From left, Mark Chandler of Cisco, Elliot Schrage of Google, Jack Krumholtz of Microsoft and Michael Callahan of Yahoo at a House hearing last year on the companies’ dealings in China (Photo: Tom Zeller Jr./The New York Times)

It looks like after years of hollering, civil rights groups have nudged some technology companies into a dialogue over how to avoid stomping on human rights, freedom of speech, privacy and other concepts that aren’t considered quite so precious in some countries where the Western companies are aggressively doing business.

An announcement today from Business for Social Responsibility, which steers corporate clients toward “socially responsible business solutions,” lays out the details:

A diverse group of companies, academics, investors, technology leaders and human rights organizations announced today its intention to seek solutions to the free expression and privacy challenges faced by technology and communications companies doing business internationally.

The process, which aims to produce a set of principles guiding company behavior when faced with laws, regulations and policies that interfere with the achievement of human rights, marks a new phase in efforts that these groups began in 2006.

This apparently weds parallel efforts begun by the B.S.R. and the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington. That group’s executive director, said in the release today:

“Technology companies have played a vital role building the economy and providing tools important for democratic reform in developing countries. But some governments have found ways to turn technology against their citizens — monitoring legitimate online activities and censoring democratic material,” she said. “It is vital that we identify solutions that preserve the enormous democratic value provided by technological development, while at the same time protecting the human rights and civil liberties of those who stand to benefit from that expansion.”

Readers might remember that it was just about this time last year that executives from four major technology companies — Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco — were summoned before Congress to account for their activities in China and elsewhere, after mounting press reports about how the software and hardware that the companies sold overseas was being used, altered and tweaked by repressive governments — or tailor-made by the companies for them.

Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for sending foreign-based websites the text of an internal Communist Party message. A Chinese division of Yahoo was decried by many human rights advocates for playing a role in the arrest.

The defense from the companies has always been that they were following local laws, but advocates have long found that explanation wanting — and this might well be the tech sectors’ best stab at avoiding onerous legislation.

This was the suggestion of John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and American Life at Harvard Law Schook, which has been one of the participating institutions in the discussions:

I am firmly of the view that this problem — of multinational corporations being required, as a matter of law or otherwise, to carry out censorship and surveillance at the behest of states — would best be solved by concerted action of the sort announced today, rather than through legislation as a first pass.

(An example of such a bill is the Global Online Freedom Act, introduced last year by New Jersey Republican Christopher Smith.)

Still, what exactly the companies will be expected to do when they find themselves between a rock and a hard place — say, with a demand to turn over the names of users of their e-mail service or to shut the accounts of bloggers that a particular government dislikes (not altogether unlikely, as some readers will remember), is a bit unclear.

The statement today simply says that in addition to developing the “principles” — whatever those will be, that the participants — will seek “to advance their effectiveness by establishing a framework to implement the principles, hold signatories accountable and provide for ongoing learning.”

Oh yes, and the participants. It’s a wide mix of digital rights groups from the Berkman Center and the C.D.T., to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco; traditional human rights and advocacy organizations like Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders and others; and of course, technology companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google.

(A complete list can be found along with the release.)

Conspicuously missing, however, is Cisco, China’s largest U.S. supplier of networking hardware, the company whose equipment forms the backbone of China’s Internet (arguably the most efficiently monitored and censored networking matrix on the planet) and the company that sat shoulder-to-shoulder with executives from Yahoo, Google and Microsoft before Congress last year.

(Rebecca McKinnon, an assistant professor of journalism at University of Hong Kong, coyly notes Cicso’s absence on her blog today.)

When we asked Mr. Palfrey of Harvard’s Berkman Center why Cisco was missing from the list, he simply replied: “Ask Cisco.”

We’ll do that, and keep you posted…