Irish company plays vital part in Syrian oppression.

Sponge Bob

I thought we embargoed this sort of tech...and if not WHY not.

http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-15/syria-blocks-texts-with-dublin-made-gear?category=/

Who else did they sell to? Ghadaffi?

Spacedog

The answer is money. Ireland is a huge exporter of tech much worse than this. We build software components for many high tech arms that are sold on the open market. The worlds governments turn a blind eye to the arms industry because it is so profitable, I suspect it is the same with censorship technology.

This is yet another reason for citizens to adopt open source communication systems and to retain control and privacy of our communications using encryption and secure, compromised platforms.

/talking to the wall

Manach

Unless told to do so by the EU - why?
In that past Irish exports have been sold to other morally dubious regimes and it would be State interference in a private business transaction.

Nodin

Doesn't suprise me.

bbam

Worked in a place in Dublin and we made parts used in scudd missiles.
It's not a new idea that **** made here in "the free state" goes on to kill innocents in other countries.

baztard

The tone of this article seems to heaily imply wrong doing on the part of the two Irish companies. I know feck all about the motivations of these companies or whether or not they knew that their software would be used for political repression. But going by whats written in the article, neither does the author.

Cellusys delivered a filtering system to Syriatel in 2008. Thats 3 years before the arab spring. (Not to say that the regime hasn't been repressive long before then). But thats 3 years before any politically motivated purchasing of the software would become extremely obvious. Might these 2 phone companies in Syria have just appeared to be normal businesses with a genuine business need, back when they bought the software? I don't know, but the author doesn't seem to either.

This is just a load of moralistic hype of an article, or else the author is pushing some agenda of his own.

Selling civilian software to mobile phone companies during relative peace time is not a crime in my book. The Cellusys CEOs analogy of Toyota Hiaces being used by the taliban in Afghanistan is pretty fitting to the situation.

southsiderosie

OP, I refer to you the charter, specifically:

If your OP consists of nothing more than a two-line thought that just popped into your head, don't start a thread. Again, that will be treated as trolling - the thread will be deleted, and you'll be banned or infracted, depending on how egregious the example is.

This forum is not a newsdump, blog or somewhere to post copy & pastes from other sites. All OP's and posts require some input of your own.

I'm closing this thread.

Cheers,

SSR