With the assistance of the West

The political crisis in Iran, which gained momentum in the course of recent days, showed the whole world not only the harsh aggression of the repressive regime towards its “subjects”, but also how modern technology can control the network activity of the whole state. I will not go into political details - not the place, not the time, and I, frankly, not the person who is able to adequately evaluate all the facts, arguments and separate the wheat from the chaff. Especially in a situation where the language of the country is completely unfamiliar to me. We are talking about the topic to us all much closer - censorship.

On the 22nd in the esteemed The Wall Street Journal (hereinafter WSJ) there appeared some very interesting material in which journalists talk about an ultra-modern system of deep filtering of Internet traffic used in Iran. There was no difficulty for Iranians, as well as foreign observers, to guess that the “government reads” - from the moment thousands of people took to the streets to rally against rigged elections, the Internet connection speed in the country dropped by an order of magnitude: This is said by bloggers and journalists who have difficulty transmitting information over the network. Obviously, no one will cut bandwidth without any special reason, then WJS decided to dig a little deeper into the history of the problem and found an interesting contract concluded in 2008 between the Iranian government, which has a monopoly on all types of communications (cellular, Internet, television, radio) in the country and a joint venture of the Finnish Nokia and the German Siemens - Nokia Siemens Networks for the supply of cutting-edge equipment for listening to all cell phones and, as it turned out later, an analysis of all national traffic. Let's start from where it is worth starting with - from prehistory.

In the second half of 2008, Nokia Siemens Networks provided Iran with special equipment under an agreement on “legal termination of access to information and filtering of Internet content”. One cannot say that there is something fantastic in this - the government of each state is trying to protect its users from child pornography, network terrorism and other, obviously criminal, actions on the part of intruders. As the company's spokesman, Ben Rome, says: “If you sell network equipment, you, oddly enough, also sell equipment with which these networks can be monitored and, if necessary, broken links in them” .

The monitoring center, established by a joint venture of two communications giants, was part of a large contract that included both cellular and Internet technologies. It is worth noting that over the past 10 years, the number of miles of optical fiber in Iran has increased 50 times - the need for a tool of "control" in this situation is not questioned. Still, one wonders why - a Muslim state living by its own rules is not some kind of France or Sweden.
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The Iranian government has arranged short equipment checks over the past months, but there was no question of intensive use of the filter or listening - no one was worried, life went on. Until one fateful day: June 13, 2009, when the network and mobile traffic in the country almost stopped.

Today, Iranian engineers and Internet experts say that “no one even imagined that the government was capable of such control. We knew that there was some kind of equipment, but now we know that this is a very powerful, modern and complex technical solution, which makes it possible to almost completely analyze the information passing through the network. ”

The method used in the Iranian data center is called deep packet inspection — the flow of information, whether it is Internet data packets or a phone call, sms, picture — anything, “parsed”, analyzed for keywords, then collected back and reached to the recipient. It is a matter of milliseconds, but, unlike in China, where the same scheme is used by the provider and decentralized, in Iran the whole procedure takes place in a single place. The digital life of an entire state is filtered in one room, if it is completely simplified, and therefore the connection speed dropped at least 10 times.

The reasons for this behavior on the part of the Iranian conservative government, again, are obvious. If they are also able to block / misinform people by means of national TV channels and radio stations, then no one will speak the truth in the Internet looking away. Today we all know the greatest Twitter opportunities in covering any details - this was the case in “Tibetan History”, this was the case in Moldova, now the same thing is repeated in Iran.

The government is trying to infiltrate the network situation and it turns out it is simple, sorry, great. Bradley Anstis, director of the US provider’s technical strategy agency Orange, says: “It all looks like a huge step forward compared to what happens in any other country in the world controlled by the“ regime, ”including China. In the latter, however, 300 million Internet users, and in Iran “only” 23 million, which, however, does not change the essence of the matter.

And now the masses have already begun to react - buyers send angry letters to Nokia and Siemens with the words that they have destroyed their phones and will advise everyone to do the same. Until the company can make "the right ethnic decisions." However, Mr. Rum comments: “every company has a choice to conduct business in a single country or not.” And if Nokia Siemens Networks could have assumed that their equipment would be used for censorship, then mass espionage at their own citizens hardly occurred to democratic Europeans. Now, I think, far from one gray hair fell from the head of the people who made this decision, trying to justify themselves by the fact that spying on a link is usually a peculiar attachment to the link itself - this is a normal situation for many quite civilized countries, and in some even a standard requirement for equipment (in England, for example). During its existence (in March, the company sold its communications business to a German investment company) Nokia Siemens Networks supplied similar data centers to governments of 150 countries, but official representatives say that neither China, nor Burma, nor other countries with a heavy censorship history, not listed

However, it is not necessary to think that Iran and China are the only countries that allow themselves such liberties without embarrassment. In the already mentioned England there is a list of "tightly" blocked sites, and the German government recently purchased the same equipment. In the United States, during the “reign” of the Bush administration, in the framework of the anti-terrorism project, the National Security Agency developed similar equipment. It is not known, however, whether it is used now. The Australian government is still experimenting with web content filtering systems. The Russian Federation ... looking at its colleagues, too, can express some immodest wishes, especially now, during the active internet-testing of everything and everyone.

Perhaps the most effective way to protect yourself, your personal data and ensure the privacy of correspondence is to encrypt your own traffic - no one will spend money, time and power to analyze such data. But this is a topic for another story.

When writing materials used The Wall Street Journal , Wired ( 1 , 2 ), Gizmodo , Mashable , Textually .