Ericsson workers were kidnapped when telco sent them to negotiate with ISIS
datacenterdynamics.com
datacenterdynamics.com
The telco used sham contracts, inflated invoices, and falsified financial statements to funnel millions to ISIS and local power brokers, with millions still unaccounted for.
Oh damn. That's going beyond just trying to maintain your infrastructure for the sake of the populace.
Tyler Cowen refers to this as the libertarian vice:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/08/th...
There is an enormous range of tolerance for this and portraying it all in the most cynical light is actively harmful.
To be fair, the Achilles heel of democracy is that most voters are easily manipulated. Demagogy, fake grass roots movements, infotainment, religion, gerrymandering, etc. Unless one of the small parties gets better at manipulation, USA will vote for two candidates of the same two parties forever.
Voters have to be aware of things in order to influence them. This is why a free press and government (and corporate) transparency are critical. All 3 of those seem to be in decline lately.
People will be easily manipulated and will trade a life of child in the next city for an extra $1 in their pocket.
It's morbid, but constant pressure is the only way.
I don't know how it is in other places, but in the US the only people who can effectively make change in government are the extremity wealthy, corporations, and industry lobby groups. The average citizen and mass-based interest groups have effectively zero impact on policy. (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...)
It's one thing to say "Let's not be cynical", but we can't ignore evidence either. As disheartening as it may be, voters are not able to effectively influence policy against the interests of a very small number of very rich people. As much as I'd like to think it's still possible to change things within the system we have, that same system has been captured and manipulated to make that increasingly difficult over centuries.
if you think otherwise, youre kidding yourself.
companies are incentivized to have qualms through a mix of legal measures and risk assessment of backlash.. then once the "correct" choice is made, they make big PR statements about their allegiance to utilize it to empower their brand.
every company who has supported green endeavors or BLM would support a party of Nazis if it was in their benefit. The line from Amazon to IBM isn't that far.
they are not your friends. theyre not allies in your cause. they are not conservative or liberal. they are not moral or immoral.
they are amoral and greedy.
period. the end
Companies are not "greedy" as they are defined - they're a wealth making organization.
Majority of American enterprises are owned by various funds, including pension funds. Which makes the beneficiaries the source for these demands to be "greedy".
On the contrary, they should take action if they dont want their company, and the rest of society, to turn into a dirty, corrupt cesspit.
A deeper question to ask: Why don't all societies trend negative and "turn into a dirty, corrupt cesspit"? Honestly, I can only guess about the effects of human cooperation and altruism. I am thankful to have lived in relatively uncorrupt societies in my life. When people tell me stories about living in much more corrupt places (some examples from last 25 years: Russia, Pakistan, Indonesia), I am always appalled. It seems so unfair to live in a corrupt society. It is a drain on good life! I always think to myself: How does anyone get things done!?
If you can't do business without bribing someone, that's like not being able to do business without using slaves; what you should do is stop doing business, not start using slaves.
That's great in theory and that was the intent of the people who wrote foreign bribery laws but it never works out this way. What happens in practice is that American companies leave the country and companies from places like Russia and China who are willing to pay get the business. Or it goes to local companies who also still pay.
>If you can't do business without bribing someone, that's like not being able to do business without using slaves; what you should do is stop doing business, not start using slaves.
Except paying the bribes doesn't cost anyone except the company paying them. You've got it reversed here: the company paying the bribes is often the victim. Do you think Telia really wanted to pay $320 million to the Uzbek president's daughter? They probably would rather have had Uzbekistan have a telecom licensing system that actually worked like the FCC.
It also establishes a norm of pay-to-play and increases the overall cost of entry into a market. This can decrease overall investment/entrants into the market and subsequently services and employment from being offered to residents.
The company can be a victim and retain some culpability.
This is so delusional its unbelievable! When a multinational firm arrives in a little town in X in a random country and showers local officials in bribes, they are funding organised crime. Are you so naive to think it's just to be 'allowed to operate'?
When someone protests that company's development or organises a strike, they now might be found dead in a ditch. Do you think the company paying bribes will be bothered with pollution or fire safety regulations?
I dont know, but I do know that if it wad me and my family business, i would spend many years in jail. When big firms break the law, unlike Wallmart.
Sources:
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/8779157b-5568-48e7-a117-96b74c6db... [2] https://www.ft.com/content/4fd12e9b-6037-4f4d-8b3a-63cce4a57...
Tangentially related but much more banal, I have a relative that works in the payment processing industry, overseeing an engineering team. One of his best employees was an overseas contractor that spent many years with the company, brought his family to the states and laid down roots. After 7-8 years with the company, his contracting firm wanted him to move to another company in another state where he could earn more. He didn't want to go, but his contract stipulated that my relative's company could not hire him under any circumstance, so his firm wound down his contract to essentially force him and his family to move. This was in a smaller city without a lot of other IT jobs, so he didn't have many other options.
The fact that huge corporations have that kind of power over people makes me really uncomfortable and to see a huge telecom company use contractors to negotiate with terrorists doesn't surprise me in the least.
There's no shortage of workers getting pushed to take risks much bigger than any potential reward.
I think we need to redefine how we think about contracting to protect contractors and reduce the amount of power companies currently have over them. Thinking about sending a contractor to negotiate with a terrorist should scare the pants off of companies.
At the end of the day, either they did what they did (and service worked), or chances are no service would work and they wouldn’t have a business.
They should have said ‘can’t work, sorry’ and walk away, but that’s tough to do when a lot of money is at stake for anyone.
You're saying that we shouldn't make a particular law to protect workers because companies will look for ways to get around it.
Yet, companies violate basic workplace safety regulations all the time. Should we not have basic workplace safety laws in place if companies get around them? If Chipotle has another E Coli outbreak, should we just throw out commercial food handling and safety laws?
It is the contractors business to accept the contract, not the companies. IMO increasing the responsibility of a business to use contractors will add more roots to current large companies and increase the burden of small businesses to exist.
I agree this situation is terrible, and that the contracting system is being abused by large companies, but we need to try to solve this without changing the nature of what a contract agreement is.
>Thinking about sending a contractor to negotiate with a terrorist should scare the pants off of companies.
the spirit of a contract is that the companies do not have an obligation to think about the contractor at all, and vice-versa. The entire relationship is defined by an agreement not to breach the contract, and that's it. Do we really need to burden every contract with cynicism just because it is a point of contact with shitty people doing shitty things?
For example, if I hire a contractor to redo my kitchen I am shifting responsibility to someone else to do something, and then I write up a contract for all the arbitrary things that need decisions like design choices, acceptable colors, etc. They are accepting the responsibility for operations. If they use illegal operations, that is on them and I hope they face consequences for that. I am just some guy who wants a nice kitchen, I cant be expected to audit the guy i am hiring to know what to do on the things he is supposed to know better than me. The only thing I accept responsibility for is whether or not I like the outcome of him fulfilling the contract.
The real problem is that companies are getting away with using "contractors" who in actuality operate like employees and are not really in a position to accept responsibility for their entire scope of work. That's a shitty thing we should be dealing with. because if a companies EMPLOYEES get kidnapped by ISIS while doing work assigned to them by their employer.. that is a very different situation
Sometimes the contracting company has a deal with the de facto employer forbidding them to hire anybody who was once contracted to them. Those also can often be set aside, even without notice to the former de jure employer. Governments are often hostile to contract provisions interfering with somebody's right to have a job in their field.
I am not an attorney. Consult a local attorney in every case, because case law is all over the place, laws likewise, and judges moreso.
https://www.thelocal.se/20181213/lund-professor-freed-studen...
Bruce Willis wishes he looks like this dude
The student Jumaah (an adult) returned willingly to Iraq to protect his wife and texts the professor to essentially apologise for the high likely-hood he wouldn't be able to turn in his homework (cos, you know.. beheadings).
The professor chats to their Uni Security Chief who leaps to attention and hires his "go-to" mercenary force to rescue the student and his family?!
They then happily give him a seemingly smallish bill for the whole job and no mention of visa problems. Wtf Sweden, is this normal?
Some people have zero self preservation. I wouldn't go deliver something to a terrorist group for any amount of money.
i mean, i can imagine large swathes of human habitation where society is organized around deadly force. literally one country exists right at the border, where cartels manage the economy.
Obviously there are situational judgement calls that can't be captured by slinging stupid internet rules of thumb around but this is Ericson we're talking about. They're providing basic infrastructure stuff that anyone seeking to run a state needs. That's a pretty neutral thing to be involved in. It's not like they are a defense contractor who were supplying the people shooting at the new regime a week ago. And in this case it was a local contractor so that adds a potential layer of baggage.
In some organizations it's also typical to throw the contractor and underlings under the bus when the project turns to sh*t.
Later the article says:
> But the report says that one of the company's partners "made arrangements" with IS to secure his release and let the company continue its work in Mosul.
So no, the person wasn't abandoned.
There is a lot of questions about the manager's conduct before the kidnapping. How the heck did things end up there? But first thing I would expect from the manager after the kidnapping is to find a professional to handle the situation. And the professional very well might advice the manager to cut communications.
Not to become a hostage negotiator darmy, but to hand the phone and the matter off to a proper hostage negotiator and army.
Not to just forking ghost the guy.
Ali's brother runs with the crew and will keep an eye out, something like that I imagine.
I totally disagree that Ericsson could be considered a neutral party as a foreign corporation doing business in Iraq. There is nothing neutral about doing business with a hostile foreign government. That's just not normal in any way. It's not like they had never heard of ISIS and were oblivious to all the Sharia law and violence going on in Iraq.
Oh piss off with the rhetoric. The Taliban did and does run Afghanistan. For a brief moment Isis was running parts of Iraq and Syria. Both are trying to perform typical state administrative functions (courts and rule of law, taxes, defense, controlling borders, etc). One way just way more violent and way less successful than the other. Neutrality is not a foriegn concept in the middle east. They just have way different concepts of "non-neutrality by association, group membership and history" than most of the west does.
Edit: What constitutes a state or government of a state doesn't change because we don't like the specific policy decisions of said state or government or because said government maintains power through a level of violence we consider unacceptable.
Yesterday a senior German politician floated the idea of reintroducing (or, more accurately, "reactivating") compulsory military service. It previously ran from 1956 until 2011.[0]
As someone else has already pointed out, pretty much all of this stuff can be viewed as shades of grey. Apart from the facts that war is awful, and that that despite that, certain people are happy to get rich from it.
[0] https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/killing-time-fo... see also https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-military-and-...
Also worth pointing out what the Taliban has been condemned for in the last decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban#Condemned_practices
I forgot they also conscript children.
It does not matter that they are 'merely performing "typical state administrative functions". The great accolade for Mussolini was that he kept the trains running on time.
Dealing with such people is a losing game - they always deceive and always take more until stopped.
The only proper response to authoritarians, despots, fascists etc. was provided by the Snake Island garrison to the Russian destroyer: "Go F*k Yourselves".
And the same goes for apologist-type responses like yours.
If you have not figured this out from this week's events, you need to seriously rethink your life.
Not even close to the same.
The POINT was that "merely performing typical state administrative functions" somehow makes them a legitimate government.
That is beyond absurd
Whether or not Mussollini made or failed to make the trains run on time, these administrative functions, whether performed well or poorly does not make any difference - they make them no less a criminal or despot.
EVERY warlord needs to perform some admin functions, and it does NOT in any way confer legitimacy if they do so. Mafia dons contribute to hospitals and festivals, but it does not make them less criminals.
FARC, for example, never tried administering anything. But the Taliban has actual courts where they enforce actual written and published laws. We don't like the laws they enforce, but nobody says they are not doing it. (By all accounts, their enforcement is much less corrupt than what they supplanted.)
That doesn't make it good government, but it certainly is government.
The US went on a war with a group that was hoping for political aims. It was very clear about that, and then eventually went on a 10-20 year war with the Taliban anyway. Here is Vice President Joe Biden affirming that in 2011. Their domestic policy in Afghanistan is not terrorism, while their external policy needs to be reconciled.
https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/12/vp-biden-says-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/biden-afgha...
Try to find a source you happen to respect that says the same thing.
Subsequently President Trump continued direct negotiations with them, which never broke our "not negotiating with terrorists policy" because............. I think you're starting to get it. With now President Biden fulfilling the pullout deadline that Trump negotiated, giving their country back to them because turns out there was ... a ... group trying to fulfill a political aim - something I've avoided saying as to not dilute and distract from my point.
The US campaign against the Taliban required demonizing them as terrorists under the definition of terrorists which is simply inaccurate, this observation has nothing to do with their human rights record it has to do with political aims that they hadn't already have achieved, the US was required to leverage its media and general islamophobia that allowed for the public to not distinguish between distinct groups. This was successful, while on the ground the people that mattered had to treat them separately for diplomacy, which continues to this day with an outcome that isn't surprising at all when understanding why we shouldn't have attempted marginalizing the Taliban to begin with. Now they have Afghanistan back, the way it was before we got involved.
I'm not sure if any of this information is new to you, but ultimately this is purely semantics. The human rights record isn't a factor.
2011 is when I was in Afghanistan and I can attest that both Joe Biden and Barack Obama lied to the American people about the progress in the war during that time because they ultimately wanted out. Let me juxtapose my experience with Mr Biden's words:
> "We are in a position where if Afghanistan ceased and desisted from being a haven for people who do damage and have as a target the United States of America and their allies, that's good enough. That's good enough. We're not there yet.
To be clear, the Taliban is the only force we were fighting in Helmand and Nimroz provinces.
> Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That's critical. There is not a single statement that the president has ever made in any of our policy assertions that the Taliban is our enemy because it threatens U.S. interests.
The only thing I can think of during that time that this correlates to is the fact that they wanted out so bad they were willing to make peace with the Taliban. The Taliban's guerilla techniques and crafty use of IEDs and VBIEDs were having a huge impact on US troops and were dessimating the local population. To the extent that the Taliban figured out that if they just bombed places we went that local populaces would blame us for attracting the Taliban to their area.
> If, in fact, the Taliban is able to collapse the existing government, which is cooperating with us in keeping the bad guys from being able to do damage to us, then that becomes a problem for us."
This is almost a complete reverse course in what he had just said. Basically, the Taliban is not a threat until they are. He's basically trying to coax the people guilty of a series of heinous war crimes that they can also be regarded as a political entity. I'm reminded of the whitewashing of the IRA, who shouldn't have been a political party either.
Human rights has everything to do with their connection to the word "terrorism".
Due to a third party, we went in to deal with the third party and used the opportunity to oust the first party. We took their state and designated them as non-state enemy combatants, colloquially calling them terrorists. That’s kinda messed up. It also didn’t work.
What's an edgy take here is your clear lack of understanding between the Taliban and the Afghan populace, the history of Afghanistan, and your ignorance to the definition of terrorism.
To correct some of the misinformation you're echoing:
> Due to a third party, we went in to deal with the third party and used the opportunity to oust the first party.
First, your speech is really confusing. If you could just directly mention who you're talking about then it'd be easier to track. I'm assuming "third party" here is the Taliban, who started a violent civil war in 94. [1]
> We took their state and designated them as non-state enemy combatants
It never was their state. The Taliban fought with the Mujahideen, whom are also terrorists, to unseat a democratic government. [1]
> We took their state and designated them as non-state enemy combatants, colloquially calling them terrorists
I'm going to assume in good faith that you did not know that at the time Al Qaeda was partnered with the Taliban [2]. The Taliban and Al Qaeda are bent on localized islamic states, while ISIL had global motivations, which is why they were partnered.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Civil_War_(1992%E2%80%9... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Afgh...
If this is something you are passionate about, somebody else should have attempted to deal with the Taliban, which is the future we are currently in.
As an infrastructure provider, it makes it tough because pulling out of a country is going to harm normal folks at least as much, if not more, than whoever is in charge you are refusing to do business with.
But that doesn’t mean providing critical infrastructure services to literal terrorists is ok.
You just forking do not negotiate (except for the release of hostages, while ensuring that all other potential hostages are moved out of harm's way).
If you do, you can expect nothing but a continuously escalating stream of demands.
It is a fool's game - the only winning move is to not play.
I'm hoping that newer designs designed from the start to be inherently safe, and often smaller and more modular, and/or using different elements such as Thorium, will result in designs that can win, but they do seem to have stalled a bit
I also don't think phone calls are the only thing separating prison from a vacation home.
Then, at the absolute most, those specific crime overlords should be restricted in their ability to communicate with underlings outside. The other prisoners certainly shouldn't be punished for that.
Give the prisoners communication with their family/friends, sure, but make it supervised personal visitation or actively monitored (also recorded and if necessary censored) phone calls, not mobile phones.
Prisons only work because of force AND information asymmetry between the guards and the inmates, so allowing unsupervised personal communications is actively dangerous and counterproductive. It's not just organising crime outside outside of the prison or arranging the import of drugs and luxury goods, it's also the dangers of planning a riot, plotting an escape attempt, organising attacks on guards or rival prison gangs, and so on.
And once you have guards on the payroll, the rules generally have a lot more flexibility.
A lawyer stole his money and blamed it on his friend and law partner, a judge, who the inmate had murdered (including his wife who was a shoe-in for mayor)...from prison. The lawyer snagged the mayoral seat after she was killed--for a short period until getting caught and sent to prison himself.
Apparently prison offers few barriers to conducting business.
https://www.businessinsider.com/high-cost-prison-communicati...
Just another example of absolute corruption and how our representative democracy doesn't work for us.
Alternatively, you could build the prison like a Faraday cage.
Is this victim blaming, or am I misreading it?
Don't pet feral animals.
Don't run with scissors.
Don't wear a fur coat in the desert.
Don't drink bottles labelled "poison".
So, it should reasonably follow:
Don't hand yourself over to violent, hostile people.
https://today.tamu.edu/2019/11/19/what-were-you-wearing-exhi...
so, in human interactions, its always the person that does the harmful, nonconsensual and/or illegal action that should have the focus
You need the ability to distinguish between a bad social cliche like "short skirt, asking for it" and this.
That was quite an experience; not every nation is friendly to Western nations, turns out.
Of course, Ericsson did get FCPA sanctioned for other stuff since they paid kickbacks etc. It’s actually quite fascinating. The real victim here is the foreign state that is suffering from the corruption but US law protects them. I suppose it’s anti-trust sort of law. It retains competition for fair-playing US companies.
Definitely an interesting positive-externalities US law.
This even applies if I pay a taxi driver to take me to the site, and he pays the bribe.
If I'm paying a bribe for safety purposes (say giving a bottle of scotch to pass a checkpoint to get back to the hotel before night), then if I'm lucky I won't be prosecuted when I return to my home country.
The great thing is I don't feel guilty about not tipping in the US.
"Facilitation payments, which are payments to induce officials to perform routine functions they are otherwise obligated to perform, are bribes"
Wow, that is a real stretch of logic, and a great way to make wait staff hate you
In every other country a tip is indeed just a bribe.
Not paying people after they perform a service that it's implicitly understood you will pay them for is stealing.
You may not like the particular way in which it's structured, in which case, you're free not to consume the service.
The GP was implying the entire system is dysfunctional. Your counter point is, don't participate in this system. Such type of statement comes typically followed by the likes of go away if you don't like it here. If that's the level of friendliness implied by your service ...
Clearly isn't. If you want the money, put it on the bill - add it as a service charge or whatever.
Sorry if I seem so outraged. I don’t mean to do that on HN. But this is one of most arrogant things I’ve ever read - and a response might help clarify.
I don’t see how any of the above has anything to do with me, the customer.
I would argue US labor/wage policies are the detestable thing to defend.
https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20210907-french-firm-lafa...
Propaganda (which I like to think of it as) works differently in different places, I guess. In Sweden it's perfectly fine to be critical of the sitting government and politicians, but information about corruption, unethical, and illegal activity in staple companies like Vattenfall (their greenwashing and coal-expansion is probably more known in Germany than Sweden), Ericsson, Volvo, Telia, Bofors, and ABB are usually just swept under the rug and more often than not most reporters aren't even aware.
Good on SVT
I was under the impression that Ericson mostly made hardware/software and sold it to companies running cell networks, but I guess I was wrong.
This kind of thing is quite standard in telco. I was briefly involved in one project in Iraq myself, but due to the risks involved stayed in Kuwait and VPN'd into Baghdad, where our local partner had set up and ran the data center.
Some networks run part of the business and contract out other parts, etc. I worked with a fair number of international carriers at my last job and couldn't figure out the pattern of when I'd get a contact with an email at the carrier domain or at a big global consultancy (telco or general) or at hotmail/gmail. Even the large international carriers would be different on a country by country level.
This is wild
You really have to wonder if that deal is going to close with this hullabaloo and the cratering of multiples in the time since.
It's all about the money. Human rights only matter on paper.
Are we going to see any haleads roll? I am not homding my breath
And can that is that covered in your job contract where they say "... and any other reasonable duties!"
[1] U.S. Eases Sanctions to Allow Routine Transactions With Afghan Government - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/us/politics/us-sanctions-...
I would rather a bunch of Ericsson contractors get kidnapped and ransomed, and local evil terrorist goons bribed by Ericsson (a greed-driven, evil telcom), and then have local Ericsson towers installed and operating than have it all done by Huawei to the same effect.