iranian government

Dispelling FUD: Iran and ISP Surveillance

/ Christopher Parsons / 8 Comments

Since the election of incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the world has witnessed considerable political tension in Iran. Protests over the questionable electoral results, beatings and deaths of political protestors, recurring protests by Iranians associated with the Green Revolution, and transmissions of information amongst civil- and global-actors have been broadcast using contemporary communications systems. Twitter, blogs, Facebook, and mobile phone video has enabled Iranians to coordinate, broadcast, and receive information. The existence of Web 2.0 infrastructure has set the conditions under which the Green Revolution operates.

The Iranian government quickly recognized the power of cheap social coordination technologies and, in response, drastically reduced the capacity of national Internet links – the government, in effect, closed the nation’s Internet faucet, which greatly reduced how quickly data could be transmitted to, and received from, the ‘net as a whole. This claim is substantiated by Arbor Networks’ (Internet) border reports, which demonstrate how, immediately after the presidential election, there was a plummet in the data traffic entering and exiting the nation. (It should be noted that Arbor is a prominent supplier of Deep Packet Inspection equipment.)

Prior to trying to dispel the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) surrounding the contemporary Iranian ISP-surveillance system that is regularly propagated by the media, I need to give a bit of context on the telecommunications structure in Iran.

Continue reading →

Iran, Traffic Analysis, and Deep Packet Inspection

/ Christopher Parsons / 9 Comments

iranelectionLet me start with this: I am woefully ignorant and Iranian politics, and have no expertise to comment on it. I’ll save my personal thoughts on the matter for private conversations rather than embarrass myself by making bold and ignorant statements here. Instead, I want to briefly note and comment on how the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) is talking about Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and the data traffic that is flowing in and out of Iran.

The WSJ has recently disclosed that Iranian network engineers are using DPI to examine, assess, and regulate content that is entering and exiting Iran. They note that the monitoring capacity was, at least in part, facilitated by infrastructure that was sold by Nokia-Simens. The article proceeds, stating that traffic analysis processes have been experimented with before, though this is the first major deployment of these processes that has captured the attention of the world/Western public. This is where things start getting interesting.

The article notes that;

The Iranian government had experimented with the equipment for brief periods in recent months, but it had not been used extensively, and therefore its capabilities weren’t fully displayed – until during the recent unrest, the Internet experts interviewed said.

Continue reading →