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.

Comments

Like the Nazis

[slimjim8094]

It just occured to me that I Godwin'd this story already, but this is just like when IBM sold adding machines to the Nazis to help them tabulate Holocaust victims.

Way I see it, who cares? The corner store selling smokes isn't to blame for the lung cancer - ultimately the smoker is. Except it's even more generic than that.

- Siemens sold network technology to Iran - the same you'd use for all sorts of network admin - and they used it to censor. That's Iran's bad.
- IBM sold adding machines - they'll count anything - and the Nazis used them to count Jews (and others). That's the Nazi's bad.

In short, don't blame the maker for the use of the tool.

Re:Surprise surprise

[pirhana]

Iran, regardless of all the shortcomings and issues IS a democracy. Most of the other countries in gulf region(Like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) are under family dictatorships and worse tyrannies. And US/EU governments and corporations sell everything including weapons to them. I think this is far worse than selling technology to Iran.

Party Talk

[AB3A]

"...so, what do you do?"

"I sell net censoring software."

"Really? Who buys that stuff?"

"Oh, lots of people. We have ISP customers from around the world."

"What do they use it for?"

"You know, censoring kiddie porn sites, blocking mail spammers, and so on." ...

I think that's a pretty good description of what this is about. People are selling tools. The problem is how those tools are used. There are evil shit-heads all over the world. That does not mean the tools themselves are evil.