Nokia Siemens admits Iran “error”

ICTs in general 1 Minute

Nokia Siemens in Iran: Shame or all’s fair game for telcos? was my exactly one year ago on the sale of equipment to Iran by Nokia that enables the clampdown on, inter alia, the freedom of expression. At the time, Ben Roome, a spokesperson for Nokia Siemens who also commented on my blog, was on the defensive and made no reference to the provisioning of surveillance technologies to surveillance agencies in Iran.

But as reported in the media recently,

After MEPs critical – Nokia admits Iran “error”

Barry French of phone company Nokia Siemens explained that they had provided Iran with lawful interception capability in mobile networks, but admitted the company committed an error providing active surveillance technology for monitoring centres.

The company had faced criticism in a European Parliament resolution over this and the way it had been used by Tehran to intercept mobile telephone calls.

In 2009 Nokia halted all work connected to monitoring centres and started reviewing policies. “We have a responsibility to help ensure that the communications technologies we provide are used to support, and not infringe, human rights” he told the hearing.

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

Published

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s