The funny thing is, Nokia's Xpress Browser did the opposite (for a day), allowing people in China to browse any site on the internet. It worked like a secure proxy or VPN, punching a hole through the Great Firewall. Until China caught on and blocked the IP addresses of Nokia servers.
If you read the linked Washington Times article, the "monitoring centers" sound like separatete bells-and-whistles products that are not the same as the mandated LI mechanisms.
Lots of other vendors market these government espionage tools to autocratic regimes too. Eg Bluecoat, Cisco etc.
At any rate it feels bad that we have to appeal to these human rights abusing autocracies, it's not any better to have these mechanisms built into the western networks.
There's a rather big difference in trusting their phones vs. trusting their services in this case:
Mobile network vendors (including Nokia's NSN) have a record of being very very helpful in supporting government wiretapping. see eg http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/apr/13/europe39s-te...
This is a much bigger problem in China, etc (the "emerging markets" under discussion) than in the west.
It's much less likely they've built backdoors into the handset, and if they do they risk getting caught.
> They are providing a service that users are opting in to use.
No, there's no opting in to the violation of end-to-end security here.