Cisco Follows IBM Infamy Of Oppression

Yesterday I featured the Congressional testimony of Ethan Gutmann on the aid of U.S. companies in Chinese oppression. Today, I started reading Edwin Black’s bestseller, IBM And The Holocaust (NY: Three Rivers Press, 2001,2002). As the Washington Post review said, “Black establishes beyond dispute that IBM Hollerith machines significantly advanced Nazi efforts to exterminate Jewry.”

The parallels of how Cisco follows IBM’s infamy are striking, sickening and saddening.

First, Gutmann:

During construction of the first Chinese public access web in ’96, Chinese authorities suddenly became interested in blocking forbidden websites and in keyword searching – “looking into the packets.”…

Cisco prevailed…Cisco’s General Counsel denies selling any special configuration. Chinese engineers who actually worked on the firewall project are equally adamant that it was custom made….[for] Cisco’s capture of 80% of the Chinese router market…

By 2003, Cisco’s “Policenet” was deployed as the Internet backbone of the Chinese State Security System….

A policeman or PSB agent using Cisco equipment could now stop any citizen on the street and simply by scanning an ID card remotely access his … political behavior, family history, fingerprints, and other images. The agent could also access his surfing history for the last 60 days, and read his e-mail. All in real time….

Detailed information on more than 96 percent of the Chinese population is now recorded on police databases…

Now, Black:

[Hitler’s] quest was greatly enhanced and energized by the ingenuity and craving for profit of a single American company…That company was International Business Machines…

Der Fuhrer’s obsession with Jewish destruction was hardly original….But for the first time in history, an anti-Semite had automation on his side…

IBM, primarily through its German subsidiary, made Hitler’s program of Jewish destruction a technologic mission the company pursued with chilling success….More than 2,000 such multi-machine sets were dispatched throughout Germany, and thousands more throughout German-dominated Europe….

IBM’s subsidiary, with the knowledge of its New York headquarters, enthusiastically custom-designed the complex devices and specialized applications as an official corporate undertaking…The machines were not sold, they were leased, and regularly maintained and upgraded by only one source: IBM….Moreover, the fragile machines were serviced on site about once per month, even when that site was in or near a concentration camp….

The Germans always had lists of Jewish names….But how did the Nazis get the lists?…The answer: IBM Germany’s census operations and similar advanced people counting and registration technologies….IBM Germany invented the racial census – listing not just religious affiliation, but bloodline going back generations….

People and asset registration was only one of the many uses Nazi Germany found for high-speed data sorters. Food allocation was organized around databases, allowing Germany to starve the Jews. Slave labor was identified, tracked, and managed largely through punch cards. Punch cards even made the trains run on time and catalogued their human cargo….

How much did IBM know?…IBM officials…were almost constantly in Berlin or Geneva, monitoring activities, ensuring that the parent company in New York was not cut out of any of the profits or business opportunities….

Ultimately, I assembled more than 20,000 pages of documentation from fifty archives…Many of these materials had simply never been accessed…

Now, over 60-years later, the records of 17.5 million people murdered by the Nazis that were captured in Germany are going to be released. How many IBM punch cards will there be among the 30-million documents?

When the Chinese have finally shucked their current despots, how many Cisco, and Yahoo, and Google, and Microsoft documents of collaboration in their enslavement will be revealed.