ceedee’s posterous

Mobiles and the net are hugely popular among young Iranians

As protests continue in Iran, details are emerging of the technology used to monitor its citizens.

Iran is well known for filtering the net, but the government has moved to do the same for mobile phones.

Nokia Siemens Network has confirmed it supplied Iran with the technology needed to monitor, control, and read local telephone calls.

It told the BBC that it sold a product called the Monitoring Centre to Iran Telecom in the second half of 2008.

Data inspection

Nokia Siemens, a joint venture between the Finnish and German companies, supplied the system to Iran through its Intelligent Solutions business, which was sold in March 2009 to Perusa Partners Fund 1LP, a German investment firm.

The product allows authorities to monitor any communications across a network, including voice calls, text messaging, instant messages, and web traffic.

But Nokia Siemens says the product is only being used, in Iran, for the monitoring of local telephone calls on fixed and mobile lines.

Rather than just block traffic, it is understood that the monitoring system can also interrogate data to see what information is being passed back and forth.

A spokesman described the system as "a standard architecture that the world's governments use for lawful intercept".

[Iran] is also struggling to compete with an opposition that call on the skills of one of the world's most vibrant blogging communities and plenty of tech-savvy folks. Rory Cellan-Jones BBC technology corespondent Read the dot.life blog in full Analysing the Arabic blogosphere

He added: "Western governments, including the UK, don't allow you to build networks without having this functionality."

Asked by the BBC about the firm's attitude to doing business in Iran, Nokia Siemens said: "We do have a choice about doing business there, and on balance providing connectivity means there is a net benefit."

He explained that millions of Iranians were getting mobile phone services through Nokia. "The amount of information that is coming out of Iran from ordinary users because they have connectivity that they would not have had before is of a net benefit to them."

"I don't think Iran would have expanded its mobile network and its connectivity to its citizens if it had not had this capability."

Nokia Siemens markets the Monitoring Centre product to 150 countries around the world where it does business. The firm says it does not supply the system to China or to Burma.

The phone monitoring system sits side-by-side with the extensive net filtering system Iran has constructed in recent years.

Traffic in and out of Iran is largely controlled by Iran Telecom. On 13 June, the day after presidential elections, data traffic come to an almost complete halt, according to analysis by network security firm Arbor Networks.

Since then, traffic has gradually recovered, and analysts have speculated that the slowdown and re-start was caused by authorities putting in place filtering and monitoring systems.

Because Iran is effectively reading every message, this results in an inevitable slow down of traffic.

In mid-June, the OpenNet Initiative, which surveys net-watching efforts, updated its survey of net use in Iran and said the nation was: "investing in improving its technical capacity to extensively monitor the behavior of its citizens on the internet."

It said women's rights activists arrested in the nation had been shown transcripts of instant messages they had sent.

"If true," said the survey, the evidence, "would support the existence of an advanced surveillance program."

The Wall Street Journal, in "Iran's Web Spying Aided By Western Technology" adds:

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.

"We didn't know they could do this much," said a network engineer in Tehran. "Now we know they have powerful things that allow them to do very complex tracking on the network."

Deep packet inspection involves inserting equipment into a flow of online data, from emails and Internet phone calls to images and messages on social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Every digitized packet of online data is deconstructed, examined for keywords and reconstructed within milliseconds. In Iran's case, this is done for the entire country at a single choke point, according to networking engineers familiar with the country's system. It couldn't be determined whether the equipment from Nokia Siemens Networks is used specifically for deep packet inspection.

All eyes have been on the Internet amid the crisis in Iran, and government attempts to crack down on information. The infiltration of Iranian online traffic could explain why the government has allowed the Internet to continue to function -- and also why it has been running at such slow speeds in the days since the results of the presidential vote spurred unrest.

Users in the country report the Internet having slowed to less than a tenth of normal speeds. Deep packet inspection delays the transmission of online data unless it is offset by a huge increase in processing power, according to Internet experts.

Iran is "now drilling into what the population is trying to say," said Bradley Anstis, director of technical strategy with Marshal8e6 Inc., an Internet security company in Orange, Calif. He and other experts interviewed have examined Internet traffic flows in and out of Iran that show characteristics of content inspection, among other measures. "This looks like a step beyond what any other country is doing, including China."