Sidecut Reports

Great post from Glenn Greenwald over the weekend, adding up the figures to find out that AT&T, Comcast and Verizon have spent $13 million on lobbying so far this year, partly to help Congress see its way clear to offering the providers amnesty from the FISA lawsuits they are facing.

It’s a longish post but there is good stuff at the bottom too, about prospective Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s ties to — surprise! — lobbyists from the telco arena. Guess which way McCain is voting on amnesty.

It apparently wasn’t quite at the level of having members of Congress call high-tech leaders moral pygmies, but Cisco nevertheless got slapped around a bit at a Senate Judiciary hearing Tuesday, with a Cisco exec publicly apologizing for an old product presentation slide that touted the ability of Cisco networking gear to help “Combat Falun Gong evil religion.”

Putting aside the Cisco explanation — it was a low-level employee who did this, we’re shocked and appalled, etc. — don’t be surprised if you see more questions from Capitol Hill about how advanced networking gear may be assisting other governments in their attempts to control their citizens’ Internet usage. While the report quotes Cisco senior VP Mark Chandler asserting that “any employee who tailors its [Cisco’s] routers to help governments monitor or censor Internet activity is in violation of the company’s code of ethics,” a Democratic-controlled Judiciary committee may not want to put a lot of trust in the company’s self-policing efforts.

“The subcommittee has received some troubling information about Cisco’s activities in China,” Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin was quoted as saying.

Don’t think politics is a part of this? Don’t forget that Cisco CEO John Chambers is BFF with probable Republican candidate John McCain.