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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.
I'm sure that here in the UK the government is already enquiring on how they can do the same.
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!
Needless to say, Motorola manufactured chips used in land mines. IBM manufactured some nasty stuff for WWII. There will be no PR fallout from this. Nobody wants to know.
"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.
Anyone who professes to that an imaginary being is responsible for everything is insane and doesn't deserve any benefit of science. Jonas Salk, Louis Pasteur, Thomas Edison, Galileo Galilei, and the other great minds have saved more souls and advanced humanity further than any Mullah, Pastor, or Priest of any faith. The Mad Mullahs of Iran don't deserve cell phones or any other bit of technology.
Yeah, it's a rant, but I'm just tired of religious nut jobs of any type forcing their superstitions on anyone else.
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.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I'm willing to bet if you poll the Iranian population, you will find that the majority of them would support censorship. The same thing would happen in China. Censorship has been with us for as long as there as been communications. I'm not saying it's alright or that censorship is a good thing. Freedom of speech is actually a pretty radical ideal and one that isn't universal outside of the western societies. Even in the US that right is constantly under threat from different sources. At the end of the day it is our believe in the value of freedom of speech that keeps it alive. Look at how often this issue comes up on Slashdot and how people are all up in arms about it. The EFF is constantly busy fighting for it. Didn't some very wise man once said, "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."? If Iran or China is to have freedom of speech, their people must be convinced of its value and necessity. Until that happens, denying them the technology would lead to them either developing their own or just not connecting to the Internet. I am not sure the latter is actually better.
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Why single out Iran? Are you saying Nokia shouldn't operate in Iran; they should break the law there; what?
I'm guessing a lot of people reading this have the former in mind: information technology companies in the industrialized world shouldn't operate in countries that place restrictions on political speech to the extent seen in the countries on which the United States already has sanctions. In the 1980s, near the end of South Africa's counterpart to the U.S. "Jim Crow" era, there was an effort to boycott companies that did business in South Africa: disinvestment was a result.
"...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.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
The question has to be asked: why does this matter? Iran would still do its own thing.
In this case, they had the product, so why not buy it? That's not such a hard thing to understand. This is like saying "omg Raytheon makes missiles!" which is no surprise to anyone. What about their clients? What about their unofficial clients? Even those aren't a surprise.
Sure, we may not agree with Iran's internet policy, and yes, the vendor may take a portion of the blame in an incident, but I hardly see Iran's isolationism as the fault of any one company.
Seeing as how most of the footage we get out of Iran is from mobile phones and such, is it any surprise that they'd ask a mobile phone maker for help? Business is business, and in this case, it's easy to pin the responsibility on the buying party.
There are no perfect answers, only the right questions. More questions at http://foresightandhindsight.blogspot.com/
When is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei up for reelection? Who ran against him in the last election?
because it assumes that the UK government does not have the technology already, and as such it is both funny and naive :)
-- All this knowledge is giving me a raging brainer.
There is nothing special about what they did...
Exactly. Besides, Nokia LGPL'd Qt. They could invade Iran, and still keep good PR.
It's not as if they probably only got the contract because American companies such as Cisco are forbidden from selling such equipment to Iran.
My point is that I do not believe there is a company in the world that would pass up this kind of contract. Do I disagree with it's use? Of course I do.
But I fail to see why Nokia and Siemens should be demonised anymore than any other company in the world - at the end of the day the only difference here between Nokia/Siemens and any other networking company is that those guys got the contract - it didn't mean others didn't bid and it doesn't mean others like Cisco wouldn't also bid if they had the opportunity to.
Rather than focus on chastising company x for the fact company x sold something to country y which was used in a bad way we should be chastising big corporations in general for this sort of behaviour. It's a problem that extends far far beyond just Nokia and Siemens and we can't expect Nokia and Siemens to change their ways if no one else will else it puts them at a major disadvantage and is like committing corporate suicide.
well technically Iran is a democracy
with democratic elections
and president elected by people.
obviously there are problems
and problems with ballot counting,
however Florida also had ballots accounting problem...
I do not say Iran is a happy place to live
but it is more open than many think.
do you think manifestations would happen in North Corea ?
do you think people would be able to play WoW or use Twitter in many Burma ?
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
...or is this just the media cynically cheering-on a 'peoples revolution' so that they can fill out their news cycles. So far I haven't heard of any widespread election tamporing, some anecdotal stories, unlike in some other elections. I could have missed it though.
Honestly so far I just see this as a knee-jerk reaction in the west sympathising with the disgruntled minority voters because clearly 'Iranians would never vote for that evil, west-hating dictator, so it must have been rigged'.
One thing I DID hear through some media analyses is that up until a few months ago, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the favourite to get elected, then he made some fumbles, made some comments, and his standing in THE ELECTION POLLS significantly reduced, and the opposition got giddy. Well that can either be a realistic reflection of the voters intentions, or it could just be a backlash that gets put to the side when it comes to making the final and long-term decision in the voting box.
So, is there any evidence of election rigging yet?
PS, I'm not apologising for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, just that suggesting that, maybe, he is popularly supported. I know that when I watched a recent doco about Iran I was surprised that their society was much more modern and free than I felt that I had been led to believe.
PPS I'm not saying it wasn't rigged either, just that in the large amount of media I have seen on it, it is all about rallys and protest, not of massive vote rigging, feel free to point out something concrete on the contrary.
Not after seeing what a piss poor job it did at actually preventing information leakage.
Same time Queen Elizabeth II is. At least the office of head of state in Iran is up for election, however rigged and preposterous that could be. Also, the "Assembly of Experts", which has elected him, can dismiss him.
Khamenei ran against Mohammad Reza Golpaygani, winning by two-thirds of the votes.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
So is there any evidence of election rigging yet?
"In 50 Iranian cities the number of votes cast in this month presidential election exceeded the number of eligible voters, the state's election watchdog admitted today. "
Take that as you will.
Correct, according to this article from the BBC:
"Western governments, including the UK, don't allow you to build networks without having this functionality."
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
Isn't it to be expected that the world's largest provider of cellular phones is better at providing connectivity devices than censorship devices?? At some point, some executives decided that a communications device with degraded service is better than no communications device at all. When you consider the utility of a cellular device, then subtract the censorship laws, you still are better off than when you started. We should be praising Nokia in particular for working around the laws of Iran and providing the Iranian people with the best tools available.
That aside, did anyone notice that the article chose to point fingers at two European companies? This would be a fine piece for brewing American distrust of Europe. I'm not so sure that was unintentional, given the messenger? Who owns the WSJ again ?? =)
I'll bite.
"Free market" forces don't deal with Tyrants, and they shouldn't. That is the responsibility of the oppressed. Lasting change won't come about externaly, it must happen internally. Note Afghanistan and Iraq, which we attacked for our own interests. If those had both been civil wars, triggered internally, the countries would probably be well on their way to their own freedom instead of being "iffy" like they are now.
Oppressed countries don't have free markets, they have tyrants stealing the majority of what they produce to further oppress the people. If a tyrant allowed the markets in his country to be open and free, guess what would happen. That's right, they'd have vastly greater liberty! You probably wouldn't be able to call the leader a "tyrant" or a "despot" either. It would be more like "benevolent ruler", because freedom to trade requires a few things, like freedom of speech (in a practical sense, not a bill of rights sense), freedom to travel, etc. These breed other freedoms that these rely on, and pretty soon the government, regardless of what kind of government it is, becomes a smaller and smaller part of life.
Free markets on a global scale don't take into account the internal market of a country, other than in the sense that there are avenues of trade that simply will not exist into or out of an oppressed country. That doesn't mean there will be NO avenues of trade, just fewer and they will be controlled by the government.
To flip the whole thing around, you can't have complete liberty if you don't have the freedom to trade. If you aren't free to trade to whoever you want, whenever you want, then you aren't completely free.
That said, complete freedom produces incivility and is counter productive. If it were possible to give everyone in the world 100% liberty, you'd have a perfect world for all of about 10 seconds, probably less. It would immediately degenerate into anarchy, which only provides freedom for those who can take it by force. In a sense, even they aren't free.
Ideally the governments role should be to maximise the individual liberties of its citizens. This requires restrictions on interactions between people, but only for the purposes preventing the imposition of another's will on the individual.
In fact, the result of any "free market" will always be a corporatocracy or at least a close working relationship between widespread tyrannical governments and the most powerful corporations.
It's not a free market if the government prevents individuals from competing. Assuming the "tyrannical government" is not preventing individuals from getting together and competing with the large corporation, in a free market system the corporation topples when becomes less efficient than what a smaller group of individuals can produce. This can take some time, but it always happens.
Look at the banking and insurance industry, that big crash? That was the market self adjusting, attempting to eliminate the "most powerful corporations" when they pushed the market too far. And what did socialism do? It went in and rescued them, taking billions of dollars from the citizens to shore up the corporations. The market can't eliminate a corporation if the government props them up!
Further (and this is a slightly different issue) Capitalism will always result in some form of slavery.
If you want to see slavery (which occurs based on the morals head of society, and has nothing to do with the market) on a mass scale, go take a look at the USSR and their Communism. You were told where to work, when to work, what you got, and any attempt to change this made you a criminal. You'd sure as hell better stay in line, or the KGB will come take you away. China was the same way when they attempted to go pure Communist, but had to re-introduce captitalism or face collapse. If Communism, the only alternative socio-economic ideology, is so great, why does the Chinese government have to block access to information about the outside world?
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Want a free market solution to keep tyrants from getting high tech weapons? How about we stop using half our entire government budget to subsidize the military industrial complex. If there is anything that is decidedly not free market, its using Tax dollars to purchase products from select companies, decided almost entirely by lobbying efforts. http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/
If the market, when left to itself, didn't tend to form monopolies, there'd be no need for an organisation to prevent that happening.
You seem to be confusing failure to prevent with collusion.
In a truly free market, there'd be no FCC to block competition. Something that doesn't exist can't collude with anyone.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
/// This message censored by Nokia and Siemens. ///