Israel Didn’t Know High-Tech Gear Was Sent to Iran - Bloomberg
The clandestine arrangement worked smoothly for years. The Israeli company shipped its Internet- monitoring equipment to a distributor in Denmark. Once there, workers stripped away the packaging and removed the labels.
Then they sent it to a man named “Hossein” in Iran, an amiable technology distributor known to them only by his first name and impeccable English, say his partners in Israel and Denmark.
Israeli trade, customs and defense officials say their departments didn’t know that the systems for peering into Internet traffic, sold under the brand name NetEnforcer, had gone to a country whose leaders have called for the destruction of the Jewish state. Israel’s ban on trade with its enemy failed, even though a paper trail on the deals was available in Denmark.
The transactions illustrate how ineffective governments have been in blocking a global trade in new, intrusive surveillance technologies that authoritarian regimes can use as weapons for repression. Such gear from Western companies — including tools that intercept e-mails and text messages, record Internet activity and map cell phone locations — has been used to track and torture dissidents in countries including Iran, Bahrain, Syria and Tunisia, a Bloomberg News investigation this year showed. It’s unclear who Hossein’s customers were, or how the technology may have been used in Iran.