In 2008 Nokia's joint-venture with Siemens, Nokia-Siemens-Networks, developed and built "monitoring centres", on-site deep-packet-inspection and Internet filtering infrastructure for Iran and later also for Egypt and Iran. This wasn't just selling custom routers or something, but a large engineering project where they knowingly agreed to aid oppressive regimes in controlling their citizens and abusing human rights. We all know what role these packet filtering systems played in the Arab Spring, etc.

So, Nokia is not very awesome++ at all, in my opinion, and in fact even though what Samsung did was very shitty, it kind of pales in comparison.

In all fairness, two and a half year later, a human rights lawyer contacted them and told them this was not okay, and they stopped doing it. Or, to quote someone on Metafilter: "Big company does something any sane, thinking person would automatically know is immoral. Film at 11."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jun/22/iran-n...

http://www.metafilter.com/82687/Nokia-Siemens-and-the-Irania...

http://www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com/news-events/press-room/c... (this is their mea culpa, it almost sounds like they learned a lesson, except that it took over 2 years and a human rights lawyer before they stopped helping oppressive regimes with human rights abuse)

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nokia+siemens+internet+filtering+e...