Iran is currently undergoing riots and violent demonstrations as a result of irregularities in the recent presidential vote. Thus Iran is all over the news, in good and in bad.

Recently Nokia-Siemens Networks got some (unwanted?) publicity from many sources after having sold “network snooping equipment” to Iran.

The sad thing is that while people are so pumped up by evil ayatollahs oppressing the people of Iran, they mistakenly think that spying on the citizens is something so terrible that it can only happen in some sort of backwater evil clerical dictatorship, and that such snooping is not even possible to do elsewhere.

That is false. This kind of functionality exists today in basically ALL GSM networks, in ALL countries you can think of. Yes, this means also your country.

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“Iran’s Web Spying Aided By Western Technology”, says Wall Street Journal, “European Gear Used in Vast Effort to Monitor Communications”:

“The Iranian regime has developed, with the assistance of European telecommunications companies, one of the world’s most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale.”

Really – no shit? Truly an axis of evil, then, eh?

“Hi-tech helps Iranian monitoring”, says the BBC:

A spokesman described the system as “a standard architecture that the world’s
governments use for lawful intercept”.

Indeed, the whole snooping functionality falls under so-called “Legal/Lawful Interception” capabilities – LI for short.

For GSM networks, LI is specified by 3GPP as part of their WG3, TSGS3. You can follow the meeting minutes and read all the specifications from the 3GPP site.

Theoretically, the LI capabilities are used by police to catch the bad guys. Who are the bad guys? As the saying goes, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”. Therefore, in reality, such capabilities are used by whoever is in control (the government), against whoever is making trouble against the ones in control (the government).

So why is it so bad that Iran is using the LI capabilities it has? Because a bad, oppressive government uses it against the people? Well, guess what: the (current) government of Iran is actually the government elected into place in previous elections, and therefore the authorities of Iran are actually the one and only legal entity in Iran who can both morally and legally conduct this “lawful interception”.

The whole system which enables LI is doing exactly what it is designed to do: it gives power for the government (or whoever is in charge) to spy on whoever is giving trouble. A problem appears when the government (or whoever is in charge) turns out to be the bad guy.

The fact that Iran has LI gear and is using it in their networks against the people is really a non-issue. The real problem is that LI capabilities are everywhere nowadays; the infrastructure already today exists in all countries, and when push comes to shove, there really is nothing preventing such capabilities from being used, just like today in Iran.

It doesn’t matter whether the country is Iran, USA, Switzerland or Ghana, since the facilities to spy on people are in place, such spying is easy to conduct, and the effort level for mass-scale spying is drastically lowered.

The real problem is the mere presence and construction of such facilities which can be used to spy on people, not the fact that Iran is using it or that Nokia-Siemens Networks built and sold the LI solution to Iran.

At the root of the real problem lies a simple fact, the heart of the whole issue: there is demand for LI solutions – otherwise those would not get built.

Whether the demand is due to crime fighting, national security, or general distrust of citizenry, the shock and horror should be focusing on the reasons for the worldwide demand of spying infrastructure, and not get stuck on a single country doing the same as all the other countries.

Update: NSN has now published a press release.