Senators Want To Punish Nokia, Siemens Over Iran

fast66 writes "After hearing about Nokia-Siemens sale of Internet-monitoring software to Iran, US Senators Schumer and Graham want to bar them from receiving federal contracts. They planned the action after hearing about a joint venture of Nokia Corp. of Finland and Siemens AG of Germany that sold a sophisticated Internet-monitoring system to Iran in 2008. According to Nextgov.com, Schumer and Graham's bill would require the Obama administration to identify foreign companies that export sensitive technology to Iran and ban them from bidding on federal contracts, or renew expiring ones, unless they first stop exports to Iran."

Comments

Re:Don't be so quick to defend the corporations.

[chill]

What about selling to non-oppressive regimes? These systems, and similar ones by Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Narus and others are in widespread use throughout the U.S., Europe and the rest of the "free world".

Been there, installed that.

Hell, I know of one system that uses a MySQL database to store the warrant and tap info. The interface is an Apache module. The front end is rather ugly closed source GUI written in Israel which sends the info via an HTTPS POST.

Narus' key products were based on Snort and Wireshark, just on custom super-computer class hardware.

Gotta love FOSS. With all the hacking tools available for Linux/BSD, including source code, who needs custom code?

and in Germany?

[Tom]

So, now that we here in Germany have introduced Internet censorship (via the crazy Zensursula von der Leyen law, your choice whether "crazy" applies to the law or the person) - will the US senators punish the companies that supply the infrastructure for that as well?

Oh wait, Germany isn't a "rogue country", right? We don't go by facts, we go by political climate, don't we?

I'm looking forward to an embargo...

Re:First uncensored post

[GrpA]

Accepting abuses of human rights in other countries is still a bad thing, even if your own government is abusing those very same rights.

If you don't stand against it openly, even if it is hypocritical to do so patriotically, then there's no reason for those within your own country to desist from their own actions.

After all, ignoring another country's abuses just because your own country does likewise is even worse than hypocrisy. It's complicity.

GrpA

Read your bible every day, dear senators!

[Opportunist]

Matt 7:3

For those not wanting to bother, it's the part about beams in your eye and splinters in that of another one.

Hey, I just want to give them something they can understand, considering how many politicians ride on God and his will into the house, I'd say they should know the good book, eh?

OK, snideness aside. Do you think this is about "freedom of speech" or similar bullcrap? It's about power. It's the attempt to dictate to foreign companies what they may or may not sell. Neither Siemens nor Nokia is a US company. It's simply an attempt to find out whether those companies rely heavily enough on US government contracts to actually bend over to US government's will.

And that's the shameful part. IF it was about free speech, I'd be very happy for such a bold and outright good move. Similar actions taken in the US lead me to the conclusion that this is not the case. Else, why care for the splinter in someone else's eye?