The Intercept reports that protesters in Iran “often wonder how the government was able to track their locations or obtain access in their private communications, tactics that are widely used but whose mechanisms are essentially unknown”.
The Intercept though presents new evidence:
Disconnecting large sections of the population from the Web remains a favored tool for Iranian state censorship, but the government has far more precise, and sophisticated tools.
Part of repression data of Iran can be explained through the use of a system called “SIAM”, a program for the remote management of mobile phone connections used by the Communications Regulatory Authority of Iran. The existence of SIAM and the details of how the system works, reported for the first time, are revealed by The Intercept in a series of internal documents from an Iranian mobile operator.
According to these internal documents, SIAM is a computer system that operates behind the scenes of Iran's mobile networks, providing its operators with a wide menu of remote commands to change, interrupt and monitor how their customers use their phones.
Click on the image below to read the documents
The tool may slow them down connections of their data, crack phone call encryption, track the movements of individuals or large groups, and produce detailed metadata summaries of who spoke to whom, when and where.
Such a system has helped the government quietly quell ongoing protests — or tomorrow's — an expert who reviewed the SIAM documents told the Intercept.
“SIAM can control if, where, when and how the users,” explained Gary Miller, a mobile phone security researcher and fellow at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab.
"In this sense, it is not simply a surveillance system, but a system of repression and control that limits users' ability to disagree or protest."
