No Companies Violated Iranian Technology Sanction, Says GAO
The GAO said in a recent report it could not identify any companies that are providing sensitive technologies to Iran. The report, based on interviews with U.S. officials, intelligence agencies, trade publications and SEC filings, said the Iranian regime has focused on developing its own indigenous communications filtering technologies. GAO made no recommendations on addressing that problem.
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Congress enacted legislation last year that bans U.S. government procurement from any firm or person that exports sensitive technologies to Iran. U.S. sanctions on the Iranian government are based on allegations that the regime engages in “systematic and ongoing violations of human rights, including the suppression of freedom of expression,” the GAO said. But the agency’s open source review was unable to identify any firms assisting Iran in developing monitoring, filtering, and disruption technologies, it said.
The legislation is useful because it “sends a warning to companies not to cooperate with Iran in building these kinds of technologies,” said Jim Lewis, director of the technology and public policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But it won’t affect federal acquisitions very much, said Lewis: “It’s just a continuation of a trend in the last 30 years that the U.S. doesn’t like companies that sell things to Iran. I don’t think any U.S. companies will get caught by this but it puts them on notice.”
But the law could be problematic down the road, if it does catch any big European or Chinese telecommunications companies, said Lewis. The ban could possibly limit U.S. procurement options, said Lewis, and “we don’t want to have to cut ourself off from either the Chinese or European markets.”
GAO specifically said it could not confirm if the Nokia Siemens Network was providing technology for Iran’s cellular network despite past intelligence indicating they were. The agency said the Nokia Siemens Network, a joint venture between the Finnish cell phone maker Nokia and the German company Siemens, sold communications monitoring equipment to the Iranian government in 2008.
Part of the reason it could not identify any companies violating the law was Iran’s decreased reliance on non-native technologies to monitor and filter its internal communications, the agency said. The OpenNet Initiative reported in 2009 that the Iranian government is “actively increasing its domestic capacity” to reduce its reliance on Western technologies. The group also said several Iranian technology companies are producing hardware and software products for use in the Iranian Web filtering system.
Iran’s information and communications technology sector is “not as closely tracked” as its energy sector, and that created challenges to identifying firms that export sensitive technologies to Iran, GAO said. Furthermore, the competitive and proprietary nature of the communication industry limits information and complicated the agency’s research, the agency said. The intention behind firms that sell technologies to Iran is also difficult to determine, because some filtering technologies which block objectionable sites like pornography can also be used to disrupt what others consider legitimate communications.