Our campaign partners, Business Human Rights Resource Centre, confirmed to us that Sandvine, Verizon and Cisco committed not to apply for Pakistan Government’s call for proposal. Business Human Rights Resource Centre were previously able to help us get a statement of commitment from Websense.
Letters from Sandvine: sandvine-re-pakistan-govt-tender-5-mar-2012
Statement from Verizon: “Verizon has never intended to bid on the Pakistan Internet filtering project.”
Cisco has indicated that it will be releasing a statement shortly. We would like to thank Business Human Rights Resource Centre for their constant support throughout the campaign. We will release another statement tomorrow, with more updates on other companies and a way forward for the campaign.
We still have not heard back from:
- Huawei
- Mcafee
- Blue Coat
- Netsweeper
- ZTE
This indicates that we need to build more pressure on these companies. Our campaign deadline is March 15th, we will need your consistent support to build pressure and get the government to stop the initiative to blanket ban the Internet.
How can you help?
- Sign this petition
- Write a letter to these CEOs asking them not to apply
Letter Written to CEOs of international companies from Bolo Bhi asking to publicly commit not to apply for this contract:
February 23, 2012
Dear Sir/Madam,
We would like to direct your attention to a Request for Proposals issued by the ICT R&D Fund [here: http://ictrdf.org.pk/RFP-%20URL%20Filtering%20&%20Blocking.pdf] of the government of Pakistan on February 22, 2012.
We are a Pakistan based civil society advocacy group and fear this technology will have terrible repercussions for our country.
We request you not to apply for this license and to publicly commit not to do so. Please respond to this letter with this commitment. If we don’t hear from you, we will assume this is a license your company intends to apply for and we will notify the public of your position.
Yours Sincerely,
Sana Saleem
CEO, Bolo Bhi
www.bolobhi.org
McAfee Inc., Headquarters
2821 Mission College Blvd.
Santa Clara, CA 95054
USATwitter: @mcafee
CEO Netsweeper,
Guelph, Ontario N1H 1A7
Canada
Blue Coat Systems, Inc
420 N. Mary Ave
Sunnyvale, CA 94085
Sandvine Corporate Headquarters
408 Albert Street
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3V3
Phone: +1 519 880 2600
Fax: +1 519 884 9892Twitter: @sandvine
Ren Zhengfei
Chief Executive Officer
Huawei Industrial Base
Bantian
Longgang District
Shenzhen, 518129
ChinaTwitter: @huaweipress
[…] Verizon, and Cisco also announced they would reject the initiative, and we laud these companies for doing so. Several companies, however, have not responded to Bolo […]