Tech companies selling the technology to track us
By Asavin Wattanajantra in Editorial
Posted in surveillance, Iran, surveillance state, hacking, malware on
In April I wrote a news story based on a talk by data encryption company PGP Inc founder Phil Zimmermann at Infosecurity, which revealed his feelings about Britain heading towards becoming a surveillance state.
But compared to countries like Iran and China, I guess we’re lucky. Both have been known to monitor citizens for years. Shockingly though, tech countries in Europe don’t look like they have any qualms in providing this surveillance technology to countries that are willing to use it in this way.
The Wall Street Journal and the BBC both reported on how the Nokia Siemens Networks (which has just bought some wireless tech from poor old Nortel) provided sophisticated technology for Iran to examine the content of online communications.
It’s not just for blocking traffic - the technology is supposed to see what information is passed back and forth. A Nokia Siemens spokesman is quoted as saying: ” Western governments, including the UK, don’t allow you to build networks without this functionality.”
It’s kind of scary. But would you expect anything less? Tech companies sell to the public as well as private sector - and very often governments around the world want to keep track of their citizens.
However, at least there are still ways to be anonymous and organise demonstrations without being tracked - as the events in Iran and the use of Twitter shows.
Even Google has to bow down to government power. Google has very quickly complied to a direct command by China to remove pornography from all its sites, even though all it is doing is linking to the content rather than having anything involved in distributing it.
But China is a big market, and there’s a lot of profit to be made. This need to make money can also be seen with the fact that the Chinese government can get away with shipping surveillance software with all of its PCs.
It’s the price we have to pay for better technology. The networking tech that makes communication on devices like mobiles so easy and useful can also be used in ways which we don’t necessarily want. Companies are there to make money - they are not our moral guardians.
As a citizen I guess the only power we have is that of the vote - and is why the Iranians are so furious that the elections over there weren’t as fair as they should be. But in the UK we still have that vote - and hopefully we can use it properly.
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