The Security Blog

Today, a CNN.com article stated that, predictably, 

Earlier this week, New Jersey-based Iranian blogger Mehdi Saharkhiz filed a lawsuit in a U.S. federal court against Nokia Siemens Networks on behalf of his father, Isa, who has been in an Iranian prison since July 2009.

In what is sure to be the baseline of its defense, Nokia-Siemens stated that the lawsuit is brought "in the wrong place, against the wrong party and on the wrong premise".   Oddly enough, NSN is not disputing that their equipment was used to spy on Iranian people, a defense they used in the past and now proves to be disingenuous.  There is no doubt that the Nokia-Siemens company, technically managed by a shell group of managers in Germany, we used to perform the surveillance after last year's elections in Iran, and that the result of such surveillance was the arrest, rapes, and executions, of many people who dared speak against the government there.  

Nokia-Siemens also states, to the European Union Parliament, no less, that  they left Iran in early 2009, and that they sold their last monitoring center there in March 2009.  

…soon after our formation as a company, we made a decision to exit from the monitoring center business, and closed a transaction to divest our remaining assets in March 2009, well before the disputed election in June. …

Really?

Nokia Siemens Is Lying.  Again.

The company's own website, has open jobs in Iran:  Want one?

A simple search on Linkedin shows that there are at least 76 people that list their current employer in Iran as Nokia-Siemens.  At least one of them has the title "Country Manager", a title which indicates that (a) there is enough business in that country to need a designated manager and (b) that the company is not based in Iran.  

And here is an employee that started working at NSN-Iran in January 2010.

Isn't it time for Nokia-Siemens to tell the truth?  Should they not divest and stop supporting that despotic, crazy, regime?

As for what we can do?

Well, we need to stop buying Nokia, Siemens, or Nokia-Siemens products.  We need to assess if anyone we find who works for NSN has a professional certification, especially around HR, Security or Networking, and complain to the certification organizations' boards, an ask for those certifications to be revoked (for performing unethical work)

And I would love to hear more ideas on how we can punish the Iranian government…   This Iranian Legal Odyssey should succeed further in punishing the Iranian regime for choosing its pariah way.

Two further, conflicting, usages of electronic data are emerging in the Iranian situation.  In the first, a website is using digital picture evidence to show how Lebanese, arabic-speaking, and non-Iranian-military forces are being use to repress the freedom seeking protesters in Iran.

The site lebasshakhsi.blogspot.com/ is providing pictorial evidence (some examples above) of "security forces" who are Lebas-Shakhsi (without uniform) beating peaceful demonstrators.  It follows those pictures with documentary evidence to the foreign nature of those forces.    Being foriegn here, in addition to the terms emphasised above means a few different things.  For example:

• That the regime was prepared ahead of time for "troubles" with these elections and even expecting trouble;
  
• That the regime believed it could not reliably call on its own, Persian, forces to fire on their fellow citizens;
  
• That the Lebanese-based Hizballah forces were willing to potentially sacrifice their own fighters to do favors for the Iranian regime; and
  
• That Hizballah has no particular like to the average Persian in the street, and willing to beat them and kill them.
  

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On the opposite side, the Iranian Regime has sites, such as xxxxx (name withheld per request) that use a technique called "crowdsourcing" to show faces of individual protesters and to ask the public to "come and tell us who they are".  Of course, using language such as

Unfortunately,… hypocrites, monarchists and counter-revolutionary and terrorist groups in cyberspace and the media are nothing but [trying to] disrupt the country social security and not for any other purpose to achieve this aim to …"

to try and encourage voluntary snitching on protesters.  That, if followed by a "call to their national responsibility"

Therefore, all users hereby and Iranian families are expected if [they know of] the personal data of any of the following photos and any news and information including photos, films, articles, news, email, web address, or complaints about the flow of disturbance of trade and [of the ] demand of each group in cyberspace actions [which] are destructive to stimulate activity through the site [...should email the information to the authorities]

Conflicting use of digital information.

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