A joint venture of Siemens AG and Nokia Corp., two large European technology firms, is denying reports that Iran uses its Web-monitoring technology to censor and spy on its citizens' online activities.
Nokia Siemens Networks said Monday that it has sold telecommunications systems to the Iranian government but that any built-in monitoring technology was for voice communications and not the Internet.
"The lawful intercept capability is purely for local voice calls," spokesman Ben Roome said in an interview. "We don't know who may have provided other Internet technologies to Iran."
The company's denial comes as protests over Iran's disputed election enter their second week, amplified by Twittering from the Iranian diaspora and cell phone videos showing ongoing street conflicts and the apparent death of young Iranian woman called Neda.
Images and video clips trickling in from the streets of Tehran--even ones whose authenticity may never be established--have electrified the West and demonstrated the limits of power that the government is able to wield. Because foreign correspondents are being pressured by authorities and forced to leave, according to journalist advocacy groups, the country's relatively tiny Internet pipe to the outside world is offering a unique glimpse of the situation on the streets.
Iran's Internet restrictions are no secret, of course. As CNET News reported last week, Web sites including Facebook, YouTube.com, and the BBC have been deemed off-limits by government censors, and there have been recurring reports that Twitter.com and Yahoo Messenger have been blocked as well. Except for some hiccups, though, Iran's Internet authorities have chosen not to pull the plug on the nation's connections to the outside world.
The source of the surveillance technology used by Iran's Internet service providers remains an unresolved political question that could prove an embarrassment for any Western company linked to Tehran's censorial regime. Few technology executives have forgotten the spectacle of Washington politicians calling Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to a hearing and denouncing him as "spineless" for doing business in China, or Cisco being dubbed as "collaborating with the Chinese government" for supplying Internet switches and routers.
This recent dispute erupted in the form of a front-page article in Monday's editions of The Wall Street Journal, which claimed that the Iranian government has developed "one of the world's most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet" with the help of Nokia Siemens Networks. The headline read: "Iran's Web Spying Aided By Western Technology." (In April, the Washington Times published a similar report that also named Nokia Siemens Networks.)
But Roome, the Nokia Siemens Networks spokesman, said that the newspaper's report was incorrect. He said in a blog post, "Unfortunately, I was unable to clarify for the Wall Street Journal the limited scope of the lawful intercept capability (voice calls only) and rule out...deep packet inspection and Web filtering."
Roome argued that, whatever its faults, even Iran's wiretap-ready mobile phone network has proven vital in spreading word about the political upheaval unfolding amid widespread protests. "Mobile networks in Iran, and the subsequent widespread adoption of mobile phones, have allowed Iranians to communicate what they are seeing and hearing with the outside world," he said. "The proof of this is in the widespread awareness of the current situation."
Complicating the matter is the difficulty of identifying the technology used. It's relatively easy to figure out which Web sites that are off-limits--groups like Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society have made a practice of compiling such lists--but much harder to know what hardware or software is being used to monitor Internet links.
"For the filtering work we are able to verify the actual functionality," said Rob Faris, research director for the Berkman Center. "It's just about impossible to document surveillance with the same level of confidence."
In terms of Web blocking, a Berkman Center report compiled in 2005 said that Iran used Secure Computing's SmartFilter. It quoted the company's chief executive, John McNulty, as saying: "We have been made aware of ISPs in Iran making illegal and unauthorized attempts to use of our software. Secure Computing is actively taking steps to stop this illegal use of our products."
McAfee now owns Secure Computing and sells the software as McAfee SmartFilter. A product description boasts of "a proven repository of more than 25 million blockable websites across more than 90 categories."
"We have never seen any direct evidence or hard proof that Iran has ever used any McAfee or Secure Computing product," McAfee said in an e-mailed statement on Monday. "McAfee complies with all export laws and regulation applicable to its products. Rigorous due diligence was conducted prior to the acquisition of Secure Computing and there was no indication of any contract in Iran or support being provided in Iran." (A U.S. economic embargo restricts trade with Iran.)
More recent reports suggest that Iranian Internet providers have developed or adapted their own Web filtering technology, but shed little light on the question of surveillance.
Compared with a few years ago, traffic analysis and inspection have become more common for Internet providers; their legitimate purposes include detecting malicious activity, prioritizing online phone calls over e-mail, and for mobile providers, charging different fees for different types of data.
Cisco's Service Control Engine series boasts of conducting "deep packet inspection" and "detection and control of virtually any network application, including: Web browsing, multimedia streaming, and peer-to-peer (P2P)." WireShark, free software for intercepting and decoding traffic, can record and display what's taking place on a network. And most modern routers can block or log access to Web sites based on a list of Internet addresses or domain names.
"I don't know how one could actually determine" what Iran is using for surveillance, said Tony Barbagallo, vice president of marketing at WildPackets of Walnut Creek, Calif., which sells Internet monitoring tools including OmniPeek Network Analyzer. "It's pretty easy to conceive that they could be using homegrown technology."
"Our products are used in the United States and elsewhere specifically for lawful intercept," Barbagallo said. "We've actually developed extensions to our products to make it easier to do lawful intercept. Any of our customers with a maintenance contract can download the same products the governments are using."
This echoes the argument that Nokia Siemens Networks has made: that selling voice-only lawful intercept gear to Iran is acceptable because built-in wiretappability is required in the United States and Europe. Ever since the 1994 Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, U.S. telephone companies have been legally required to make sure their networks can easily be wiretapped by police; in 2006, a federal appeals court upheld the Bush administration's decision to extend those rules to Internet providers.
On the other hand, the United States and Europe tend not to imprison people for criticizing their respective governments, something that responses posted on Nokia Siemens Networks' blog pointed out on Monday. One response asked: "What happens when your 'lawful intercept' capability is sold to regimes which are likely to use it a way which would be considered unlawful under European and U.N. Human Rights conventions -- say to suppress freedom of speech?"
Jay Botelho, WildPackets' director of product management, said the best way for an Iranian Internet provider to monitor its customers would be to use one bank of monitoring equipment for e-mail, another for Web browsing, a third for VoIP calls, and so on. "Using our product, the easiest way to monitor everything is to hook onto an (extra port) port off your main switch," Botelho said. "The problem is that depending on the traffic, that could overload an appliance. But if you slowed everything down, you'd get everything."
That's not a problem in Iran, which has limited connectivity to the outside world, and where download speeds are far slower than what many other countries enjoy. Some Iran watchers have speculated for years that those sluggish connections represented a form of social control--it dramatically curbs Web video usage, for instance--and point to a 2006 decree saying that Internet connections should be limited to 128 Kbps (kilobits per second).
The largest Internet provider in Iran is Tehran-based Pars Online, which claims to employ over 400 people. It claims to have three satellite stations that can send data at 155 Mbps (megabits per second), amounting to the size of the virtual pipe connecting much of Iran to the outside world. By contrast, Verizon's FIOS service offers each home subscriber a connection of 50 Mbps for downloads and 20 Mbps for uploads.
Twitter has the starring role as opening up Net communications about Iran's turbulent politics, but Google and Facebook are jumping in with their its own hasty efforts.
Google is adding Farsi, or Persian, language support to its translation service, the company announced Thursday night. Google rushed out the support specifically because of events in Iran, said Principal Scientist Franz Och in a blog posting.
Google used its YouTube blog to spotlight often violent conflicts between Iranian police and protesters.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)"We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran," Och said. "Like YouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa--increasing everyone's access to information."
And Facebook produced a beta version of its social-networking site in Persian, Facebook localization engineer Eric Kwan said in a blog posting.
"Since the Iranian election last week, people around the world have increasingly been sharing news and information on Facebook about the results and its aftermath. Much of the content created and shared has been in Persian--the native language of Iran--but people have had to navigate the site in English or other languages," Kwan said. "We could not have made this happen so quickly without the more than 400 Persian speakers who submitted thousands of individual translations of the site."
Google's translation service so far is optimized for translating between English and Farsi, but Google is working on expanding that to support other language combinations, Och said. A quick test for me showed it workable translating Persian to English.
The Internet lowers barriers between different cultures, countries, and languages, but censors can seriously curtail access to Internet services. Of course, there often are ways to sidestep censors for those with some technical know-how.
Google also has spotlighted citizen journalist efforts on YouTube to document the crackdown on Iranian protesters.
Google has struggled with censorship in China in particular, concluding that censorship cooperation is better than not participating in the market at all.
A new generation of Iranians has found ways to bypass the country's notoriously censorial Internet restrictions and disseminate details about Iran's internal turmoil in the wake of the recent election.
In technical circles, at least, Iran is well-known for erecting one of the world's most restrictive Internet blockades, second only to China in its scope. Certain blogs are cordoned off, politically unacceptable keywords are blocked, and Web sites like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, the BBC, and YouTube remain--at least at the moment--off-limits.
That has complicated the task of distributing videos and e-mail descriptions of the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators marching in the streets to protest the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Supporters of reformist leader Mir Hossein Mousavi have alleged that the election was a fraud.
But the government's censors have been unable to staunch every data leak. "The bottom line is that a lot of information is still getting out," says Zahir Janmohamed, advocacy director of the Middle East and North Africa for Amnesty International USA.
Watch CBS Videos Online
Harry Smith of CBS News speaks with Steve Grove, director of news video at
YouTube, about the role YouTube is playing in Iran as the country tries to
crack down on news organizations.
Some of the online restrictions appeared around the time of the election: that's when Facebook, BBC English (BBC Persia was already blocked), Technorati.com, and YouTube were added to the verboten-in-Iran list. One report says that YouTube's traffic from Iran has dropped by 90 percent in the last few days, and another says that Yahoo Messenger was blocked early Wednesday. Unconfirmed reports from Iran say Twitter.com is also blocked.
One way around the government's online blockades is to find the electronic equivalent of a detour, which involves using something known as a proxy server.
Here's how it works: Normally, a Web browser makes a connection directly to a Web site's Internet address. But that address can be easily discovered and added to the government's blacklist. The trick is to redirect Web browsing through a proxy, which could be a permanent commercial service or someone volunteering his or her computer temporarily.
Then, instead of the relatively easy task of blocking Facebook.com or YouTube.com, the Iranian government has the far more difficult job--in practice, an impossible one--of identifying and blacklisting thousands of individual proxy servers.
In the last few days, Web sites like proxysetupforiran.blogspot.com have sprouted, as have exhortations to engage in a bit of social activism by creating your own proxy server, complete with detailed instructions on how to do it.
Twitter is abuzz with information on how to set up proxies and tips on how to keep addresses known to correspond to Iranian government computers from using them. Other sites have suggested filter-bypassing utilities like a Firefox plug-in that bypasses bans on connecting to Flickr.com or software called FreeAccess Plus that claims to circumvent restrictions on YouTube, MySpace, and some Persian-language sites blocked by Iran.
Using Tor to stay anonymous
Similarly, Iranian usage of the Tor anonymizing network has spiked. "We have seen a doubling of Tor users from IP addresses in Iran over the last few days," says Andrew Lewman, executive director of The Tor Project.
Think of Tor as a far more complex and powerful version of a proxy server; once a computer with the right software installed connects to the Tor network, the rest of the connection becomes very difficult for even government agencies to monitor. Unlike some Web-based anonymizers or proxy servers, Tor can handle instant messaging communications as well.
Watch CBS Videos Online
Iran has a history of riots and protests. Students rioted in 1999 and 2003, but
were put down quickly. The difference this time is the Internet. Bob Orr reports.
Tor's public addresses can be blocked, of course, but enterprising individuals can set up private entry points. "You act as a secure relay into the Tor network," Lewman says, referring to private entry points. "From someone watching it, it looks like an SSL session between a browser and a web server, so it doesn't stand out. We look like SSL by design, because who's going to suspect a web browser?" (SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, the standard method of encrypting Web connections to banks or credit card companies. There have been reports that Iran is blocking SSL too.)
A Web site called iran.whyweprotest.net has recommended Iranians use Tor to cloak their identities and bypass government filters; a related one called TorIR.org offers instructions on how to configure the software for most common Web browsers.
Daniel Calingaert, deputy director of programs at Freedom House, a human rights group, says Iranian authorities have been focused on jamming phones and satellite connections and have not paid as much attention to the Internet.
"They're still focused on cat and mouse games with satellite broadcasting," Calingaert says. "They had jammed BBC Persia, which is probably the most respected and known source of news. And then we've heard that BBC moved to different frequencies. A lot of people are able to get it. It varies based on time of day and neighborhood."
Janmohamed, from Amnesty International USA, says that because SMS text messages are curbed, Iranians have been using the Twitter application on mobile phones as an alternative. And now, he believes, the government has begun to pay attention. "When I look at the pattern of arrests from Saturday to today, initially you had the Mousavi supporters, the Calvin Klein activists--the urban elites--and now you're getting people of all different backgrounds," he says. "They're cracking down on a wider group of people."
According to the OpenNet Initiative, a collaboration of Harvard University, the University of Toronto, the University of Cambridge, and Oxford University, Iran "uses the commercial filtering package SmartFilter--made by the U.S.-based company, Secure Computing--as the primary technical engine of its filtering system."
McAfee now owns Secure Computing and sells the software as McAfee SmartFilter; a product description boasts of "a proven repository of more than 25 million blockable websites across more than 90 categories." (A U.S. economic embargo against Iran prohibits software licensing and the company has said in the past that the software is pirated. McAfee did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain, an OpenNet contributor, wrote in a blog post this week that "today Iran runs its own home-grown filtering software.)
Even if Iranians can't always secure a reliable Internet connection to the outside world, they nevertheless have a potent voice: the Iranian and Persian diaspora, amounting to millions of former residents living abroad. It just takes one e-mail message with a video or photo attached for the contents to rocket around the diaspora and eventually end up on a place like TehranBureau.com. In a pinch, a simple phone call to a family member abroad can be transcribed for a Twitter feed.
Freedom House's Calingaert says: "What makes this situation different from others and is driving a lot of it is that you have a very large and vibrant online and blogger community of Iranians outside the country."
"People are really bypassing channels though Facebook and Twitter and contacting their cousins," Amnesty's Janmohamd adds. "You've got one of the largest Iranian diasporas in Los Angeles. Information is getting out there."
Updated 8:14 p.m. PDT: Added more information on Iran's filters.
A State Department press briefing gives some insight into why the U.S. government requested that Twitter postpone a scheduled downtime during a crucial period in the post-election upheaval in Iran.
"I think, as I was following this, these developments over the weekend...I began to recognize the importance of new social media as a vital tool for citizens' empowerment and as a way for people to get their messages out," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said Tuesday, according to a transcript of the department's daily press briefing (which was not held specifically to address the Twitter question). "And it was very clear to me that these kinds of social media played a very important role in democracy, spreading the word about what was going on."
CNN reported Tuesday that the State Department had been behind the decision by Twitter and its hosting provider to reschedule the downtime for an hour when it would be the middle of the night in the Iranian capital of Tehran.
Kelly was then asked to comment on "discussions that (the State Department is) having with networking sites about maintaining the technology, about how the State Department as an institution is monitoring these type of sites to gain information about what's going on."
His response: "We're monitoring many different media, including some of these sites. And we've had, of course, talks with Twitter as well...I don't want to go into the detail of the nature of those talks right now."
Another reporter then pointed out that "by not providing any information on the nature of the talks, it indicates that you have some role in kind of providing messages to Twitter, messages to Iranians."
Kelly denied this. He said he was not sure who exactly within the State Department had been in touch with Twitter and added that "we use a number of social media outlets, and we're in constant contact with them. And as I said before, we were, of course, monitoring the situation through a number of different media, including social media networks like Facebook and Twitter...this is about the Iranian people. This is about giving their voices a chance to be heard. One of the ways that their voices are heard are through new media."
With the Iranian government clamping down on foreign journalists, Kelly has a point: access to Twitter and ilk are crucial sources of information.
Social media tools like Twitter and Facebook have already emerged as sources of raw news in disasters and political crises before--from the Hudson River emergency plane landing to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. But this is the first time they've been highlighted as vital information channels in Iran--both for protesters trying to spread information and for government authorities trying to gather it.
- prev
- 1
- next
