Following allegations in the Wall
Street Journal last June, Nokia-Siemens Networks has finally come
clean and admitted that it sold
surveillance technology to Iranian mobile phone operators. The
technology was used by the regime in Tehran to track down dissidents
during the widespread protests that followed last year’s contested
re-election of Mahmud Ahmadinejad. At least 36 people were killed in a
brutal crackdown by the authorities.
[neoconopticon.wordpress.com] While Nokia’s admission is welcome, the EU and the USA also shoulder
some responsibility. As Gus
Hosein of Privacy International has pointed out, “everyone got
angry at Nokia, while forgetting that they had built those [surveillance
capacities because of] demands from our own governments”.
The demands in question, on the “lawful interception
of telecommunications”, were drawn-up by the FBI and European
governments in the early 1990s and transposed into EU law, placing an
obligation on all telecommunications service providers to give law
enforcement agencies real-time surveillance capabilities. The result is
that all mobile phone networks can easily be fitted with this
kind of “backdoor”. (more on neoconopticon.wordpress.com)
