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Siemens, Nokia Helped Provide Iran's Censoring Tech
An anonymous reader writes "The Wall Street Journal has an article about Nokia and Siemens selling the censoring technology to Iran's government. Do you believe that the public relations damage to these companies can persuade them from selling this kind of technology to other dictatorial regimes?" I don't believe there will *be* any PR Damage, and that makes me a little sad.
I'm sure first and second world dictatorships all over the world will be looking at buying that technology.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
There won't be any PR damage, unless people make a huge stink out of it.
It's not like the world will wake up and think of them as "evil" unless they're told to think of them that way.
This is a good time for another couple companies to step in and blast away.
These are capitalist corporations. Their goal is to make money. People are willing to buy censorship technology (just look at any government office). Why do you act shocked that this is happening?
... Cisco... ... after finding out they collude with the Chinese government for censorship and spying.
Look how much that's slowing them down!
"It couldn't be determined whether the equipment from Nokia Siemens Networks is used specifically for deep packet inspection."
So in other words a European venture sold a bunch of equipment to Iran for network usage and (also FTFA)
If you sell networks, you also, intrinsically, sell the capability to intercept any communication that runs over them."
It sounds like a beat up to me. What would the story be if a US company had sold the equipment to Iran? (yeah I know .. trade embargo etc) This story smells of sour grapes.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
All they're doing is selling the Iranian government some mobile telecommunications infrastructure. What the government decide to do with said infrastructure is entirely their responsibility.
Sophistry, I hear you say? Only about to the same degree as that moron who was arguing with me here, that the author of the World of Warcraft Glider bot should not be sued by Blizzard; because he wasn't doing anything against the rules himself. All he was doing was creating a macro generation program; what other people did with it was entirely their own responsibility.
Sadly, we've come to accept most modern corporations as pretty much ammoral when it comes to stuff like this, and they're rarely ever held accountable in any meaningful way. The bulk of the population will no more hold this against Nokia/Seimens than they will hold Volkswagon responsible for its early Nazi roots (does it invoke Godwin's Law to mention that?), Yahoo/Google responsible for selling out dissidents in China, etc., etc.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Precisely - this is just a case of 'who do we like today' verses 'who do we dislike today'. The western world was all for selling Iran complex military machines (F-14s with AIM-54 Phoenix missiles among other things) when the country was under the Shah dictatorship, to the extent that there was a huge panic when the Shah was deposed. Infact there still is a huge panic about those weapons, take a look at the extent the US went to to ensure the Iranian air force did not benefit from blackmarket spares stolen from museums when the US Navy retired their F-14s from active service.
When we start long bloody wars or we burn heretics, then come and talk.
Until then you are just spouting mindless hyperbole.
Ultimately, your hyperbole is it's own most convincing disproof of itself.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Not after seeing what a piss poor job it did at actually preventing information leakage.
Iran is clearly no more a democracy than the Soviet Union. It requires more than holding an election to be considered a democracy, the outcome of the election has to actually reflect the way people voted. No one in any election anywhere wins every district across an ethnically (and otherwise) diverse population by the same margin, and yet that is what the Iranian government (which is actually the Supreme Leader and the Guardian Council) is claiming happened in this last Presidential election.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Funny how we react differently to other technology. We say that P2P is not only for copyright infringement, but also for other uses. We say that hacker tools are also used by security researchers and consultants. Whenever the politicians or the mainstream press try to demonize a technology, we are the first to show that it's not that simple.
But with technology that hits one of our sweet spots - censorship - we turn around 180 degrees? And wish the companies PR backlash? Why? Are we doing anyone a favour? Should not the anger about censorship be focussed on those who engage and support censorship, and not the technology?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
No.. Technologies are not value neutral. You can brush your teeth with a pistol, and you can kill someone with a toothbrush, but each is clearly better suited to the other task.
Censorship technology presupposes that there's an authority that knows better than you what you should be allowed to see. This is the source of the problem, and designing technology to support it _is_ a problem.