Is SIAM tool the genie that won’t go back in the box?
An omnipotent management system’s ability to control information flow has turned it into a tool of oppression in Iran. It was unveiled in a report by The Intercept which revealed that SIAM is being misused with the cooperation of mobile carriers.
SIAM is a computer system that works behind the scenes of Iranian cellular networks. It provides its operators with a broad menu of remote commands to alter, disrupt and monitor how customers use their phones. For example, SIAM can kick mobile devices from 3G and 4G networks to 2G networks. At best, this relegates the users to slow and outdated protocols. Since they cannot work with modern messaging platforms like Signal and WhatsApp, the user is effectively silenced. As the suppression of free speech becomes a common tactic of governments across the UK, Europe, Middle and Africa, these silencing methods may no longer seem an outlandish possibility that will be restricted to Iran.
The tools can slow a user’s data connections to a crawl, break the encryption of phone calls and track the movements of individuals or large groups, said The Intercept. The system also produces detailed metadata summaries of who spoke to whom, when and where. Such a system could help the governments invisibly quash today’s protestors, be they Gilets Jaunes in France or protesting farmers in the Netherlands. In February the Canadian government invoked emergency powers in order to justify using technology to crush a protest by the nation’s truck drivers.
SIAM gives governments the power to track every device that was at a given protest and to collect enough data to build profiles about the people in contact with those devices. It bestows complete omnipotence on the Iranian telecoms industry’s regulator, the government’s Communications Regulatory Authority which can see all the activity and the powers of the country’s mobile users. “Based on CRA rules and regulations all telecom operators must provide CRA direct access to their system for query customers information and change their services via web service,” reads an English-language document obtained by The Intercept.
The SIAM documents are drawn from a trove of internal materials from the Iranian mobile operator Ariantel. Allegedly, in Tehran the Iranian government works with mobile carriers to track mobile devices, as well as monitoring, disrupting, and altering communications. “SIAM can control if, where, when, and how users can communicate,” explained Gary Miller, a mobile security researcher and fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. “In this respect, this is not a surveillance system but rather a repression and control system to limit the capability of users to dissent or protest.”
Following the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iran’s morality police, there had been protests all over the country. The government has responded by restricting internet access and blocking platforms like WhatsApp and Instagram. Internet shutdowns have by now become a familiar tool of political control in the hands of the Iranian government and other states. For almost a week in 2019, Sudan was almost completely cut off from the internet. It started slowly, with a series of intermittent disruptions during months of protests against former President Omar al-Bashir‘s 30-year rule.