[jessaustin]

There might be some network equipment vendors nervously observing this case. They probably haven't done anything as awful as building a bespoke apparatus of apartheid, and arguably they've done nothing technically different than Room 641A. However, there are probably some dissidents who would make convincing plaintiff's witnesses, were they ever to get out of the dungeons and into an American courtroom.

[zingar]

I'm not saying you intended this, but to be clear to anyone else: there are no apartheid "dungeons" remaining, the system was dismantled 20 years ago. The obstacle to victims making their way to the US is the innocuous but still effective lack of funds to do so (now we can ask ourselves whether voices silenced by poverty are less deserving of justice than voices silenced by violence).

[jessaustin]

Yeah I don't blame any network equipment for apartheid. Rather, I'm thinking of MITM equipment like Iran used to leverage their DigiNotar attack. I'm not aware of particular people that were taken into custody as a result, but it seems likely that those people exist.

[higherpurpose]

Cisco is probably feeling pretty nervous about this.

Some may say "but why does this matter now? It's all in the past."

The problem is I think we're going to see many more such cases in the next couple of decades (at least). There are already companies that knowingly help governments spy on their citizens and help them catch dissidents or even kill journalists (think the self-driving cars of the future or cars that have remote controls).

History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. It's important to punish the people responsible in helping totalitarian leaders (even within "democratic" countries). Maybe such a case will prevent say Intel from installing a backdoor in their chips in the future, or giving certain governments their future SGX keys to secure applications.

Also, IBM already got off with helping the Nazis. If they would've been punished for helping the Nazi, maybe they would've thought twice about helping with the Apartheid.

EDIT: Apparently punishing companies that helped in the Holocaust and the Apartheid isn't popular on HN.

[sroerick]

I am really not sure why you are being downvoted.

You expressed your opinion eloquently, and well within the rules of good discourse.

Downvoters, you should reply to this post explaining what you find wrong with it, rather than simply downvoting in silence.

[hindsightbias]

> spy on their citizens

Mass surveillance has only become possible via scale-out solutions. The NSA isn't running HP-UX, Solaris, AIX or Windows to track your metadata - they're running Linux.

What responsibilities do distro of scale-out solution contributors hold? Are they immune while scale-up platform execs and developers should be swinging in the Hague?

What happens when Google maps are used in a war zone by ISIL? Or twitter search engines are used to target protestors? We're dropping bombs today on people via targeting from the their android phones.

[yellowapple]

For what it's worth, I upvoted despite my disagreement about IBM being supposedly complicit in South African institutionalized racism (I don't think the EFF's case here is particularly convincing as presented in the article, though the case regarding Nazi collaboration might be different), since I think your comment does in fact contribute positively to the discussion and doesn't deserve to be downvoted at all, let alone as heavily as it seems to be.

[rfrank]

> Cisco is probably feeling pretty nervous about this.

Or the folks at Palantir and comparable companies that help enable mass surveillance of populations.

[gnoway]

The only thing wrong with this comment (IMO) is the assertion that companies help governments kill journalists. I'm not asserting they don't, but I don't consider it common knowledge that they do, i.e. please provide a source.

I upvoted.

[yellowapple]

I think that commenter is referring to military drones (and the manufacturers thereof), though I'm not sure about the journalists being killed.