And why is SIEMENS allowed to do business with a madman who wants to erase Israel.
To get the job done, that they didn’t finish during WWll?
SIEMENS provided the telephone infrastructure used to track down torture and kill all those people who employed telephones to record and transmit the brutality of the election protest.
SIEMENS has oil interests in Iran, that’s the priority.
SIEMENS is big into the “greeny” stuff here in the US, which is good PR.
All else being equal, would you employ and/or specify a SIEMENS product? (Not I)
Iranian activist sues telecoms firm over ‘spying system’
guardian.co.uk | Tuesday 24 August 2010
Saeed Kamali Dehghan
An imprisoned Iranian activist is suing Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) over allegations that the telecommunications company provided the Islamic regime with a monitoring system it used to spy on the opposition Green movement.
Isa Saharkhiz, a prominent journalist and political figure, was arrested after last summer’s disputed presidential election.
Saharkhiz, who is still in detention, discovered during his interrogation in Tehran’s Evin prison that his whereabouts were revealed when security officials listened in to his mobile phone conversations using technology NSN allegedly sold to Iran, his son Mehdi told the Guardian.
Moawad & Herischi, a Maryland law firm, has submitted an official complaint to a federal court in the US state of Virginia, alleging that Saharkhiz was tortured and mistreated because of the government’s monitoring of his conversations.
NSN has confirmed to the Guardian that it sold the Iranian regime a monitoring system called Lawful Interception Management System (LIMS) in 2008. The company insists the technology is standard equipment in use in dozens of countries, but Saharkhiz’s lawyers argue that NSN could have sold its mobile phone service without the monitoring technology, which should not have been made available to a country with a record of human rights abuses.
NSN said it halted all work related to monitoring in 2009.
“The monitoring system that NSN sold to Iran was subsidiary to the main network,” Ali Herischi said. “They provided Iran with the network for many years before deciding to sell the spy system. My question is why they decided to provide Iran with the monitoring function when they knew that [the government] was abusing human rights and suppressing the opposition?”