Senate hearing refocuses on China

Well it's not nice to pick on China these days, what with the earthquake and all. But that didn't stop Dick Durbin from picking on Google, Cisco and Yahoo about their business dealings in China, as Anne Broache reports on News.com. In interesting part, the hearing focused on a 90-slide PowerPoint apparently created by a Cisco employee working in China that suggest Cisco assisted China with its Golden Shield of Internet censorship.

One slide lists one of the project's main objectives as monitoring and controlling the Internet to combat the "Falun Gong evil cult," a spiritual practice that the Chinese government has persecuted.

Another slide lists planning, construction, technical training, and maintenance as "opportunities" for Cisco, which Shiyu Zhou, deputy director of a group called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, argues "flatly rebut(s) Cisco's repeated and self-serving claims" that it has sold the same generic routers and other equipment to China as to any other government and does not in any way assist with its censorship goals.

The industry lawyers at the meeting trumpeted their voluntary efforts at being good global citizens, but Sen. Durbin suggested that may not be good enough.

"Perhaps it's time for Congress to consider converting this moral obligation into a legal obligation," he said.