Siemens a Grand Prix Sponor with long history of support for Worlds most Notorious despots and tyrants

Siemens became involved in Formula 1 in 1998 as a partner of the McLaren F1 team and as a partner of Formula One Management.

Siemens. Siemens took slave laborers during the Holocaust and had them help construct the gas chambers that would kill them and their families. Good people over there.

Siemens also has the single biggest post-Holocaust moment of insensitivity of any of the companies on this list. In 2001, they tried to trademark the word “Zyklon” (which means “cyclone” in German) to become the name a new line of products… including a line of gas ovens.

Zyklon, of course, being the name of the poison gas used in their gas chambers during the Holocaust.

A week later, after several watchdog groups appropriately freaked out, Siemens withdrew the application. They said they never drew the connection between the Zyklon B gas used during the Holocaust and their proposed Zyklon line of products. (Source: BBC)

Nokia-Siemens Spy Tools Aid Police Torture in Bahrain
06 September, 2011

Spy tools sold and maintained by German communications and engineering giants Siemens and Nokia Siemens Networks are being used by authorities in Bahrain to aid in their interrogation and torture of human rights activists, according to Bloomberg Markets magazine.

The equipment is used by authorities there, and in other repressive regimes, to track the location of activists through their mobile phones and record their conversations and text messages, according to activists as well as workers at NSN and Trovicor (a divested unit of NSN) who installed the systems in several Middle East countries.

Abdul Ghani Al Khanjar, a 39-year-old school administrator and activist, was shown transcripts of his text messages by jailers who beat him with rubber hoses and used other torture methods during his detention between August 2010 and February 2011.

The systems are currently sold and installed by Trovicor, a business whose activities initially began in 1993 as a unit of Siemens’ voice- and data-recording division. In 2007, the unit became part of Nokia Siemens Networks, a joint venture between Siemens and Finland’s Nokia Oyj. In March 2009, NSN sold the unit, then known as Intelligence Solutions, to Perusa Partners Fund — in part to distance NSN from the controversial surveillance business and the potential it posed for human rights abuses. Perusa renamed the company Trovicor, though the equipment and most of the workers remained the same as prior to the sale.

Trovicor’s monitoring centers, which can be installed at telecommunications companies or at ISPs, have been sold to Egypt, Syria and Yemen, in addition to Bahrain. In all, the equipment plays a surveillance role in at least 12 Middle Eastern and North African nations, Bloomberg Markets reports. …more