Iranians Boycotting Nokia Siemens, But Is It Justified?
About a month ago, when most of the unrest in Iran was happening, I wrote about the fact that Nokia Siemens seemed to be helping the Iranian government track down protesters.
Well, it looks like the Iranian people are doing something about it and protesting with their wallets. Perhaps you should too?
Not so fast…
First, from the Guardian…
The mobile phone company Nokia is being hit by a growing economic boycott in Iran as consumers sympathetic to the post-election protest movement begin targeting a string of companies deemed to be collaborating with the regime.
Wholesale vendors in the capital report that demand for Nokia handsets has fallen by as much as half in the wake of calls to boycott Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) for selling communications monitoring systems to Iran.
There are signs that the boycott is spreading: consumers are shunning SMS messaging in protest at the perceived complicity with the regime by the state telecoms company, TCI. Iran’s state-run broadcaster has been hit by a collapse in advertising as companies fear being blacklisted in a Facebook petition. There is also anecdotal evidence that people are moving money out of state banks and into private banks.
So why might this boycott be unjustified? Because the functionality that Nokia Siemens offered Iran was the exact same they offer every other country…
Nokia Siemens Networks have responded by confirming that they did provide a “monitoring centre” as part of the network, but that its capability is restricted to voice monitoring of local calls on its fixed and mobile network. The company said the Wall Street Journal was wrong to surmise that this surveillance technology also extended to the internet.
In a statement, Nokia Siemens Networks said: “The restricted functionality monitoring centre provided by Nokia Siemens Networks in Iran cannot provide data monitoring, internet monitoring, deep packet inspection, and international call monitoring or speech recognition. Therefore, contrary to speculation in the media, the technology supplied by Nokia Siemens Networks cannot be used for the monitoring or censorship of internet traffic.”
They point out that there is nothing out of the ordinary in providing a monitoring centre as part of a new network. “In most countries around the world, including all EU member states and the US, telecommunications networks are legally required to have the capability for lawful intercept and this is also the case in Iran.”
Long story short, there seems to be more to this story and the company may not have colluded with the Iranian government as many first thought.
Here’s the question: Who do you believe?
(Photo: Aref-Abid)
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This debate accesses some very difficult questions in international law. South African victims of apartheid have sued various US corporations in American courts alleging that goods they provided to the apartheid regime resulted in crimes against humanity. The rub, to me at least, ends up being how the firm marketed the equipment.
So if IBM just sold a computer and software to the military in Johannesburg, and they didn’t have any idea how it was going to be used, maybe how the computer was adapted to the military’s uses might not be their fault.
But if South Africa’s military went to IBM and said, “Hey, we need some software to help us track dissidents, what do you got?” I think that’s clearly complicity in human rights violations.
So if Iran’s intelligence service went to Scandinavia and said, “How can we shut down communications between our citizens and the outside world in a political crisis,” and Nokia Siemens said, “Oh, this works great,” I think they’ve got some virtual blood on their hands.