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Iranian Police Tracking Dissidents Using Tech From Western Companies
chrb writes "A recent article at Bloomberg discusses Western companies supplying monitoring equipment to Iran. There are few regulations restricting the sale of intelligence monitoring systems to the Iranian government, and large corporations like Ericsson and Nokia have supplied the equipment used to identify dissidents and suppress anti-government protests. '[One such system from Creativity Software] can record a person’s location every 15 seconds — eight times more frequently than a similar system the company sold in Yemen, according to company documents. A tool called "geofences" triggers an alarm when two targets come in close proximity to each other. The system also stores the data and can generate reports of a person's movements. A former Creativity Software manager said the Iran system was far more sophisticated than any other systems the company had sold in the Middle East.'"
Let me just say: fuck Creativity Software and fuck any programmer willing to work for them. There's this thing called 'ethics' and if they choose to violate the most basic premises to enable people to do shit like this, the outcomes are also on *their* heads. None of this "just doing my job" bullshit.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
FYI - I couldn't be more against despotic regimes, I don't fly because of the TSA... I'm not an apologist. /Syria was before this one)
I do; however, have the same question anytime this article runs on Slashdot (Bluecoat
If you are Ericcson/Cisco/Bluecoat/Juniper/etc, how do you ensure your tech never ends up being used for "evil"?
Who is evil? Should network filtering equipment be declared munitions and its export controlled? Should they include a killswitch so if it gets in the hands of an evil dictator it can be disabled? Should Nokia do background checks on all potential buyers to try to predict whether or not they are straw purchasers for evil entities?
Both of those ideas some either really far fetched, impractical, or inethical in themselves... so my question is - if you feel a hatin' rising up after reading this about Ericcson/Nokia - what should they do?
mov ah, 4ch
int 21h
Didn't past articles say they were smuggled into Iran by Dubai-based buyers?
I guess we can have a debate about how many degrees of separation is needed for effective export restrictions, but I don't know how we can ever draw the lines to be reasonable.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
I know your trying to take a shot, but to answer your question, yes. When did a company become responsible for governments using/misusing thier technology/product? Our own govt. (U.S.) uses Sun boxes and Cisco switches to monitor ME. Think the US government isn't using similar software/hardware to monitor dissidents (Occupy Wall Street, Tea Party, Neo Nazi, etc..). It's a snow job blaming big companies (which is all the rage today). It reminds me when global warming fired up, even the traffic reports changed: Before global warming debate: "Intoxicated man ran over a pedestrian." After: "Intoxicated driver's SUV ran over a pedestrian".
I'm an idiot because your arguing a different point (which i agree with oddly). My point is that it's not up to the individual business to decided who is nice enough to buy thier technology. If Nokia sold them equipment/technology that was against U.S. policy, then by all means, prosecute. Use your own examples, They are all illegal. What Nokia did was legal. I take issue with some business practices, but I'm also going to call bullshit when I see it. GE paid no taxes so GE=bad. Why? Did they follow all current tax laws? Yes? Did they get write downs for losing thier ass the year before (shh.. it's a secret), yes. Ask yourself, "Can Krogers decide to not sell food to Muslims?". In short, if you want something illegal, make it illegal. BTW, as the IDIOT of the group, can you point out, in any way the part of your post the refutes mine?