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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.
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!
It's not the printer technology per se, it's the ban on crypto export. Them there printers can be used to print steganographic messages :)
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?
Why devalue the paper?
For those to lazy to look up what he is talking about check this out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography#Usage_in_modern_printers I am amazed at the example shown in the wikipedia page.
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.
"We gave Muslims top secret printer technology."
We also gave them HP printer drivers. That's like requiring them to throw shoes at themselves if they want to print.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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...
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?
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
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