What You Need to Know About Iran’s Surveillance Tech

Tulika Bose: This is 60-Second Science. I’m Tulika Bose. Iranians have been fiercely and relentlessly protesting against their government. This was sparked by the death of a 22-year old Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini who died in the custody of the country’s “morality police.” The demonstrations have been led by young women, who refused to accept restrictive laws like hijab requirements, but authorities have been cracking down with violence, arrests, and with surveillance. I’m here with Sophie Bushwick, our tech editor at Scientific American. Sophie interviewed Amir Rashidi, who is the director of digital rights and security at Miaan Group, an Austin, Texas based advocacy organization working to improve human rights in Iran. 

Bose: Hey, Sophie.

Sophie Bushwick: Hi. Sophie. 

Bose: So how did you find this story?

Bushwick: I had heard that some protesters in Iran were worried about the government using facial recognition. And I reached out to Amir to just ask them about this technology in particular, but what I learned is that the use of technology for suppression in Iran goes way beyond facial recognition. In fact, the government is actively trying to create its own nationwide intranet that would be separate from the global Internet and allow it to maintain much stricter control over what its citizens can see on the internet.

Bose: Do you think that has any ramifications in the near future?

Bushwick: So within Iran, what I learned is that the government has been interested in this intranet project for a while, but there hasn’t been a lot of adoption, in part because people know that the government is really interested in surveillance and censorship. It’s not just a matter of creating their own servers, they need their own data centers, and they need their own proprietary apps. They’ve shut down access to WhatsApp, they don’t want people to be communicating with the outside world or to have access to that kind of information. So what they’ve instead suggested is they’re trying to push citizens to adopt nationwide apps, and the nationwide intranet. They’ve done things like making the nationwide intranet cheaper and faster than accessing the global Internet.

Bose: Is Iran taking a page out of anyone else’s playbook here? 

Bushwick: Yes, there are a lot of authoritarian governments that are very interested in the use of technology for surveillance and censorship. In particular, Iran has a technology sharing agreement with China. There’s a…