When Nokia Pulled Out of Russia, a Vast Surveillance System Remained

[Celerity]

The Finnish company played a key role in enabling Russia’s cyberspying, documents show, raising questions of corporate responsibility.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/28/technology/nokia-russia-surveillance-system-sorm.html

https://archive.ph/57Tar



Nokia said this month that it would stop its sales in Russia and denounced the invasion of Ukraine. But the Finnish company didn’t mention what it was leaving behind: equipment and software connecting the government’s most powerful tool for digital surveillance to the nation’s largest telecommunications network.

The tool was used to track supporters of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny. Investigators said it had intercepted the phone calls of a Kremlin foe who was later assassinated. Called the System for Operative Investigative Activities, or SORM, it is also most likely being employed at this moment as President Vladimir V. Putin culls and silences antiwar voices inside Russia.

For more than five years, Nokia provided equipment and services to link SORM to Russia’s largest telecom service provider, MTS, according to company documents obtained by The New York Times. While Nokia does not make the tech that intercepts communications, the documents lay out how it worked with state-linked Russian companies to plan, streamline and troubleshoot the SORM system’s connection to the MTS network. Russia’s main intelligence service, the F.S.B., uses SORM to listen in on phone conversations, intercept emails and text messages, and track other internet communications.


The documents outlined Nokia’s involvement in connecting the MTS network to SORM. Floor plans and schematics refer to SORM by its Russian acronym COPM. Credit...The New York Times

The documents, spanning 2008 to 2017, show in previously unreported detail that Nokia knew it was enabling a Russian surveillance system. The work was essential for Nokia to do business in Russia, where it had become a top supplier of equipment and services to various telecommunications customers to help their networks function. The business yielded hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, even as Mr. Putin became more belligerent abroad and more controlling at home.

snip

[msongs]

1. surprised to hear they even still around...

[HAB911]

4. It's the old Western Electric-BELL LABS/Lucent Technologies/Alcatel-Lucent

[iluvtennis]

2. Capitalism and greed. uggh n/t

[UpInArms]

3. Reminds me of IBM and Nazi Germany

IBM And Nazi Germany

He said his research had uncovered the existence of a 500-man Nazi statistical operation in Krakow that handled the complex task of scheduling trains used to transport prisoners from other European nations to death camps in Poland.

This so-called Hollerith Department of Polish Railways also calculated the rate of deaths per square kilometer due to progressive starvation and other arcane facts compiled to satisfy the Nazi's lust for statistics, Black said.

Leon Krzemieniecki, likely the only man still living who worked in the department, said in the book he did not understand at the time the role his office had in transporting Jews to the gas chambers. "I only know that this very modern equipment made possible the control of all the railway traffic in the General Government (of Poland)," he said

[empedocles]

5. Reminds me of the notorious IG Farben

'IG Farben was a monopoly and Hitler used it to poison and kill people he needed to control. IG Farben was the Pharma monopoly of yesteryear, in other words, like Monsanto, Johnson & Johnson, or Pfizer is today. The processed and dead foods that come in cans ever since WWII contained toxic heavy metal poisons already.
IG Farben: Pharmaceutical Conglomerate (1916 to 2015 ...

www.truthwiki.org/ig-farben-pharmaceutical-conglomerate-1916-to-2015/''

[cbabe]

6. More than trains.

How did they know where they were?

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48838.IBM_and_the_Holocaust

IBM and the Holocaust
Edwin Black
TimeWarner, 1999
…

Only after Jews were identified--a massively complex task Hitler wanted done immediately--could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor & annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation & organizational challenge so monumental, it called for a computer. Of course, in the 30s no computer existed. But IBM's Hollerith punch card technology did exist. Aided by the company's custom-designed & constantly updated Hollerith systems, Hitler was able to automate the persecution of the Jews.

Historians were amazed at the speed & accuracy with which the Nazis were able to identify & locate European Jewry. Until now, the pieces of this puzzle have never been fully assembled. The fact is, IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany & then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations & ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads & organizing of concentration camp slave labor. IBM & its German subsidiary custom-designed complex solutions, anticipating the Reich's needs. They didn't merely sell the machines & walk away. Instead, IBM leased these machines for high fees & became the sole source of the billions of punch cards needed.

…(more)