[liberationtech] Nokia Campaign

[Kim Pham]

Hi all -

Here is some more info on the campaign:
http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2010/10/14/a-year-later-nokia-still-cant-escape-connections-to-iran-repression/
(full text follows).  You can sign the petition here
(http://www.accessnow.org/page/s/notonokia). Feel free to forward to
people who would be interested in putting their name to this.


A Year Later, Nokia Still Can’t Escape Connections To Iran Repression
Oct. 14 2010 - 4:01 pm

By ANDY GREENBERG

Here’s a lesson for corporations selling high tech surveillance
equipment to digitally repressive regimes: The taint of dictatorship
isn’t easy to wash off, even after a year of public relations scrubbing.

Access Now, a free speech organization, launched a “No To Nokia”
petition Wednesday that’s quickly spreading through Facebook and
Twitter, criticizing the company’s dealings with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s
regime in Iran and calling on Nokia to “completely end all sales,
support, and service of tracking and surveillance technology to
governments with a record of human rights abuses.”

That will be a tough demand for Nokia to satisfy: In fact, the company
has said it already exited the Iranian business more than a year ago.

In a statement to the European Parliament in June, Nokia Siemens
admitted that it had sold “lawful intercept” capabilities to Iranian
data providers over several years, equipment that could be used to
identify and track political dissidents or other opponents of Iran’s
dictatorship. Those statements confirmed reports from the Wall Street
Journal a year before that accused Nokia Siemens, a joint venture
between the Finnish mobile provider and the German tech conglomerate, of
supplying Iran with technology it used to find and imprison political
opponents, reports that the company vehemently denied at the time.

The company’s testimony in the European Parliamentary hearing on
information technology and human rights abuses sounded much like the
confession and policy promises that Access’s petitioners are now looking
for:

    While we halted all work related to monitoring centers in Iran in
2009, including service and support, we believe that we should have
understood the issues in Iran better in advance and addressed them more
proactively. There have been credible reports from Iran that
telecommunications monitoring has been used as a tool to suppress
dissent and freedom of speech. We deplore such use of a technology that
can bring so many positive benefits to society – and that, in fact, we
believe has brought so many positive benefits to Iran.

But since then, Nokia’s Siemens’ Iran public relations morass has only
widened, thanks in part to a lawsuit brought by one Iranian, 56-year-old
Isa Saharkhiz, in a Virginia Court. Saharkiz, a journalist and political
dissident, was arrested and imprisoned after his Nokia phone was tracked
by the company’s Intelligence Solutions law enforcement tracking
technology. While Saharkiz has been in prison for the past 14 months, he
and his son Mehdi Saharkiz have accused Nokia Siemens in a civil
complaint of “aiding and abetting the undemocratic, tyrannical and
repressive Iranian government’s humiliation, torture and unconscionable
human rights abuses.”

Imprisoned Iranian dissident Isa Saharkiz

You can read the latest version of the complaint here.

Nokia Siemens has responded in court that it’s not liable for how its
foreign customers use its technology under the U.S.’s Electronic
Communications Privacy Act. But the Electronic Frontier Foundation has
called on the company to drop that defense and take legal responsibility
for Saharkiz’s sad fate. “The time is now for Nokia to ‘be accountable’
for its role in the repression of Mr. Saharkhiz and likely thousands of
others. And it must do so not just in the press room, but in the court
case, dropping its cynical claims that corporations should never be held
accountable for their role in human rights violations,” the EFF’s Eddan
Katz writes in a statement.

I’ve asked Nokia for comment and will update when I hear from the company.

The moral of the story, particularly for companies like IBM that have
expressed their eagerness to sell data mining technology to China: Once
you’ve put your foot in a human rights quagmire, even defending yourself
in court will only sink you deeper.

**

Best,

Kim