Is Iran Tracking and Controlling Its Protesters' Phones? (theintercept.com) 67
The Intercept reports that protesters in Iran "have often been left wondering how the government was able to track down their locations or gain access to their private communications — tactics that are frighteningly pervasive but whose mechanisms are virtually unknown."
But The Intercept now has evidence of a new possibility: While disconnecting broad swaths of the population from the web remains a favored blunt instrument of Iranian state censorship, the government has far more precise, sophisticated tools available as well. Part of Iran's data clampdown may be explained through the use of a system called "SIAM," a web program for remotely manipulating cellular connections made available to the Iranian Communications Regulatory Authority. The existence of SIAM and details of how the system works, reported here for the first time, are laid out in a series of internal documents from an Iranian cellular carrier that were obtained by The Intercept.
According to these internal documents, SIAM is a computer system that works behind the scenes of Iranian cellular networks, providing its operators a broad menu of remote commands to alter, disrupt, and monitor how customers use their phones. The tools can slow their data connections to a crawl, break the encryption of phone calls, track the movements of individuals or large groups, and produce detailed metadata summaries of who spoke to whom, when, and where. Such a system could help the government invisibly quash the ongoing protests — or those of tomorrow — an expert who reviewed the SIAM documents told The Intercept.
"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."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for submitting the article.
But The Intercept now has evidence of a new possibility: While disconnecting broad swaths of the population from the web remains a favored blunt instrument of Iranian state censorship, the government has far more precise, sophisticated tools available as well. Part of Iran's data clampdown may be explained through the use of a system called "SIAM," a web program for remotely manipulating cellular connections made available to the Iranian Communications Regulatory Authority. The existence of SIAM and details of how the system works, reported here for the first time, are laid out in a series of internal documents from an Iranian cellular carrier that were obtained by The Intercept.
According to these internal documents, SIAM is a computer system that works behind the scenes of Iranian cellular networks, providing its operators a broad menu of remote commands to alter, disrupt, and monitor how customers use their phones. The tools can slow their data connections to a crawl, break the encryption of phone calls, track the movements of individuals or large groups, and produce detailed metadata summaries of who spoke to whom, when, and where. Such a system could help the government invisibly quash the ongoing protests — or those of tomorrow — an expert who reviewed the SIAM documents told The Intercept.
"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."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for submitting the article.
Yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Betteridge just pooped his pants.
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Most people need the obvious stated to them time and again because they have no active intelligence and a short memory.
Umm... duh? (Score:2)
An oppressive regine snooping on its subjects in a feeble attempt to stay in power? That's never happened before, has it?
Guns (Score:1)
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Really? I'm the dumbass because I didn't make things up just to confirm something I believe, as you are doing?
Really? I'm the dumbass because I don't engage in wishful thinking and accept said wishful thinking as high probability, as you are doing?
You really should kill yourself, you daft cunt. You are too stupid to deserve to keep on living. Do everything in your life, especially your children, a favour and fucking kill yourself. They'll be much MUCH better off
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How? (Score:5, Insightful)
"have often been left wondering how the government was able to track down their locations or gain access to their private communications
Maybe it's because they're walking around with a tracking device in their pockets.
Just sayin'.
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True.
But blaming users rather than the government is not useful.
This article does seem to expose a very versatile tool (SIAM) that they are using.
Can't wait until this comes to the rest of the world... do you carry a phone?
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The question I answered was "how"?
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Pegasus from Mossad
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I don't want to blame the victim but...duh?
Who would oppose a government today and simultaneously carry around both a tracking AND REMOTE CONTROLLED SURVEILLANCE DEVICE in their pockets?
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Insane is racist tribalism. All human suffering, actually all sentient suffering, is worth preventing. If you don't care about other people's suffering, you've self-declared your own life as worthless too.
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It's profoundly stupid to think that you can't afford to care about anything else unless you "stabilized your own country first", where you don't even provide the specifics of what that could look like.
More often then not that turns into a never ending cycle of relative privation where seemingly smaller issues are dismissed for some non existent triage reasoning. Often also combined with some
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What do you think is preventing you from feeding your family and paying your bills?
Of course while being able to maintain that sockpuppet account here on Slashdot (going by the comment history)?
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Grandiose and dramatic, but also so vague that the stench of bullshit requires wilful ignorance to be missed.
Have fun when your own government starts to spy on every aspect of your own life and comes after you for Wrongthink, because you were busy with making up excuses to not care what happens around you.
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Keep making shit up, while others of us have first hand witnessed the horrors of the self proclaimed Communist regimes obsessed with loyalty, blanket spying on people to find anyone who dares to veer off the lines even a tiny bit, extorting them, apprehending and torturing them, or disappearing them to never being seen again.
We know where this kind of obliviousness has lead to, does lead to as is apparent in places like Iran, and highly likely will lead to in other places as w
Meanings (Score:1, Troll)
In case anyone forgot or didn't realize, outside of the narrow and carefully defined cases in legitimate academic journals, any usage of the globalism/globalist terms acts simply a proxy for the dog-whistles of antisemitism and its related failed ideologies. Reference the blatant antisemitism expressed in other posts on this story.
It is disappointing to the greatest degree to see formerly useful places like Slashdot degenerate like this. Maybe it is just a sign of the increased exposure, but while the indiv
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We should care about all human beings, actually all suffering of sentient beings. Why only care about your tribe? That's stupid. There's no logic to only caring about certain people. If you subscribe to tribalism, you shouldn't complain if someone bigger harms you, because they are simply following the same rule you follow.
"But the US does it!" (Score:5, Insightful)
"It's just metadata, who they call and when!"
To all the turds in law enforcement and Congress, do you see how such info is abused? And what a baldfaced lie you are lying?
If the Founding Fathers had had cell phones, the Tyrant King George III would have used metadata to flesh out their networks and round them up. Then, in spite of all hanging together, they'd have all hung apart. Had they managed to prevail anyway, it would have been directly included in the Constitution.
Every time you argue for tracking people, spy cans everywhere, computer tracking, back doors in cryptography, all of it, "imagine a boot stepping on a human face, forever."
Well, billions around the world already live that dream, and now feel it a little more forever-er.
Denying government tools of tyranny prevent misuse and are the, not a, core constitutional design.
Re: "But the US does it!" (Score:4, Informative)
Most of those people were dumb enough to live stream their own crimes. Also this.
https://thehill.com/policy/nat... [thehill.com]
“ We should have brought rifles. We could have fixed it right then and there. I’d hang F–— Pelosi from the lamppost,” Rhodes said in the recording, according to CBS News.”
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To all the turds in law enforcement and Congress, do you see how such info is abused?
Law enforcement is never about defending freedom. What they want is "order" above everything else, which is the very thing a totalitarian regime craves too.
Puzzling... (Score:2)
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" tactics that are frighteningly pervasive but whose mechanisms are virtually unknown."
What EVER could it be? This is so mysterious!
Yes. If you are deeply stupid. Which, to be fair, most people are.
"No"... (Score:1)
... is usually the answer when the headline is a question. Not this time though.
Iran/Christian nationalism (Score:1)
Two sides of the same coin. Fight me.
Um. Yeah. (Score:3)
1. Suck it up and meekly accept your fate.
2. Revolt.
3. Quietly give up on getting ahead and drag the country down by passively doing nothing
4. Leave for someplace better to live. Maybe try a democracy?
Overall I think it’s a good thing that the US seems to be, slowly and fitfully, getting out of the business of violently imposing democracy elsewhere. But this means that a LOT of people are going to have to decide for themselves what sort of society and government they want. If they like their dictator or theocracy, its all good. You do you. But if they want their dictator lut, they’ll have to do the bleeding themselves to change it.
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There seems to be a nascent revolution growing in Iran now... led by women.
There are historic protests happening right now in Iran, which globally may well be the first time in history that “women have been both the spark and engine for an attempted counter-revolution.”1 People all across the country—primarily women, queer folks, and young Gen-Z Iranians—are leading protests calling for an end to Iran’s oppressive government–a regime that killed 22-year-old Kurdish Irania
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The same goes for EU media that I've seen.
Really the only ones that have no interest in having this covered too well are the authoritarian to totalitarian states where any disagreement with the government is seen as undermining the power the regime tries to project like Russia, China, and well... Iran.
And not even they themselves are going to be completely quiet about it, because
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Yeah, the c
and here at home (Score:2)
Men Controlling Women (Score:1)
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And a completely wrong one. You are making things worse. Shame on you.
The sooner they overthrow, the better (Score:2)
Phew, Good Thing DHS Only Caps Our Free Speech (Score:1)
Brave New World, meet Nineteen Eighty-Four (Score:2)
... we will drug the people until they carry their prison with them, in their pocket.