Last summer, demonstrators in Tehran’s central square shouted anti-Nokia slogans following news reports that the Finnish mobile giant had sold technology to the Iranian government allowing the government to monitor its citizens through Iran’s communications networks. This has since sparked a storm of protest actions against Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) — the joint venture between Nokia and the German conglomerate Siemens — including the splashing of green paint (associated with pro-reformist presidential candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi) over Nokia billboards in Iran and calls for a boycott of NSN on social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter. In Tehran, wholesale vendors told The Guardian newspaper that the demand for Nokia gadgets had fallen by nearly half following the news reports. Millions of Iranians currently use Nokia mobile phones. Iran is known to be an avid practitioner of Internet filtering, but during the post-elections fall out, many suspected that the Iranian authorities
