboing and wired, Cisco sees China’s repression as a business opportunity. “The document is the first evidence that the networking giant has marketed its routers to China specifically as a tool of repression.” (wired) Understandably Cisco is backpedalling as fast as they can.

“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’d file this under “We’re sorry we got caught”. Cisco is well-known for their aggressive sales tactics but no golden shield will protect them from the moral fallout on this one. I think the Chinese media blog said it best:

At the end of the day, though, Cisco has done a lousy job at explaining itself. We are left with many question marks. Their behavior and statements to date have given us little reason to believe that they care in any meaningful way about human rights.