Highlights
– Iran attempts to contain information on planned protests and images of demonstrations on the Internet
– New technologies are being utilized to inspect and block information flowing over Iran’s Internet connections
– Iran will likely refocus its efforts to increase the effectiveness of its Internet filtering capabilities
Over the past week, the Iranian government has faced post election turmoil on many fronts including the Internet where it has struggled to contain information on planned demonstrations as well as images of widespread dissent and protests. The Internet has been the primary tool utilized by supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his main challenger former Prime Minister Mir Hussein Moussavi to organize protests and to help spread news and images of the demonstrations.
In the near to medium term, we expect Tehran’s network engineers will become more familiar with the capabilities of the newly installed monitoring and censorship equipment allowing the government to further restrict existing technologies such as Facebook and Twitter which have allowed protesters to continue to communicate among themselves and the outside world. We also believe the new software will allow the government to monitor and track individual users suspected of attempting to stir up dissent online. This could effectively negate many of the benefits of communicating anonymously online.
Internet Blackout Could Have Been Much Worse
Despite a brief Internet blackout on June 12, 2009 following the elections, the Iranian government has exercised restraint in shutting down the web for an extended period as it did following the 2005 presidential elections. This is due in large part to the country’s significant commercial and technological relationships with the rest of the world that would be severely affected by a complete shutdown of the Internet.
Nevertheless, the government possesses one of the worlds most extensive and technologically sophisticated systems for controlling and censoring the Internet. The technology designed to control and monitor the activities of the nation’s estimated 23 million Internet users was developed with the assistance of two European telecommunications companies. The technology, which goes beyond blocking access to websites or severing individual Internet connections, has slowly been deployed over the past few years inside the government’s centralized telecommunications infrastructure.
Despite the government’s blocking of an estimated five million Internet sites, news and images of the protest have rapidly spread around the world. This is due in large part to the lack of training and experience displayed by the country’s network engineers who have only begun to experiment with some of the new features of the censoring equipment which the European telecommunications companies finished installing in the second half of 2008. According to one network engineer interviewed in Tehran, engineers, “did not know the newly installed equipment could do this much.”
Technology Supporting the Regime
Following the Presidential elections, Iran’s Internet users noticed a sharp decline in speed with some reports showing a decline to less than a tenth of normal speeds. While some of this is attributed to the increased use of bandwidth intensive technologies such as video, internet telephony (VOIP), and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on Iranian websites by supporters around the world, some are pointing the blame at a new technology being utilized by the Iranian government – deep packet inspection.
Deep packet inspection involves inserting equipment into a flow of online data, from emails and Internet phone calls to images and messages on social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Every digitized packet of online data is deconstructed, examined for keywords and reconstructed within milliseconds. In Iran’s case, this is done for the entire country at a single choke point, according to networking engineers familiar with the country’s system.
Deep packet inspection delays the transmission of online data unless it is offset by a huge increase in processing power to handle the increased number of packets that must be inspected and subsequently blocked or logged for further inspection by Iran’s monitoring center. Internet experts in the United States (US) have examined Internet traffic flow in and out of Iran that show characteristics of content inspection, among other measures.
Iran’s Censorship Will Likely Become More Sophisticated and Pervasive
Similar to China, which censors what its Internet users can say or view online, the Iranian government will likely put renewed focus on improving the effectiveness of its newly installed censorship and monitoring hardware in an attempt to prevent further demonstrations and any future threats to its power.
In addition to providing its information technology engineers with better training, Tehran will likely continue to attempt to acquire more sophisticated and pervasive technologies to regulate dissent within the country – particularly dissent aimed at the governing elite.
