Iran’s digital surveillance machine is about to end

“CCTV networks, facial recognition systems, applications designed to capture or record private user messages, and systems that collectively evaluate citizens’ lifestyles and behavioral profiles provide the Islamic Republic’s security agencies with the means for broad and precise surveillance of the population,” the analysis says.

In other words, Mehdi Saremifar of Holistic Resilience puts it simply: “They want to have a central system that monitors daily life – lifestyle monitoring.”

The NIN was developed as a key element of the Iranian regime’s control mechanisms, designed to provide Iran-specific applications, web services, and digital platforms to constantly monitor Iranians and control the information they have access to, while at the same time making it more difficult to transfer information from the country to the international community. The NIN network has an insular structure that also prevents communications from outside Iran.

However, the first days of the outage in January were so severe that the NIN network itself was offline, disrupting government websites and local services. Several researchers told WIRED that NIN, landline phone networks, and even SIM cards with privileged access have no connectivity.

“There’s been a lot of things going on in Iran, but I would say the power outage we’re experiencing right now is unprecedented in the country,” says Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at monitoring firm Kinetic. “I think it’s arguably one of the largest telecom outages in history, and not just Iran.”

The Filterwatch project of Internet freedom organization Mian Group says that as some connectivity is restored, including international communications, it believes the Iranian regime is moving to a “whitelist” system — restricting internet access for certain organizations, websites or applications. Around mid-January, the group NotesIranian state-controlled media published a list of websites available on NIN, which included Iranian search engines, maps, video services, and messaging apps.

“This architecture uses sophisticated service and customer segmentation to transform Internet access from a public utility to a government-granted privilege, allowing the state to maintain critical business services while disconnecting the public from the World Wide Web,” Filterwatch. He explains.

Even with connectivity partially restored, researchers stress that the volatility of the digital landscape remains striking and leaves open the possibility of the current saga getting worse. Permanent interruption-or Division– Iran from the global Internet.

Currently, analysis of signals coming from abroad does not clarify the regime’s intentions. “I see this kind of chaos in traffic, and I don’t know if that’s the goal — they want chaos — or if this is the system not working properly,” says Kinetic’s Madori. Maybe “they created this internet blocking system that went into chaos or maybe they wanted it to go into chaos. I can’t say it, but it’s crazy.”

Disconnections, selective blocking, and other forms of digital censorship can be attractive to repressive governments when they feel the situation is spiraling out of control – both domestically and potentially in terms of optics on the global stage. But as scholars who focus on Iran and other authoritarian governments have often noted, there are very real limits to control via digital disconnection.

“When everything is completely disconnected, even people who may not want to take to the streets, because they can no longer see what is happening just sitting in their homes,” another Aineta Project researcher told WIRED. “So in terms of controlling the situation, a bunch of these decisions don’t make any sense.”

As the Iranians slowly regain connectivity, they face the difficult reality that they are returning to the intrusive and all-encompassing surveillance network it ever was.