Technology

Should foreign companies that sell technology to Iran be barred from receiving federal contracts in the United States? According to two US Senators, the answer is a resounding yes.

Hot on the heels of several news reports indicating that Nokia Siemens Networks supplied the Iranian government with technology that allowed them to control online content on an almost unheralded scale, US Senators Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) plan to introduce a bill that would bar foreign companies that sell technology to Iran from receiving federal contracts.

“The internet has proven to be one of the strongest weapons in the hands of the Iranian people seeking freedom and trying to chart a new destiny for their country,” said Senator Graham, as quoted by Netgov. “Companies that provide technology to the Iranian regime to control the internet must be forced to pay a heavy price.”

The bill, if passed, could potentially put quite a kibosh on a good deal of business for Siemens, who, along with Nokia Corporation, established the joint venture that sold the technology to Iran. According to Senator Schumer, as quoted by Netgov, Siemens has approximately 2,000 contracts with the federal government, including contracts with the Pentagon, Homeland Security, Justice, and Energy departments. For fiscal year 2009, Siemens has federal contracts worth about $250 million. Nokia Siemens holds federal contracts worth in excess of $5 million.

The problem, however, with any such bill is the issue of enforcing it, which would undoubtedly require armies of lawyers slogging through reams and reams of contractual data to find a smoking gun. Nokia Siemens Networks, for example, is now saying that the technology it supplied to the Telecommunications Co. of Iran, the country’s lone fixed and mobile network operator, is designed only to conduct lawful intercept of traffic by law enforcement organizations. And that technology is required by both the United States and European Union countries, leaving technology companies like Nokia Siemens Networks between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

To muddy the waters even further, according to a recent statement from Nokia Siemens Networks, reports of them supplying nefarious technology to the Iranian government are false. In a recent blog post, Ben Roome, spokesman for Nokia Siemens Networks, states unequivocally that his company “has provided lawful intercept capability solely for the monitoring of local voice calls in Iran. Nokia Siemens Networks has not provided any deep packet inspection, web censorship, or internet filtering capability to Iran.”

Of course, we’ve been down this road before. During the 1990s, Hughes Electronics Corp. and Loral Space and Communications Ltd. were accused of damaging US national security by providing Chinese space engineers with technical rocketry data that could have aided China’s ballistic missile program. Loral eventually reached a settlement with the US government in which they paid a $14 million civil fine, while neither admitting nor denying any improprieties.

Senator Schumer’s and Senator Graham’s bill, while perhaps laudable in its intent, can’t be seen as anything other than reactionary in nature. Technology, in essence, is a blunt, dumb instrument. Inherently, technology is neither good nor bad; only in its application does technology enter the realm of morality. A hammer, after all, is just an object, or tool, with as many applications as there are grains of sand on a beach. Should a company that produces hammers be held liable in instances where one of its hammers was used to commit a murder?

Likewise, Nokia Siemens Networks should in no way be held morally or fiscally responsible for how the Iranian government applied the technology the company supplied to it, especially as Nokia Siemens Networks followed the letter of all existing laws. Attempting to extract a pound of flesh from Nokia Siemens Networks would have a chilling effect on the advance of technology itself by bringing intent into the equation. If forced to face such punishment and public rebuke, no technology company that wished to remain profitable would explore any sort of technology that might be employed by bad people for bad things. Ultimately, the world would suffer at the hands of seemingly good intentions.

By Robert Pothier