Nokia, Siemens and their friends in Tehran

Until yesterday, I had never heard of "deep-packet inspection". If you had asked what it meant, I'd probably have said that it was some kind of technology used by postal systems or UPS or Amazon.com to check what is in all those envelopes and boxes they move around the world.

But no. "Deep-packet inspection" is a technology used by the Iranian government to open e-mail and then gather information about the people who write it. Worse, it allows the regime to alter the e-mail for disinformation purposes. So if I write to you saying that we'll meet at 2 p.m. in front of the mosque to protest against the stolen presidential election, you might actually get an e-mail from me saying that these protests are stupid and I'm not going to have anything to do with them!

Who's responsible for this evil technology? The CIA, right? Wrong. According to The Wall Street Journal, "The monitoring capability was provided, at least in part, by a joint venture of Siemens AG, the German conglomerate, and Nokia Corp., the Finnish cellphone company, in the second half of 2008, Ben Roome, a spokesman for the joint venture, confirmed."

The monitoring technology, which was installed in the Iranian government's telecom monopoly, "was part of a larger contract with Iran that included mobile-phone networking technology." Because, Ben Roome said, "If you sell networks, you also, intrinsically, sell the capability to intercept any communication that runs over them." Aha.

The next time you make a call on that nice Nokia phone of yours, as you take a cool drink from that big Siemens refrigerator, think about Neda. Her name means "voice" in Farsi. Except she doesn't have one any more.