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The NGO Amnesty International denounces more than a hundred deaths during protests in Iran. A report disputed by the authorities and very difficult to verify following the digital curfew. Kavé Salamatian, computer science professor and co-author of an article on the subject explains this new means of mass control.
RFI: Since last Friday the Iranians are cut off from the world, how is this digital break a new element ?
Kavé Salamatian : There have already been several total internet cuts in Iran over the past decade, with the introduction of a Kill-Switch, a system that gives the possibility of cutting off all communications in the country by one point. centralized. But today's break is the longest and most sophisticated we've seen in recent years. Usually when you cut the internet, you cut the connection to the outside, but also the internal network. Governments and government structures are increasingly dependent on the internet. The novelty is on this point: Iran, in recent years, has reconfigured its network so that it can implement cuts on the outside while retaining a very important part of the Internet internally. When you want to access services inside Iran, you continue to have access, but when you want to access a foreign site you do not have connectivity. The work of filtering sites internally has already been done for a long time, so all that is critical now is abroad.
Is this technological breakthrough surprising for you?
What is interesting about Iran is that initially its network was not designed to be controllable. It is through a will implemented a few years ago that the internet has become totally controllable. So we have a situation "onion", we can allow traffic, prohibit another, and have a very high level of flexibility on this choice of traffic to allow or not. It's a job that took several years. The element of surprise is that this is the first time we see it operational. All this is the result of a rise in power and internal technical capabilities. We must not forget that today Iran is a country of 80 million inhabitants. The number of people who have gone to university is higher than all the countries in the Middle East, including Israel. And Iran in particular has a very strong competence in all fields related to information technology even if the vast majority of this technical capacity is abroad and emigrated. That is, Iran loses about 90% of its technical capacity through emigration, but the remaining 10% is enough to create the current situation.
But when there are more than a hundred deaths in a few days, is it still possible to contain this type of information?
The goal is not only to control the information but also to slow it down. This kind of mechanism effectively slows the spread of information even if it is not completely controlled. We will go through the phone for example. And then as I explained, the entire internet is not cut, 5% of the internet is still available today so we will try to find relays by places that still have connectivity. A drop of videos or content can be seen drop by drop. An example of a way that can be used is to use the network of a neighboring country if you are close to a border.