The Iranian officers who knocked out Saeid Pourheydar’s four front teeth also enlightened the opposition journalist. Held in Evin Prison for weeks following his arrest early last year for protesting, he says, he learned that he was not only fighting the regime, but also companies that armed Tehran with technology to monitor dissidents like him.
Pourheydar, 30, says the power of this enemy became clear as intelligence officers brandished transcripts of his mobile phone calls, e-mails and text messages during his detention. About half the political prisoners he met in jail told him police had tracked their communications and movements through their cell phones, he says.
“This is a commerce of death for the companies that place this technology in the hands of dictatorships,” Pourheydar says.
So begins a must-read report by Bloomberg News on the complicity of Western technology companies in Iran’s suppression of anti-regime protests. It deserves the widest possible circulation and attention.
Bloomberg singles out three companies for scrutiny:
Even as the pariah state pursued a brutal political crackdown, including arrests and executions surrounding its contested 2009 elections, European companies supplied Iran with location tracking and text-message monitoring equipment that can turn mobile phones into tools for surveillance.
Stockholm-based Ericsson AB, Creativity Software Ltd. of the U.K. and Dublin-based AdaptiveMobile Security Ltd. marketed or provided gear over the past two years that Iran’s law enforcement or state security agencies would have access to, according to more than 100 documents and interviews with more than two dozen technicians and managers who worked on the systems.
Ericsson and Creativity Software offered technology expressly for law enforcement use — including a location- monitoring product proposed by Ericsson in early 2009 and one sold this year by Creativity, according to the interviews.
By all means read the rest.
As for Creativity Software, based in Kingston upon Thames, you can get a quick idea of what it’s all about from its homepage (click to enlarge):
Creativity Software specialises in Location Based Services. Our turnkey solutions enable mobile operators around the world to capitalise on the LBS market opportunity and to meet regulatory Lawful Intercept requirements.
“Lawful Intercept requirements”? As required by the murderous, repressive Islamic Republic of Iran?
Bloomberg reports:
Early this year, Creativity Software sold a system that enables Iranian law enforcement and security forces to monitor cell phone locations, according to three people familiar with the transaction. With it, police can track a target’s movements every 15 seconds and plot the locations on a map, according to a 19-page company product specification document. Creativity Software confirms that Irancell is a client, but declined to discuss sales of any location-tracking gear for law enforcement purposes, saying it would breach contract confidentiality.
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The system can record a person’s location every 15 seconds — eight times more frequently than a similar system the company sold in Yemen, according to company documents. A tool called “geofences” triggers an alarm when two targets come in close proximity to each other. The system also stores the data and can generate reports of a person’s movements. A former Creativity Software manager said the Iran system was far more sophisticated than any other systems the company had sold in the Middle East.
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Employees at Creativity Software were concerned about selling the technology to Iran, says Venu Gokaram, who worked as a test manager for the company until early this year.“A lot of people were not happy they were working on a project in Iran,” he says. “They were worried about how the product was going to be used.”
Gokaram says he worked only on commercial products and didn’t share those concerns. He declined to discuss specifics about any technology deployed in Iran.
Creativity Software, which is privately-held and partly funded by London-based venture capital firm MMC Ventures, announced last November that it had made four sales in six months in the Middle East for law enforcement purposes without identifying the mobile operator clients.
So here we have a British company that is profiting by aiding a brutal rightwing regime to stay in power through suppression of pro-democracy opponents.
And where is the Left? Who is raising bloody hell about this?
Well, if you’re Kevin Ovenden, John Wight or Richard Seymour, among many others, you’re aiding the Islamic Republic’s propaganda efforts by appearing on George Galloway’s program “The Real Deal” on the Iranian state-funded Press TV.
Seriously, folks in London, who or what are you waiting for? How huge a task is it to print up some flyers, gather a like-minded friend or two, call a few newspapers and TV stations, and spend a morning or afternoon leafleting in front of Creativity Software’s offices?
