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HP Accused of Illegal Exportation To Iran
AdamWeeden writes "According to research done by the Boston Globe, HP has been secretly using a third-party company to sell printers to Iran. This is illegal under a ban instituted in 1995 by then US President Bill Clinton. The third-party company, Redington Gulf, operates out of Dubai and previously stated on their web site that the company began in 1997 with 'a team of five people and the HP supplies as our first product, we started operations as the distributor for Iran,' though now the site has been changed to remove the mention of Iran. Has HP unknowingly been supplying Iran with technology or have they been trying to secretly get by the US government's export restrictions?"
Nice to hear that another country has its entire WLAN infastructure polluted by "Hpsetup" SSIDs!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
>"Has HP unknowingly been supplying Iran with technology or have they been trying to secretly get by the U.S. governement's export restrictions?"
Yes.
Oh, and Timmy...please use a modern browser w/spell checking, thanks.
We gave Muslims top secret printer technology. They can now print G'Had pantalets at 28 ppm. The world will now end.
Only if you put big finger-quotes around "unknowingly".
On the other hand, maybe this is a secret government plot to bankrupt Iran by selling them cheap printers, then gouging them on cartridges.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Selling product to people who want them is a slap in the face of our American free market system!! How dare they!
This is what IBM did during WWII to avoid the ban on sales to Nazi Germany.
You are with the free market system, or you are against it.
shhhhhh.... it is a CIA ploy to bankrupt Iran via HP printer ink refills... would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for that meddling /.
Let's for a moment gloss over whether those restrictions are good ideas. Are they even possible? I mean, we're talking about computing hardware here, the kind of stuff you can buy anywhere in the world without identification. It's not like a ban on nuclear materials where there's a limited supply and you can watch the sources pretty closely. So if HP quits selling to Iran, what's to stop them from buying from Turkey or England or India or Japan or China, and how could we ever pretend to know or that we could prevent it?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Weapons of Mass Instruction?
The military is run very much like any other enterprise; cell phones, fax machines, computers, and -printers-. lots of paperwork. a big part of the military is moving data/information, documenting it, getting it in front of people to make decisions. alot of paying bills, aquiring supplies, etc.
anything that helps a business run pretty much helps the military run. the better it is, the more efficient the war machine is.
(although im sure some vets would disagree the paperwork helps anything... haha.. but you get the idea)
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Why devalue the paper?
Nah, they're modern HP printers. Light pinch, then the printer breaks.
If they were LaserJet 4s, though...
At a time where our economy is taking a beating we should be glad that someone is willing to buy our stuff, even if they are crappy and actually made in China.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I'm quite sure he meant their human rights. Iran might not honor those, but that doesn't mean Iranians don't have them. Specifically, in this case, freedom of the press.
You know Canada had price controls on their goods in 1980, so...the US killed 2 million of us? Oh no wait you're just an uninformed troll.
Om, nomnomnom...
Just before the islamic revolution, the Shah had acquired US made bank note printing presses, the exact same used to make US dollars.
So they can already make the most real fake notes.
It's not like there was another country a few thousand km away that made all sorts of IT products, including but not limited to printers, which just happened to want to buy exactly what Iran had a lot of.
Clearly, without US-made printers, the Iranian military is unable to function properly.
Print Controlla!
THL phish sticks
That explains why those guys are so pissed off at the West. It really didn't add up for a while. I mean our policies of colonialism and arrogance might be a bit irksome, but it's no reason to want to kill us. But those poor bastards have had to talk to use HP hardware and talk to HP tech support. Yeah... now I understand where they're coming from. Perhaps now that HP's been busted and will no doubt be forced to stop, our relations with Iran will improve...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You've obviously never been in an Iranian torture facility. They strap you to a chair, and force you to watch Titanic and Spice World in full Dolby digital surround sound, and in 3D. About an hour into the movies, the prisoners beg to be fed to the HP printers.
Hey, actually, this doesn't sound like a half-bad T.V. show. "Persian Science Theater 3000"
Hooman: Abbas, what the hell are we watching?
Abbas: I don't know Hooman, the box said "Plan 9 From Outer Space." I heard it won the Golden Raspberry Award, I think they give that to the top films! Raspberries taste good, so the movie should have been good!
Kavan: Hold me, Abbas, I want to die.
[The three men gouge their own eyes out]
Best "String" Ever!
i think Iran should be allowed to buy printers. Ink is more expensive than oil and with HP's / Lexmark's, etc. business model, I'd say making them buy ink to print is nearly an act of economic war more effective than the trade embargo itself.
[/humor]
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
PC load letter! FSCK!
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Sell them (Iran) ink more expensive than oil until they become bankrupt.
PC LOAD LETTER? What the fuck does that mean?
Around 1998 I got hired by a company that manufactured medical lab equipment. Just before I started, they got a HUGE order from Iraq, which at the time, was under UN embargo and the scandal-ridden oil-for-food program.
The type and quantity of equipment that was ordered was ASTOUNDING, and sent alarm bells off through-out my organization. This was an enormous order, which amounted to about 70% of our typical annual production (world-wide) for the specific products. On top of that, there was a second order for spare parts to fully rebuild 2/3 of the original order. The equipment was specifically designed to grow bacterial and viral cultures on a very large scale for research. 60 Minutes had just done an investigative report on Saddam's chief biological weapons expert, who to most western news was only known as "Dr. Germ".
Our organization was struggling, and we really needed the revenue. To the workers on the floor, it meant that the lay-offs had stopped, for the moment.
I was dismayed that the organization was not in the position just reject the order on principle. Instead, they submitted the order to Clinton Administration's Commerce Department and set up a contingency plan to sell the equipment through multiple intermediary companies if permission was denied. Our CEO then made a large donation to the Democratic National Committee, and magically the sale was approved and blessed by the Commerce Department as "Humanitarian Medical Equipment", which it clearly was not.
Many can claim that no WMD's were found in Iraq, but I have a very good insight to the scale of the program that they had put in place. Almost all politicians have a price, and none are as pure as the wind-driven snow. Where there is money to be made, the barriers can be overcome.
One would think that HP's consumer goods could not be easily adapted to nefarious purposes (beyond counterfeiting), but you never know. Most laser printers do contain processors that are far beyond the capability allowed to pass through the embargo. Desperate people become very resourceful.
-- Len
exactly, I'd doubt these printers ever touched US or allied soil. They probably went straight from China to Dubai. China will let HP get the money or simply run the factory overtime (counterfeits) and ship the printers from a different warehouse when the HP managers leave. HP USA has absolutely no control over HP China in matters like this. "be happy the Chinese pay HP to use the HP logo on the equipment, pray they don't alter the deal anymore".
"Everyone does it!"
(( The following may or may not be fiction ))
I have personally witnessed similar activities being attempted by EFTDatalink/Amstar Systems (both entities run by the same people) trying to set up ATM based money transfers between the US and Mexico... yes... if your first thought was "drug money laundering" then you wouldn't be alone because talks with various money handling entities refused to talk to Amstar Systems about it and simply walked out of talks with the company's executives. "Amstar Mexico" was pursuing business activities in ALL of central and south america and CUBA. Amstar Mexico is free to deal with whoever they want... they are a Mexican company and they don't have those restrictions as far as I know.
Of course, all of the statements I just made are mostly based on my own recollection and may be inaccurate. My last contact with the operators of the company was well over 10 years ago. I believe my memory is accurate enough but should be treated as speculation or even as fiction. One of the executives at the time was an arrogant asshole of a lawyer and who knows what he might try to do to me if Slashdot offers little to no protection regarding my identity.
Given how technologically advanced HP printers have become, this presents a huge risk to national security. I'm mortally afraid that my comfy way of life has been jeopardized by HP's actions. President-Elect Obama needs to appoint a special prosecutor ASAP!
Actually, now that I think about it, my comfy life has already been jeopardized by HP products... anyone want a paperweight that just happens to look like a fancy scanner with ADF?
Hmm.. san act of war. I guess it would be an act of war when they jack up the tariffs so that their citizens prefer buying their domestic crap over our now artificially expensive exported crap too. Right? I mean anything to break the free market is an act of war right? That's what your saying isn't it.
The embargo is there because Iran can't play well with others and it's attempting to obtain Nuclear weapons so it doesn't have to listen to people telling them to play nice. It isn't just the US, almost all of Europe is telling them to drop the Nuclear ambitions too. Iran sponsors terrorism and if you think it is ok because they are only killing the jews right now, just wait until they run out of the jews and start looking for you. By then, you will know what an act of war is. And it won't be something as petty and not being able to make a buck because the world don't wasn't some country to go Nuclear or have vast resources availible to it when sponsoring terrorists who are just as happy killing you the innocent civilian as they are those damn innocent civilian jews..