About a month ago you couldn’t go to Huffington Post without thinking that Iran was going to protest its way into the year 2009. That didn’t exactly happen, despite people thinking that they could tweet a government into collapse, all from the comfort of their armchair in Columbus, Ohio. (There’s actually a term for that: slacktivism.) That being said, it now looks like some of the more rambunctious elements of that whole dust-up have now set their sights on Nokia, a company they view as being too close to the current political regime.
Nokia, which, together with Siemens, runs a mobile network in Iran, is accused of providing authorities with monitoring equipment. Said monitoring equipment was used to keep a close eye on key people in the whole dust-up. Says one shop owner, by way of The Guardian:
I don’t like to lose my customers and now people don’t feel happy seeing Nokia’s products. We even had customers who wanted to refund their new Nokia cellphones or change them with just another cellphone from any other companies.
An Iranian journalist explains:
And the most unbelievable thing for me is that Nokia sold this system to our government. It would be a reasonable excuse for Nokia if they had sold the monitoring technology to a democratic country for controlling child abuse or other uses, but selling it to the Iranian government with a very clear background of human rights violence and suppression of dissent, it’s just inexcusable for me. I’d like to tell Nokia that I’m tortured because they had sold this damn technology to our government.
Nokia has yet to address the allegations.
