It seems that interest in the ongoing struggle for Iranians to escape the oppressive regime continues, and interest in it appears to be on a resurgence as well.  I’ve noticed in my feeds an uptick in the number of posts carrying the #IranElection tag, and I continue to be fed interesting stories from our friends in the Middle East.

This is why, late one night this week, when I saw a post from the UK Guardian profiling the green political art coming from Iran, I took the time to read.  About mid-way through the article, I noticed a particularly disturbing poster (in light of the extensive coverage we did here at SiliconANGLE on the topic) proclaiming that “Life is Beautiful Without Nokia-Siemens.”

From the Guardian:

Nokia and Siemens have also been a frequent target for these posters as their joint venture, NSN, sold a mobile surveillance system to the Iranian regime last year. Many prisoners have been arrested on the basis of their mobile phone conversations.

Linked within that short blurb is a much longer post on the Nokia-Siemens / Iran connection. From that post (my emphasis added):

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.

Nokia is the most prominent western company to suffer from its dealings with the Iranian authorities. Its NSN joint venture with Siemens provided Iran with a monitoring system as it expanded a mobile network last year. NSN says the technology is standard issue to dozens of countries, but protesters believe the company could have provided the network without the monitoring function.

Siemens is also accused of providing Iran with an internet filtering system called Webwasher.

A Nokia spokeswoman refused to comment on the company’s sales in Iran.

There are a number of things that strike me as odd about these assertions.

Nokia Did Sell Lawful Intercept to Iran

Iranians are primarily upset that their government has the ability to perform what are called “lawful intercepts,” which is essentially the ability to digitally ‘tap’ the line of any subscriber on the network and listen in on conversations.

This is reasonable to be upset about in the situation that Iran finds itself in, but not uncommon.  Pat Phelan spoke back in July of this year to this very topic:

I think Nokia’s behavior in the whole sordid issue has been exemplary given that the so called monitoring equipment (intercept) is supplied by every Mobile switch manufacturer at every installation on the planet.

U.S. Government Has Same Wireless Monitoring Ability as Iran (businessWeek).

Now that we have the usual rent a mob who know zero about the technology starting a fucking dumb campaign with an anti Nokia twist I feel I have to comment.

“It’s hard to tell whether the problem is ignorance or hypocrisy, but Senators Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are making fools of themselves with their war on Nokia Siemens for supplying the Iranian government with equipment that lets authorities monitor wireless phone calls and data transmissions.”

This monitoring (Calea) has been in existence since 1994 in the USA and if the equipment was supplied by USA firms it would have the exact same monitoring tools onboard.

Lawful intercept capabilities has never been denied as having been sold to Iran – mostly because every modern telco has sold it standard issue since the 90’s. Any geek over the age of 25 worth his salt knows this.

See past SiliconANGLE [#IranElection] posts

Did You Know: Nokia is Getting Boycotted? [#iranelection]

Iran Probably Isn’t Using Deep Packet Inspection [#iranElection]

More Details Emerge on Iran’s Internet Censorship

How Iran is Blocking the Internet Suggests They Weren’t Prepared for an Election Backlash [#iranElection]

7 Sites for Tracking #IranElection

Again, No Deep Packet Inspection

I’m not sure how many ways I can say this before it sinks in.  I’ve given interviews to foreign press on this topic, I’ve appeared on dozens of podcasts and radio shows. I’ve blogged about it here and elsewhere.

I’ll say it again: Nokia-Siemens didn’t sell Iran deep-packet inspection.  Nokia-Siemens doesn’t even have deep-packet inspection software or hardware in their repertoir.

I’ll put it one more way today that I haven’t ever done in the past. 

I worked for Nokia in the 90s, and amazingly (two tech busts later) still have a number of friends who work at the company.  I spent the better part of the afternoon for two days calling folks I knew and the people they recommended me to, and only on the second day of calls did I run into anyone at the company who really understood what Deep Packet Inspection utility was without me having to explain it in great, detailed laymen’s terms.

This isn’t a slam against Nokia… it simply goes to show you that spying isn’t their world.  They aren’t in the business of building better security and spycraft protocols in their equipment.

They make phones, towers and all the paraphernalia that accompanies that.

So I can say, without equivocation, that Nokia-Siemens didn’t sell Iran with a system called WebWasher.

In fact, searching Google for ‘webwasher nokia’ and filtering results to exclude anything before July 2009 (when these allegations surfaced) show that the only connection there between Nokia and anything termed Webwasher is when a fellow left Nokia to go join the Webwasher.com executive team in 1999 before the utility’s acquisition by McAfee years later.

Webwasher is now a free anti-spyware and content filtering utility for the PC, available for free download via CNet. 

It isn’t Deep Packet Inspection.

Where’s the Accountability?

The blame for this creeping anti-Nokia sentiment rests squarely on the shoulders of the Wall Street Journal, and the dozens of other organizations like the UK Guardian that continue to perpetuate these myths about the company’s alleged unscrupulous activities.

Should we have an honest and open debate about whether our governments should have the ability to listen in on our phone calls digitally?  I’d welcome it.  It’s certainly a dangerous thing for the Iranian government to have their hands on, but I’d also argue that it’s just as dangerous in the hands of US law enforcement, who in certain parts of the country can be similarly as cruel and corrupt as some of the instances we’ve seen in Iran.

Should Nokia bear the brunt of that criticism?  I say it’s unfair. Nokia-Siemens developed that product at the behest of American and European governmental requirements, and then exported it to other countries as they could afford to pay the premium on what is essentially a cornerstone to modern telephony.

Last week, ZDnet’s Richard Koman published a post that alleged Yahoo collaborated with Iranian officials in turning over email accounts of alleged bloggers.  That story, without scrutinizing it very closely, was at least more believable than the Nokia story.  Yahoo does have quite a checkered past with human rights abuses, something I covered pretty extensively back in 2007 at Mashable:

The grand take-a-way is that neither Congress nor Yahoo really know how to operate morally and ethically, when it comes to privacy concerns, on the international stage. Callahan talked about how in 1999, when the incident occurred, China’s tech sector, as well as Yahoo as an organization, were both young, and how they want to take more responsibility now. Congressman Lantos didn’t really seem interested in that, calling Yahoo a group of “moral pygmies.”

Back then, the commenters were outraged:

I saw two very arrogant executives refuse to take personal responsibility, continue to pretend that they do not know the workings of their own company on a topic they have had more than 2 years to think about and investigate further.

As an ordinary citizen I have tried to get basic answers from Yahoo and Google on their human rights policy – but they don’t even have the courtesy to send a "thank you for contacting us" letter.

Dozens of pundits and readers last week showed that very same outrage at the possibility that Yahoo could guilty of doing the same thing yet again.  Robert X. Cringely talked about how stupid Koman was, how idiotic his editor was, and evil his headline writer was, and how dumb we all were for believing it for a second. Tech Trader Daily talked about how Yahoo’s stock numbers actually slid on the news that there might be an Iranian connection.

ZDnet, though, issued a retraction and an update within hours of publishing the post, apologizing for not double sourcing the information that led to the post.

Here’s my point: we’re working on four months later, and I still haven’t heard the Wall Street Journal issue a retraction or an apology for their clearly misleading and un-fact-checked post that’s led to utter devastation of Nokia’s sales in an entire country, a major PR problem that seems to be infecting other neighboring Asian countries.

ZDNet sure has been raked over the coals for their error on Yahoo. Where’s the accountability for everyone else over Nokia?