Nokia profits from Iranian surveillance, UK next?

Rory Cellan-Jones, Technology correspondent at BBC News, has reported on the latest moves by the Iranian State to curb dissent:

'As protests continue in Iran, details are emerging of the technology used to monitor its citizens.
Iran is well known for filtering the net, but the government has moved to do the same for mobile phones.
Nokia Siemens Network has confirmed it supplied Iran with the technology needed to monitor, control, and read local telephone calls.
It told the BBC that it sold a product called the Monitoring Centre to Iran Telecom in the second half of 2008.
[ Nokia provides what it calls 'next generation' network 'solution' for Cellcom Israel. Although on Nokia's website map, Palestine is clearly not included as part of Europe, 'Israel' is defined as being in south-west Europe]

Data inspection
Nokia Siemens, a joint venture between the Finnish and German companies, supplied the system to Iran through its Intelligent Solutions business, which [in turn] was sold in March 2009 to Perusa Partners Fund 1LP, a German investment firm.
The product allows authorities to monitor any communications across a network, including voice calls, text messaging, instant messages, and web traffic, but Nokia Siemens says the product is only being used, in Iran, for the monitoring of local telephone calls on fixed and mobile lines.
Rather than just block traffic, it is understood that the monitoring system can also interrogate data to see what information is being passed back and forth.
A spokesman described the system as "a standard architecture that the world's governments use for lawful intercept".
Iran is also struggling to compete with an opposition that call on the skills of one of the world's most vibrant blogging communities and plenty of tech-savvy folks.'

It's here already
He added: "Western governments, including the UK, don't allow you to build networks without having this functionality."
One useful source of information about the watchers is The Open Net Initiative (ONI).
The ONI is a collaborative partnership of four leading academic institutions: the University of Toronto, Harvard University, Cambridge University and Oxford University. It recognises Israel as a legitimate state, although it places it in the Middle East rather than Europe. Here are pieces of their research into the possibilities of state surveillance on the net:
Political Blocking
There are no examples in Europe of filtering carried out to silence political opposition such as those that the Open Net Initiative has documented in other regions. There are, however, examples of filtering that seeks to maintain the legitimacy of government institutions and preserve national identity. In December 2002 a local Swiss magistrate, Françoise Dessaux, ordered several Swiss ISPs to block access to three Web sites hosted in the United States that were strongly critical of Swiss courts, and to modify their DNS-servers to block the domain appel-au-people.org. The Swiss Internet User Group and the Swiss Network Operators Group protested that the blocks could easily be bypassed and that the move was contrary to the Swiss constitution, which guarantees “the right to receive information freely, to gather it from generally accessible sources and to disseminate it” to every person. However, there was strong enforcement, as the directors of noncompliant ISPs were asked to appear personally in court, failing which they faced charges of disobedience.

In their current form, defamation laws at the country level, particularly in Britain, have been criticized for leading to a “Web takedown” culture where ISPs immediately remove content that is allegedly defamatory when brought to their notice, for fear of facing law suits. The concern in Britain, as in other nations, is that this can have a “chilling effect” on lawful online content and behaviour.

For up-to-date information on this, see http://opennet.net/research/regions/europe
see also: http://hanleyexpress.blogspot.com/2009/08/surveillance-guidelines-are-not-enough.html
...and here's a word from our sponsor:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNvHl9Uy1Nw

Arrested for taking a photo

As part of the stand against the corruption of our liberties and the gradual mission-creep taking place in the Police Force as it takes on the appearance and function of an army of occupation in many situations, we are encouraged to use our cameras, as the police use theirs against us.

As this video assembled by the Guardian shows, the officers of the Force do not take kindly to having a taste of their own medicine. If you carry a camera, make sure you have access to a lawyer.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/21/kingsnorth-protester-arrests-video-complaint

The police paranoia about anonymity, extending here to blurring out their own faces in their own video, is understandable, as it took three of these big men to subdue a defenceless woman.

Update, 22nd July: This Guardian link kindly sent in by my correspondent:
Woman cuffed by Boys-in-Blue for filming boyfriend being searched:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jul/21/police-search-mobile-phone-court

Ezra Nawi

Ezra Nawi, born an Israeli, is a singular activist looked on as a prophet by all those he has helped, and treated as a criminal by the Zionist regime. He has dedicated his life to helping those who are trampled on. He has stood by Jewish single mothers who pitched tents in front of the Knesset while struggling for a living wage, and by Palestinians threatened with expulsion from their homes.
More info: http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/



This is a video of his recent attempt to intervene during the heartless demolition of several Palestinian houses, shelters and shanty homes, for which he was arrested.

The hell of life for women in 'liberated' Afghanistan

By Malalai Joya, member of the Afghan parliament

As an elected representative for Farah, Afghanistan, I add my voice to those condemning the NATO bombing that claimed over 150 civilian lives in my province earlier this month. This latest massacre offers the world a glimpse of the horrors faced by our people.
The US military authorities do not want you to see this reality. As usual, they have tried to downplay the number of civilian casualties, but I have information that as many as 164 civilians were killed in the bombings. One grief-stricken man from the village of Geranai said he lost 20 members of his family in the massacre.
The Afghan government commission, furthermore, appears to have failed to list infants under the age of three who were killed. The government commission that went to the village after three days — when all the victims had been buried in mass graves by the villagers — is not willing to make their list public. How can the precious lives of Afghans be treated with such disrespect?

A trick to deceive our people
The news is that the US has replaced its top military commander in Afghanistan. I think this is just a trick to deceive our people and put responsibility for their disastrous strategy on the shoulders of one person.
The Afghan ambassador to the US said in an Al Jazeera interview that if a proper apology is made, then people will understand the civilian deaths. But the Afghan people do not just want to hear “sorry”. We ask for an end to the occupation of Afghanistan and a stop to such tragic war crimes.
The demonstrations by students and others against these latest air strikes, like the April protests by hundreds of Afghan women in Kabul, show the world the way forward for real democracy in Afghanistan.
In the face of harassment and threats, women took to the streets to demand the scrapping of the law that would legalise rape within marriage and codify the oppression of our country’s Shia women. Just as the US air strikes have not brought security to Afghans, nor has the occupation brought security to Afghan women. The reality is quite the opposite.
This now infamous law is but the tip of the iceberg of the women’s rights catastrophe in our occupied country. The whole system, and especially the judiciary, is infected with the virus of fundamentalism. In Afghanistan, men who commit crimes against women do so with impunity.
Rates of abduction, gang rape, and domestic violence are as high as ever, and so is the number of women’s self-immolation and other forms of suicide. Tragically, women would rather set themselves on fire than endure the hell of life in our liberated country.

Women’s rights
The Afghan constitution does include provisions for women’s rights. I was one of many female delegates to the 2003 Loya Jirga who pushed hard to include them. But this founding document of the new Afghanistan was also scarred by the heavy influence of fundamentalists and warlords, with whom President Hamid Karzai and the West have been compromising from the beginning.
In fact, I was not really surprised by this latest law against women. When the US and its allies replaced the Taliban with the old notorious warlords and fundamentalists of the Northern Alliance, I could see that the only change would be from the frying pan to the fire.
There have been a whole series of outrageous laws and court decisions in recent years. For instance, there was the disgusting law passed on the pretext of national reconciliation that provided immunity from prosecution to warlords and notorious war criminals, many of whom sit in the Afghan parliament. At that time, the world media and governments turned a blind eye to it.
My opposition to this law was one of the reasons that I, as an elected MP from Farah province, was expelled from parliament in May 2007. More recently, there was the outrageous 20-year sentence handed down against Parvez Kambakhsh, a young man whose only crime was to allegedly distribute a dissenting article at his university.
We are told that additional US and NATO troops are coming to Afghanistan to help secure the upcoming presidential election. But frankly, the Afghan people have no hope in this election. We know that there can be no true democracy under the guns of warlords, the drug-trafficking mafia and foreign occupation. We know that one puppet can be replaced by another puppet, and that the winner of this election will most certainly be selected behind closed doors in the White House and the Pentagon. I must conclude that this presidential election is merely a drama to legitimise the future US puppet.

Pawns in the Great Game of empire
Just like in Iraq, war has not brought liberation to Afghanistan. Neither war was really about democracy or justice or uprooting terrorist groups; rather they were and are about US strategic interests in the region. We Afghans have never liked being pawns in the Great Game of empire, as the British and the Soviets learned in the past century. It is a shame that so much of Afghanistan’s reality has been kept veiled by a Western media consensus in support of the good war.
Perhaps if the citizens of North America had been better informed about my country, Obama would not have dared to send more troops and spend taxpayers money on a war that is only adding to the suffering of our people and pushing the region into deeper conflicts.
A troop surge in Afghanistan, and continued air strikes, will do nothing to help the liberation of Afghan women. The only thing it will do is increase the number of civilian casualties and increase the resistance to occupation. To really help Afghan women, citizens in the US and elsewhere must tell their government to stop propping up and covering for a regime of warlords and extremists. If these thugs were finally brought to justice, Afghan women and men would prove quite capable of helping ourselves.

Malalai Joya is the youngest elected representative in Afghan’s parliament. In 2007, she was absurdly suspended for “insulting” other members of the parliament. Joya is an opponent of the US-led occupation and a strong supporter of women’s rights. She opposes the brutal, misogynistic polices of both the Taliban and the fundamentalist puppet forces the US have installed. Her memoir, ‘Raising My Voice: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice’, should be published later this year, 2009.

Big Brother is 60 so what's new?

On the 8th June, it was exactly 60 years since the publication of George Orwell's 1984. He spent the grim winter of 1948, the year of my birth and the Nakba among other remarkable events, polishing the work before reversing the numbers to get the title.

Given the great loss of liberties and the policies being followed to catch the so-called 'Fifth Columnists',(a totally fictional threat created by Churchill's government to justify the invasive policies and imprisonments without trial during the six years of war with the Nazies), Orwell's saga was not so remote; merely a few years in the past. His future was created in the image of the recent years, the projected crumbling, rusting infrastructure of imagined future society growing from the bombsites all over Britain.

The former head of GCHQ, Sir David Pepper, chose the occasion of this anniversary to come out of the shadows and tell the BBC ('Who's Watching You') that it has become necessary for the government to record all data from phone and internet traffic in the war on fright. 'Fight against terror' was the phrase he used.
"There are plenty of people who will do all they can to make themselves difficult to find," he said. "The thing you worry about most is the attack that you haven't seen coming."
His answer? Mass surveillance. It's here already, in the streets, and too many citizens have been fooled into voting for more, rather than less, CCTV, in the belief that it (A) works and (B) only spies on 'Them'.
In the programme, Pepper also explained the challenges that face his former colleagues at GCHQ with a diagram that shows how information is shifted in little pieces over the internet, a development which he implied must be met by granting the agency total access to all our communications. Including this one.

Mass surveillance in any form is bound to be subject to mission creep. Local councils already overstep the mark when it comes to snooping. (see: http://hanleyexpress.blogspot.com/2009/06/ripa-council-snooping-is-growth.html)
And allowing the government and its agents such powers over us, given the inescapable evidence of their incompetence, immorality, brutality and self-interest, would be the greatest folly; but Pepper tried to make the case for arrogating such powers. A Home Office Memo leaked while the airheaded former home secretary, Jacqui Smith, was losing her sense of proportion over GCHQ's megalomaniac plans held them to be "impractical, disproportionate, politically unattractive and possibly unlawful". The plans have since been modified so that data collection would be 'outsourced' to internet service providers, whoever they may be, but the key measure of mass surveillance remains and so does the function and ultimate use of that machinery by an anonymous official.

The late Ben Pimlott wrote: “Orwell offers a political choice between the protections of truth and the slide into expedient falsehood for the benefit of rulers and the exploitation of the ruled. Thus the novel is above all subversive, a protest against the tricks played by government. It is a volley against the authoritarian in every personality, a polemic against every orthodoxy, an anarchistic blast against every unquestioning conformist.”

I couldn't put it better, and neither could Henry Porter, whose blog alerted us all to this timely anniversary.

See also: http://www.no-cctv.org.uk/

Tasers with a side order of wallops

Coming soon to your high street. Here is an example of what we may come to expect from police officers in England/Wales, in any situation from the genuinely dangerous down to the simply inconvenient - from the police point of view, of course.
So far, all the blandishments and bland assurances we have been given by police spokesmen about Tasers, as indeed about basic police behaviour, are looking like hot air.
Their statement, on this occasion that they had, because public trust in the police was considered very important, referred this to the IPCC, must also be read with some scepticism: considering their concern for PR on one hand and the specious addition of the word 'independent' to the title of the new complaints body on the other. The IPCC, (a.k.a. the PCC) like its predecessor the PCA, relies almost totally on the police for its evidence-gathering. The results are selective and inevitably biased. The citizen reporter who captured this example of undeniable brutality did well.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/nottinghamshire/8101763.stm

Here is an excerpt from Henry Porter's blog on this subject:
After the G20 demonstration the IPCC did everything in its power to try to remove video evidence showing the police's treatment of Tomlinson from the web. The handling of the Jean Charles de Menezes case does not give us confidence about the transparency of the IPCC's processes, or of the reliability of the police. I am not suggesting that police in County Durham have lied but I am saying that Richards' death should be treated as a matter of grave concern and be thoroughly and openly investigated.
This country has no capital punishment for very good reasons. What we cannot allow to develop is a shoot to kill policy, in which the police are executing people who may, in time, be persuaded to drop their weapons or who can be rendered harmless by non–fatal shots to the body.

Gaza artists deliver hope out of the womb of destruction

Iqbal Tamimi
21st April, 2009

Israel should realize by now that the Palestinian nation is indestructible. A nation that was born from the womb of a great civilization is hard to defeat regardless of the methods or the variety of arms used to attack them. Nothing ever will break their spirit. Israel keeps destroying and Palestinians keep rising up from the ashes, green and willing to rebuild.
Israel has bombed everything in Gaza during the latest 21 day assault including hospitals and the only museum in the Strip. But the artists of Gaza who even do not have any materials to experiment with, have been able to make their statement heard out of the rubble.
No colours were left in Gaza, no canvas or building material since the tools of arts are like food and medicine and were subjected to the cruel Israeli siege. But Gaza’s artists will never give up, they used destroyed oxygen cylinders, parts of what is left of a bed, remains of destroyed ambulances that were shelled by Israel, lab coats, a destroyed children’s swing, and burned medical gloves to create their art on the half-standing walls of the hospital destroyed by the Israeli army.
The artwork was created to commemorate the 14 doctors and paramedics killed during the attack that left the white walls of the hospital in black and grey and smelling of gun powder.
Three artists from Gaza celebrated the rebirth of Gaza. Basil Almaqusi, Shareef Sarhan, and Majid Shala are members of the modern artists school, they are a group called Shababeek (it means windows in Arabic). Life might have deserted Gaza, but art will bring it back to life through the windows of hope and art.
The artists chose to name their gallery the Rescue, and the venue was on the remains of the bombed hospital ground of the Red Crescent at Tal Elhawa south of Gaza which was destroyed last January.
The white surgical gloves and white bandages offers hints of hope on the verge of death and destruction. 14 medical lab coats were part of the exhibition; those were the coats of the doctors and paramedics who were also victims of the Israeli aggression They were killed while stretching their hands to help those who were swinging between life and death. Israel forced its siege on everything including art materials, but this never stopped the artists of Gaza from creating art of whatever available in their destroyed city. Viva Gaza…Viva Palestine

First published on http://www.palestinianmothers.com