Nokia snooped on employee e-mail communications in 2005

Company suspected leak of company secrets to Chinese company

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Mobile telephone manufacturer Nokia investigated the e-mail communications of its employees in the early part of 2005. Helsingin Sanomat has learned from a number of sources that the company was especially interested in possible communications with the Chinese network manufacturer Huawei.
      A number of legal experts interviewed by Helsingin Sanomat have said that the search for information on employee e-mail traffic was in violation of the law on data protection of electronic communications.
     
The events began in February 2005 when a Nokia representative at a GSM exhibition in Cannes noticed a number of suspicious similarities between a Huawei base station product and a Nokia innovation, which was being unveiled in Cannes.
      A couple of months later Nokia requested that the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) look into the matter. The NBI began to investigate the case as a possible violation of corporate secrets.
      Nokia’s data technology section investigated which of the company’s computers had been used for communicating with Huawei.
      Several hundred Nokia employees had access to confidential documentation of the new product. Nokia noticed that contact had been made with Huawei from a single computer 69 times.
     
The law does not allow a company to investigate information on senders and recipients of employee e-mails in such a situation, even if it suspects violation of company secrets.
      Helsingin Sanomat has learned that in spite of warnings by outside experts, Nokia investigated employee e-mail traffic to back up its suspicions.
     
The NBI began to have doubts of its own three months after the request from Nokia came for an investigation.
      The NBI asked for a statement from the Data Protection Ombudsman on whether or not Nokia was authorised to investigate information in server logs on product development documents, and to pass them on to police.
      The Data Protection Ombudsman said that the company can use information from the server log, on the condition that the staff is informed on the matter.
      The NBI had not asked for a statement on log information on e-mail messages.
     
Nokia withdrew the request for an investigation in 2006, and as the matter was a complainant offence, the NBI closed its investigation.
      One expert in criminal law, Dr. Ari-Matti Nuutila, feels that the NBI should have issued a criminal complaint about Nokia’s snooping activities.
      “It appears that the threshold to suspect a crime has been crossed. What is also strange in the actions of the NBI is that there were similar problems in the preliminary investigation into the equivalent case of Microcell.”
      The NBI feels that the investigation stayed within the law.
     
In 2000-2001 Nokia monitored e-mail traffic between its employees and the Oulu-based Microcell. No criminal complaints concerning possible Nokia violations of communications privacy were filed in that case either.
      In the spring of 2006 prosecutor Jukka Haavisto felt that Nokia’s action in the Microcell case had met the criteria of violation of communications secrets. Haavisto did not press charges against Nokia, because too much time had passed.
      The prosecutor nevertheless felt that police had violated their official duty by not reacting to indications that communications confidentiality had been violated. Haavisto nevertheless decided not to charge the police, because “their guilt should be considered to be slight.”
      It later came out that Nokia had continued to monitor e-mail contacts with Microcell all the way into 2003.
     
Nokia itself says that the actions that it took were at the request of the NBI.
      The Nokia communications department told Helsingin Sanomat by e-mail on Friday that the police asked Nokia to save the e-mail log over a certain period of time for later investigation by police. Nokia emphasised that it never looked into the e-mail activities of individual people or the content of the messages themselves.
      One reason that Nokia gave for asking that the investigation be brought to a halt was that it became apparent that under existing law, not even state officials had any possibilities of getting sufficient information on the matter.
      “We were also unable to produce any concrete evidence that Nokia would have suffered actual economic harm from the incident”, stated the e-mail from the company.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Prosecutor: Nokia dug up e-mails in effort to plug information leaks in 2000-2001 (18.4.2006)

Helsingin Sanomat