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Iran’s architecture of internet control is built on technologies from China, according to an analysis published by a British human rights organisation.
The report by Article 19 says the technologies include facial recognition tools used on Uyghurs in western China and a Chinese alternative to the US-based GPS system, BeiDou.
The report outlines the policies and imported hardware behind the growth of Iran’s fine-tuned censorship regime, which allowed authorities to almost entirely cut off its 93 million people from the global internet during the height of January’s anti-government protests.
The internet blackout has helped to obscure grave human rights violations, including mass killings. The death toll from the protests is still being reckoned.
Iran’s internet is still not back to where it was. Rather, a patchy censorship regime appears to be allowing users sporadic access. The capabilities that underpin this blackout are the culmination of a decades-long project, one that involved the collaboration of Chinese authorities.
Iran and China’s infrastructure contracts have been guided by a shared vision of “cyber sovereignty” – the idea that a state should have absolute control over the internet within its borders, says the report.
“A really significant turning point in the evolution of digital authoritarianism in China and Iran was 2010, when both countries started to make more significant steps towards a national internet,” said Michael Caster, the report’s author.
According to the report, Chinese companies have supplied Iran with several key categories of surveillance technologies including internet-filtering equipment from telecoms companies such as Huawei and ZTE and surveillance technologies from camera-makers Hikvision and Tiandy.
Researchers at the Outline Foundation and Project Ainita said there was a third category of equipment, manufactured by smaller providers in China. These tools are largely unknown and have “alarming” capabilities – meaning that it is difficult for researchers to know exactly how Iranian authorities can surveil users.
“They are getting all this widely available technology, and they are curating it and weaponising it for censorship and surveillance in very creative ways,” said Caster.
“There’s an incentive to not be transparent about a lot of this. The question about what is happening now in terms of Chinese tools in Iranian infrastructure is murky.”
Iran’s contracts with Chinese technology companies include several with the Tiandy, which provides facial recognition tools and bills itself as “No. 7 in the surveillance field”. It supplies branches of the Revolutionary Guards and Iran’s armed forces.
ZTE and Huawei, meanwhile, have offered deep packet inspection (DPI) technologies to Iranian authorities – tools that allow the extensive monitoring of internet traffic. These have been used in China to prevent citizens from accessing websites discussing Tiananmen Square or Tibet, for example, although they also have uses that go beyond censorship.
Iran is not the only customer of these tools. Last year, a series of reports documented how a little-known group of Chinese companies has sold sophisticated censorship systems to Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Myanmar and Ethiopia.
That company Geedge Networks sells middleboxes – devices that sit on network cables – that allow governments, in theory, to individually sift through a user’s internet activity.
However, the actual capabilities of these tools is unclear, said Jurre van Bergen, a researcher at Amnesty International. “It’s pretty hard to find out what these deep packet inspections actually do from these providers.”
“While they could do deep packet inspection to block certain apps or VPN protocols from working, it might be cheaper to just block certain domain names, to block certain functionalities or make websites unreachable.”
A Hikvision spokesperson said: “Hikvision exited the Iranian market eight years ago and does not sell its products in the country. The company builds and continuously improves a robust and well-established global trade compliance management framework to help ensure its products and operations comply with all applicable laws and regulations.”
ZTE said it ceased operations in Iran in 2016. The other companies mentioned in the Article 19 report have also been approached for comment.
