Baghdad Post, January 14 2018 - Amid growing protests, Iran’s government censors its critics with Chinese-style internet control, a report, published in The Intercept, revealed Saturday.
Late last month, as nationwide street protests entered their fourth day, Iran’s interior minister, Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, issued a statement darkly warning that online social networks in the country were being used to create “violence and fear.”
A day earlier, the internet as a whole had briefly flickered offline throughout Iran in what was widely interpreted as a government-engineered throttling. Following Fazli’s statement, the government blocked access to the photo-sharing site Instagram, as well as Telegram, a secure messaging app used by 40 million Iranians per month that had begun to emerge as a key organizing tool for protesters.
The shutdown of Telegram and the brief closure of the internet as a whole are signs of Iran’s increasing technical capacity to manage its citizens’ access to the global web. A new report by the Center for Human Rights in Iran, “Guards at the Gate: The Expanding State Control over the Internet in Iran,” paints a grim picture of Tehran’s growing ability to control and stymie the flow of information online.
This increasing public access to the web is partly the fruit of government investments in telecommunications infrastructure. But Iranians’ growing ability to share information and organize online also poses obvious threats to the authoritarian ruling government.
Iran has responded to these threats in various ways. As the report documents, the government’s effort to tame the internet has been centered on the creation of a government-controlled system known as the National Information Network.
This system, the first phases of which launched in 2014, gives Iranian internet users preferential access to domestic websites and search engines. In practice, the NIN serves as something of a “walled internet,” in which content can be regulated and users can be monitored by state security agencies. The NIN also allows access to the “real,” or global, internet, but in a way that allows authorities to filter information, manipulate connection quality, and even cut off access when deemed appropriate.
The creation of a national internet infrastructure is not in itself nefarious. “Part of what motivates a country to create a national internet is [the desire] to help keep internet traffic inside the country, which in many ways is what a healthy internet infrastructure should do,” says Collin Anderson, a Washington-based cybersecurity researcher who has published analysis on Iran.
“The problem in Iran is that the catalyst for developing a national internet has not been social or economic development, but rather the government’s desire to retain access to its citizens’ data instead of having that data stored outside of the country.”
The government has tried a number of ways to get people to use services offered on the NIN rather than the global internet. As a result of tiered pricing plans set up by state infrastructure companies, the NIN today is the much cheaper option for Iranians to go online.
The government also tilts the scales in favor of the NIN by slowing down connection speeds for the global internet, a violation of net neutrality principles that can also be used during periods of crisis to make the global internet effectively useless for activists and journalists.
Thanks to its growing technical capacity, the government can even block the global internet entirely while letting the NIN continue to operate, a power it briefly demonstrated during the recent protests.
Meanwhile, the Iranian government is looking to the Chinese model of online control for inspiration, says Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran. While China’s citizens can access certain approved messaging applications and news sources, the government censors websites deemed politically or socially subversive and surveils internet users extensively.
As bad as online freedom is in China, though, the challenges facing Iranians today might be even worse. In addition to facing relatively straightforward restrictions to online access, according to the report, Iranians must also navigate government-created “fake news” planted on domestic search engines, as well as phishing, malware, and denial-of-service attacks.
The government has also attempted to place restrictions on virtual private networks, or VPNs, which can help Iranians circumvent state censorship. These restrictions are particularly acute for Iranian researchers and academics, who are often unable to access online information because the government has either blocked it or deliberately slowed it down.
Comments
Post a Comment