*Music*
Herald: Because Iran pops up in the news
frequently and mostly when it pops up, it's often about censorship and
surveillance and our speaker here Mahsa Alimardani she's actually an expert on
this topic. She's a specialist, she currently works at the Oxford Internet
Institute, where she researches politics of Iran and of the Iranian internet but
she also works for the NGO Article 19 and in her talk - which we hope we'll have
the slides up very soon - in her talk she's doing a rundown of the current state
of censorship and surveillance in Iran. So thank you for waiting until now, please
give a warm round of applause to
Mahsa Alimardani
*Applause*
Mahsa Alimardani: Well, thank you for coming and
being so patient to hear me talk today I have to admit I did not anticipate doing
this without my computer in front of me but I guess it's a good exercise in
becoming less reliant on my devices. But I do still have my phone in my hand with the
slide so I think that'll be useful; so, the name of the talk is "Tightening the
Net" and so as the introduction went I'm going to be talking a little bit about how
information controls work on the Iranian intranet. You're probably listening to my
voice wondering why someone with an Iranian name sounds kind of American. I'm
- I grew up in Canada and I spent most of my life going back and forth between the
various countries I lived in abroad and back to Iran, so that's why I sound this
way. It's a Canadian accent. And so I, I had slides to accompany what I was going
to say next and it had a frightening Iranian vampire, that I was going to get
into later on, but it seems that I can you know replace the frightening Iranian
vampire for now. So the reason why I am here. Who am I?Well I wear a lot of
different hats, the introduction said that I am,
oh, that's not my slide,
there's a frightening woman in front of me.
*Laughter*
So I, I'm doing my PhD at the Oxford Internet
Institute and there I'm studying how social media evolves in Iran's information
control space to see how political participation shapes, especially during
elections and things like that. I also spend the majority of my time at a london-
based NGO called Article 19 and there I work with an Iran team that tracks how
freedom of expression and access to information takes shape in Iran, and uh, I
think my slides are on their way up here? No? Is it there? It will come? That's
promising. So at Article 19.
*Applause*
Yay, my slides are here, that's so
exciting. Oh can I actually? then I it goes
... can I actually control it?
Herald: You have to signal.
MA: Oh, I have to signal, okay. We
can go to the next slide.
*Laughter*
No, nope, oh this is fun, okay, so this was the part
that would appear when I'm explaining who I am. What are you? It's the scene
from the movie, but, I've been referencing, it's called "A girl walkes
home alone at night" I think you should all watch it. So, we can go to the next
slide. So, um, there was a troll on Twitter yesterday when I posted about my
talk, who were saying that I'm kind of doing war-mongering or something like
that, so I just want to leave a disclaimer: I do work on human rights, I
am talking about some of the repressive things that happens in Iran, but this is
not a talk to scare you away from Iran. In fact, if - you can go back - in fact, if
it, if I weren't here and if I weren't doing this particular type of work I would
probably be in Iran with my family for the holidays, so I urge you, if you have no
security concerns, please go. It's a amazing country lots to see. But, one
thing you will find is that the internet experience is a little bit different than
what you would experience here in Leipzig, which kind of brings me round to the topic
of my talk. So, the Iranian internet is sometimes known as "Filter-Net", this is a
term that a lot of us who do kind of digital advocacy for Iran know and often
use. I think the term was coined around 2009 or 2010 by a Iranian journalist, who
focuses on technology named Mima Akbar, for, you can follow the hashtag on Twitter
and you could see lots of different things related to Internet censorship and
surveillance in Iran. And so - next slide - there's also the series, that I helped
run with a number of colleagues at Article 19, which is called "Tightening the Net"
the name of this talk and if you want to get into the nitty gritty details of what
happens in terms of internet policy, in terms of how users are put at risk in Iran
this is a series you can follow and it started initially with the national
internet project, which is sort of sometimes known as the "Halal-Net".
And then, we looked at software and cyber tactics in Iran for the next edition and
now every quarter we come out with a rundown of what's going on, online in
Iran, with a series of advocacy recommendations for various branches of
the Iranian government. So, if you want to get more information beyond the
generalities of this talk to check that out. Next slide. So, understanding the
#filternet. In order to understand - next slide - so whenever I do this, it means
next slide. So, understanding what happens online you
have to kind of understand that in Iran there is an infrastructure of control,
that kind of shapes how this works and I can show this to you. Here, which is kind
of a map of what's going on in Iran and you can see that in Iran the head of state
is in fact not elected, it's the supreme leader. He's kind of a religious
authority, but also he has ultimate veto- power over everything that happens in the
country and you can see him up at the top. I'm not signaling to change, I'm just pointing.
It's, he's up at the top there and everything sort of like falls under
his umbrella. And, what's interesting to know that, every four years there, are
there is a democratic element to the government in Iran and there is a
president that gets elected and within the president's cabinet you have the Ministry
of ICT information communications and technology and within the Ministry of ICT
you see a lot of what happens in terms of control inside of Iran. So the Ministry of
ICT runs the telecommunications company of Iran and they maintain and authorize all
the ISP and so in some ways this has been really good, because the current
administration, that was elected back in 2013 and it was reelected in 2017 is a
moderate administration and so it's done a lot to improve internet conditions in
Iran. Internet speeds have improved by huge
amounts. So, sometimes the Iranian internet was named, known as "condnet"
which, kind of is like "slow internet", but that's really improved since this
government has come into power and it's the government of President Rouhani and
other things, like Internet access has come to villages, that often didn't have
this kind of access. So in terms of ICT for development there's been a lot of
progress over the past few years because of the work of this government in that
ministry, but in terms of how surveillance occurs. So all Internet traffic is routed
through the telecommunications company of Iran including private and government ISPs
and the TCI - as you can see right below the Ministry of ICT - is responsible for
blocking webpages and blacklists and keywords and in terms of surveillance the
TCI also uses proxy servers for surveillance by logging all unencrypted
web traffic which is why it's really important for there to be HTTPS over
websites in Iran. What was particularly concerning is that
underneath the control of the Supreme Leader there's a body called the
Revolutionary Guards and so, every time there's a protest movement in Iran or
there's any sort of opposition's of the status quo the Revolutionary Guards help
the regime kind of, you know, quell protesters, arrest them, gather
intelligence and so the IRGC, excuse me. In 2009 the IRGC a consortium owned by
this kind of paramilitary organization bought about 51% of the telecommunications
company of Iran, because the government was trying to privatize it, but in essence
its ownership falls, fell under this kind of repressive body within the
establishment. So, beyond strengthening the the Revolutionary Guards, with you
know, financial, through financial means they had direct access to the data of
ordinary citizens which is super concerning. We can go to the next slide now.
This was the news back in 2009 when they
got 51% of the shares of the telecommunications company of Iran. Next
slide. So, just to go over a brief history of controls, because along with the
infrastructure of control, there's kind of a legal mechanism for how this kind of
established itself. So, back in 2001, filtering really started in Iran because
there is a crackdown on newspapers and a lot of people started migrating online.
The scripts for writing Persian online was developing so, there was this huge
migration and it was only around 2001 that the government started targeting and doing
censorship of these, you know, more reformist or progressive journalists and
activists, who were writing and kind of going against the ethos of the regime.
You can go back, you went ahead too. Oh, so were you doing it? Oh sorry.
*Laughter*
Totally did not make that connection. So that was in 2001 and they wanted to
codify how the system works, in terms of the filtering committee that enables this
and so in 2006 there was a draft law known as the computer crimes law and actually
Article 19, the law team and that Iran team - I wasn't part
of it because this was before my time at the organization - they actually are the
only source of translating and analyzing this law and so, it came into a draft form
in 2006 and then by 2009 they really wanted to mobilize it and make sure it
went into law. And 2009 was when the green movement happened and so the government
was kind of trying to rein in control over what kind of discourse was going on
online, because they they effectively shut down the internet for a small period of
time during that protest movement and so right after this happened they picked up
speed on this and made sure it passed and by 2010 this became law.
You can take a look at this document in more precise form, different things like
article 10, which makes things like encryption illegal came out of this
document, different things like the filtering committee that decides through
multi agency network of different ministries and different experts in the
government what content needs to be filtered.
Do you want me to do this and you can.
*Laughs*
Sorry I feel bad I've made you, yeah.
*Laughter*
Here she is.
*Applause*
Okay, okay, yeah, I'm sorry, I didn't realize and she was crouching here
the entire time and that's not cool. So, so the next thing I have is a video
which I feel like it's gonna get really difficult. So, the law came into effect in
2010 and different bodies came into formation as well, things like the
Revolutionary Guard set up their own cyber division known as Gharargah in 2009, right
after the protest movement. Iran's police forces also established
their own pulley of cyber force named Fatah in 2011 and because the
establishment was realizing that the internet was so, basically crucial to the
functioning of the nation, national security was being compromised, things
like cyber attacks against the country's infrastructure was happening, the supreme
leader basically wanted everything centralized to him, and so he created the
"Supreme Council of Cyberspace" which, its name translated into English, is very
scifi and fun to say sometimes and that happened in 2012.
And so, this is all kind of like boring and I guess lots of dates and lots of
things, but it's really important to how things happen day to day in Iranian's
lives and how they experience the internet and so... Back in a few years ago, a
colleague and I, okay, at the University of Amsterdam, decided to go through the
censorship redirect page. So everytime you want to visit a page that's censored it's
called peyvandha.ir - you can probably look this up, if you want - and so we
using the wayback machine we, like, traced it over the years and how it evolved and
how it kind of reflects on this changing internet policy.
So I'm gonna take a crack at playing this, I'm probably gonna really mess this up,
actually, but... uhm... so this is the video... Can I do it without...?
AH: Let's try it... I can
MA: Yes. Yeah!
Video: arose with the establishment of Iran cybercrime laws following the 2009
Green movement. The different versions of peyvandha.ir, which contain literature
related to these laws and regulations, evolve as norms of what constitutes as
filtered content becomes more entrenched with Iran. From the inception of the very
first version of the page, whereby users are told: "In the name of god, according
to the Computer Crimes Act, access to this website requested, is not possible." The
messages users are viewing as censorship page, is toned down in the next version,
whereby users are only told, that the links they are viewing are some of the
registered links. Within version 2, we also see the peyvandha.ir website creating
pages related to Internet policy. the 3rd version of peyvandha.ir continues with the
theme of religious references, with a poem featured that states: "If you listen to
the words of the poet Saadi, he says, he consents to require the consent of him".
Immediately to the right of this, users see the text: "In the name of god and the
merciful", as if to subtly tell users that the censorship they are experiencing, is
by the will of god. These religious references are continued
in version 4, whereby the main feature of the page is a changing image that makes
references to national holidays and events, maintaining the theme of allusions
to Shia Islam and national Imams. This image, for instance, depicts a mosque,
marking the festival of Imam Reza, asking users to click on a link to submit ideas
for the festival. Version 5 of peyvandha.ir brings attention
to the islamic nature of censorship. The links featured here are perhaps the most
related to state propaganda in comparisons to the other versions. While the previous
version did not display any links, all previous versions of peyvandha.ir featured
the popular Persian language blogging platform, BlogFa. However, this version
omits the website. The omission of the main image in version 5 makes it hard to
establish a firm connection between the previous and following versions. This
finding is in line with the notion that archives of web pages are not always
successful in capturing all of the content. However, further research shows
that this version still made use of images regarding Shia Islam. The after the Green
movement, internet controls in Iran from 2009 and 2012 report, by the OpenNet
initiative has captured and saved the version of peyvandha.ir, as it was on a
25th of October 2012. This image features quranic writings. The last 2 iterations of
the website in version 6 and 7 are very similar in design. The sudden change in
design was explained by an anonymous source to make filtering more pleasant. Or
rather to appear as a subtle part of the Iranian internet experience rather than
one presented with indoctrinating aspects of the government. The significant change
that comes in version 7, however, is the prominent feature of the Internet policy
links. Concluding, we can say that this historiography of the peyvandha.ir website
demonstrates a timeline of the beginning of the heightened internet controls from
the inception of the page in 2010 to the present day. The changes in the page
essentially demonstrate the evolution of the ways the Iranian state represents its
censorship policies. The notions of religious motifs decrease over time,
whereas the focus on internet policy becomes more present by the last iteration
of the page.
MA: And that was that. And as I struggle
to go back to my presentation... Oh, I did it... without any glitches... how
exciting... and so, over the years there have been different programs that the
government has kind of put into place beyond the censorship that they do. Things
that I have been following through my own work have been "the spider program", which
comes from the Revolutionary Guards Garrideb division, the cyber... kind of
Iranian cyber division of the Revolutionary Guards and intelligent
filtering, the National Information Network, and the different ways that the
Iranian government has been trying to attack journalist, activists, and human
rights defenders in terms of... that the attacking these kind of vulnerable
individuals that pose a threat. There's a lot of different projects article 19
had an Iranian cyber army report about this, and there's been really great work
to track this being done by the campaign for human rights in Iran by their
researcher Amir Rashidi and by two other researchers who've been tracking this with
the Iran threats project - Colin Anderson and Claudio Ranieri - so there's tons of
great research being done in terms of identifying these attackers. The
intelligent filtering project that the Iranian government has been doing is
something that I looked into with another colleague - Frederic Jacobs - in 2015 and
basically at that time we were noticing that the Iranian government was making
these really grand statements. That's the Ministry of ICT about how they had
sophisticated means to censor individual pages on different social media. And
basically this has been a old policy that they've wanted to do, so sites like
Facebook and Twitter were censored after the protest movement in 2009. Actually in
the lead-up to the protest movement they were censored. And so for a long time
various members of the government have said they want to unblock these platforms
and find the means to just censor individual pages, or problematic content
and leave these websites open. However, that's really
hard to do, unless the government has a relationship with these companies. If they
have a relationship with Facebook or Twitter. And so back in 2015, they made a
grand announcement that they had finally nailed it, and they were doing this on
Instagram. And Instagram is one of the more popular social media platforms and so
what we noticed was that the censorship - intelligence censorship, which is just
individual pages or individual pictures or accounts being censored - it was only
being done on the mobile app, and the reason was that Instagram hadn't yet
rolled out HTTPS on the mobile application. It had enabled it on the the
browser version of the website, and so the running governments great, grand unveiling
of intelligent censorship was in reality just Instagram not doing this.
And so we found what kind of content they were targeting, which was really
interesting, kind of cultural research in terms of how censorship was working.
And then my colleague got in touch with Instagram, and they soon rolled out the
HTTPS on the mobile app and then intelligent censorship came unraveling as
the motherboard writer Lorenzo "Iran smart Instagram censorship isn't that smart."
And so that's just one example of these grand policies that actually don't really
add up to very much in terms of intelligent filtering. The researcher
Colin Anderson recently found this database of Europe URLs that different
ISPs were giving to this company called Sahab Pardaz. I can't talk too much about
this, but this was kind of a public notice he put out to ask anyone interested in
this data set, to see if this is actually another phase of intelligent filtering.
However, the minister of ICT did respond to this and said that they are not
actually compromising users' data, and he condemned the work of this company Sahab
Pardaz, which doesn't quite add up, which I guess helps illustrate how confusing
Internet policy is in Iran, like what are they actually doing, what are they
actually saying, how does it align with the laws, and those kinds of regulations.
In 2016... through the budget, it was announced that Iran was spending about 66
million on the intelligent filtering project, however it's really unclear what
that adds up to, like what are the deliverables on this work that they're
doing? So again, it's kind of like this chaotic quagmire of what's actually
happening or not in terms of their ability to silence
different voices in Iran. They have been kind of targeting different users in
different ways in 2015, 2016 the Garrideb spider program was rounding up series of
models and people in the fashion industry in Iran that are quite prominently present
on Instagram, and while some of the statements coming from Garrideb was saying
that they had technical hacking abilities, what they were actually doing
was arresting these models and forcing passwords and getting their accounts that
way, but during that time I actually got an Instagram request from one of these
seized accounts, Nikahang Clothing, which you can see over there, and you can see
that Garrideb had taken it over, because there's a notice that's saying because of
such-and-such law this account has been seized under the spider program, and so
that was happening for a while under this. Again, more actual physical takeover than
technical sophistication of that kind of work. Another thing that's quite
concerning, that the campaign for human rights actually was the first to report
on, was the Supreme Council of cyberspace requiring all telegram accounts to
register with the government, and so Telegram is hugely popular inside of Iran,
it's almost ubiquitous, and it's often used as a social media application,
and so the public channels are run by administrators, and if you have more than
5,000 followers, they basically needed you to register and get approval, and by
registering they would add a bot to the account, and the bot could basically get
information of the administrators and the followers, which was quite dangerous
because last May, when in the lead-up to the presidential elections there was a
roundup of Telegram administrators that a lot of digital activists believe was
through this registration program of having all of this personal data. Excuse
me. In terms of the national internet project, it's quite a contentious project
in that a lot of people say that on one extreme it goes towards being like North
Korea's intranet, kind of closed off from the rest of the world. I... through
my own work I don't think this is what the Iranian government wants to do. They
do want to localize certain things like banking and different forms of
infrastructure against cyberattacks like Stuxnet, but in general what they want to
do is keep data inside of the country, so they can have access and control in...
part of this project has been to create imitation versions
of foreign companies, so like I said they couldn't force Facebook or
Twitter to censor things for them, because they don't have a relationship, but if
they have local versions they can effectively do this, and so and they've
come up with alternatives for things like Instagram, with Lenzor, which you can see
has a very oddly similar user interface, but oftentimes users inside of Iran don't
trust these imitation apps, so usage amongst for like Instagram it's always
much higher than it is for the local alternatives. One researcher
a few years ago saw that the way that a Telegram imitation app was implemented
kind of traced how the data was going back to the government, so there's generally a
sense of distrust for this kind of work. Throughout the year, since 2016 this
attempt to localize user content has really increased. They put a ultimatum on
platforms that have not been censored yet, like Telegram and Instagram, that they had
a year to bring their servers inside of the country, or else it would be censored.
This obviously didn't work, so in 2017, this past year, they've been doing
different things that kind of have basically added up to net discrimination,
like they've been going against net neutrality values by offering incentives
for people to use local traffic, access local traffic, local platforms and
websites over international ones, and they've been giving million-dollar
incentives to developers to create apps, and for example if they got a million
users, they would get a million American dollars for developing such a platform.
Recently, we just translated and analyzed a new policy that's forming into a law by
the Supreme Council of cyberspace policy, an action on organizing social media
messaging applications, and this is just a set of rules for local apps and foreign
apps that need to follow in order to operate inside
of Iran. This is supposed to be a gif, but that didn't work. So, another point
that's kind of come up over... especially over the past year, is how controls don't
only come from the Iranian government, but they
also come from abroad. So companies like Apple and Google, in order to comply and
sometimes over-comply with US sanctions, they've been denying certain services to
Iranians. So what has been happening... it has been... Iranian app developers have
been seeing their apps being rejected from the Google Play Store, and the Apple...
the App Store. Mainly because they were providing financial transactions over it,
and even things that weren't directly doing financial payments were getting
blocked, such as one particular app, which is kind of the Uber of Iran, called Snap,
they were told to remove financial payments over the app or else they would
be getting removed from the App Store. Once they did remove that, it seemed that
they knew that there was some sort of financial transaction occurring offline
and they still removed that app from the App Store, just to
comply with sanctions. There's also a kind of threat to other companies, as the
nuclear negotiations went through back in 2015, there's a lot of foreign companies
going in. There's been a huge influx of the telecom sector, like Vodafone and
Orange, and different companies like that going to Iran, and there's kind of a fear
that social media giants like Twitter and Facebook might find incentive to also
go, so it's always good to keep pressure to... for them to the remain transparent
about their dealings with Iran. The new minister of ICT recently said that he had
started negotiations with Twitter to unfilter Twitter in Iran, however Twitter
has refused to officially reply, or say anything. So the thing that I spend most
of my time working on in terms of social media discourse is Telegram, because
Telegram is kind of an exciting new territory in understanding social media,
especially in Iran, because internet penetration and Telegram usage are
almost on par, so there's about 40 to 45 million Internet users inside of Iran, and
according to the company Telegram, there's about 25 million daily users and about
40 million monthly users. So what this means for how
people communicate, how people are accessing information in Iran, is huge,
because oftentimes everything from shopping to staying in touch with friends
to getting updates on the weather and traffic and news, it comes from Telegram
and the public channels. So understanding this, and how the government is responding
to such an important application for communication, is also really important
and as always it's become sort of a target for vulnerable at-risk users, for example
a number of journalists a few years ago were having their accounts seized through
SMS brute-force entry, I mean through SMS logins, they were
able to get in, and so there's those kinds of concerns. Telegram has been kind of
reactive to these security flaws. When the journalist had their accounts taken over
through the SMS hacks, they did help reinstate them. A few weeks ago there was
a flaw in a notification that users got in Iran on Telegram, that hackers were able
to sort of take over - you can see in that picture over there - and Telegram kind of
reacted really fast and fixed the flaw. But the issue that a lot of digital rights
activists on Iran find is that Telegram is so important, and it's so crucial to how a
lot of things operate inside of Iran, yet they're not really trying to prevent
anything, they're being much more reactive. There's also been concerns about
how they interact with the Iranian government as well, and... however,
Telegram has kind of always made a... taking a stand to say that they are not
cooperating with the Iranian government and... but they do say large things,
boastful things, that they stand for freedom of speech, yet they have failed to
really reach out to civil society and human rights activists for Iran and so
there's a general kind of plea towards this platform that's so important, for
them to be a bit more cooperative and prioritize these human rights concerns in
Iran a little bit more. I was going to slightly get into more security
aspects of things, but I'll quickly go over it. Obviously, there's security concerns
with Telegram. It takes up some of the work that I do at article 19, working with
civil society and protecting them in that way, so I'll just quickly go over it
because I wanted to end on a particular note. This is like a very... a standard
thing I'd like to say is you don't necessarily apply the same security
concerns to Iran that you would here, so just these grand statements of
"use Signal, use TOR" often don't work. Telegram is hugely popular, so I often say
"why don't we work on making Telegram safer," because users are not going to
migrate away from it unless Signal comes and creates a whole infrastructure
and platform that's going to cater to those specific needs of being both social
media and having the different usability features. That's really the last point
I wanted to take away with. But I also just wanted to have one kind of message, which is
I am super privileged to be standing here and talking about this topic that
I am really passionate about and I am really grateful that I've had this opportunity,
since over the years to work on these kind of digital rights concerns on Iran, and
I've had certain personal hurdles in terms of, without cutting into the nitty-gritty
of my personal life and the things I've had to go through, but there's been this
general kind of mood in the past year, with the #MeToo movement and all these
different stories of harassment and basically I've been really grateful to all
the people who have supported me over the years to make sure that the hurdles I've
had to encounter for the specific kind of unfortunate personal events that took
place, that have affected my career... To really help support me and when I was
coming to Leipzig I was super proud to be coming to the Chaos
Computer Club's events and the stories I've been hearing about people who have
been victims of harassment have really upset me and I think it would be...
I would be remiss to not make a point of saying that I'm a little bit
disappointed, that I've been reading these things, and
*Applause*
And while I really appreciate all of you
and all the help you give me to set up my talk and I appreciate
that I've been given this platform, but I really hope we can do better, because this
is just not cool. It's not cool for people to not feel safe and I know how it feels
personally and I hope Dina - I haven't seen her yet, I have chatted with her
briefly, I hope she's having a great time at this Congress, because... and I'm
really sorry to hear that some of... some people that I think are doing great work
and should be in the space are not here this year, and I just hope we can do
better in 2018. And that's about it. Thank you.
*Applause*
Herald: Thanks for your talk. Mahsa
Alimardani, and for your patience with our technical problems. Thank you very much.
Please line up at the microphones. There are four microphones here in the room.
Please line up there. We have a couple more
minutes for Q&A. You wanna hold a Q&A? Yes?
MA: Sure.
H: But first, maybe there are the signal
angels in the back. Is he waving or not, are there any questions from the internet?
Signal angel: No, nothing. H: Okay, thank you. There is someone
standing at microphone 3. What's your question?
Microphone 3: Hi. Thanks for your last statement, really. Thanks a lot. My
question would be about Instagram and Telegram. I don't know if I missed that
part, but does it mean that then the Iranian government has relationships with
them? Because you mentioned that they help. I mean, they show these things, so
you've been blocked and this is because of this. So why this happens? And why is it
only these two particular platforms? I understood that Twitter and Facebook don't
cooperate. If you could say more about that, thanks.
MA: yeah, that's a really great question, and something that's been really
interesting. So, I think, I mentioned that this new government the moderate Rouhani
administration has kind of, at least in terms of how its positioned the words it
says, has been a bit more open to internet freedoms and things like that. And so I think
one of the achievements of that government is stopping the censorship of Instagram
and Telegram. Because there's lots of hardline elements
in the establishment that have wanted this to get censored. And it's kind of like
come to deliberation to censor it over the years. There have been some rumors that
Telegram has been working with... with the Iranian government. Although, I think that
might be rumors, because the Ministry of ICT every so often says that they have a
direct relationship and then Telegram comes and refutes it. So, yeah, that's up
in the realm of rumours, however. But I think it's mainly the work of this
moderate administration that's been able to prevent the censorship. If that answers
your question. M3: So they are in connection
with Instagram? MA: No, there are as far as I know they're
not working with Instagram. Instagram is owned by Facebook, so Facebook is
censored. But, I mean there could be many different reasons but these are all
conjecture. Instagram is just kind of more for entertainment, so they have less of a
reason to block it, but also the work of this moderate administration to kind of
keep Instagram going. Although, for a short while during the elections they were
blocking Instagram live, because it was being used for like protests and
gatherings and things like that. H: Microphone number 1 please.
Microphone 1: Mahsa I just wanted to thank you for you for your talk, and also
appearing persevering through all the adversity. Not only of nation state
actors but of also people inside the community that might.
H: Come a little bit closer to the microphone please.
M3: Sure. I just wanted to say thank you for persevering through all the
adversity that has come your way, and for being here today to give this talk. It's
important and vital and your voice is valued. The question about Iran in a
geopolitical landscape as its exerting itself more in Yemen, Lebanon, perhaps
other places. Do you see that the technology that's being pioneered by the
state apparatuses, the state bodies inside of, inside of Tehran and Iran, will have a
trickle-down effect into other countries, that may replicate the oppressive
structures in which that Iran has placed? Do you see it being a model, as Iran
geopolitically exerts this muscle? Well, do you see that some of these the
technical sophistication and other things will be picked up by other actors in the
region? A: Yeah, that's a good question. I think
Iran would like to have the technical sophistication that would be replicated
elsewhere. And I guess in some ways the capabilities are some that you're on cyber
Iran cyber army which is kind of very hard to associate directly with the government,
because sometimes the affiliations are very loose. They have certain
capabilities, but in terms of the technology, I think, for censorship and
surveillance, I think Iran more models itself on the technology coming out of
China and Russia. Because they have had more effective and more sophisticated
platforms and means of doing it. So, I think it's a little bit the other way
around. H: Microphone number 1 please.
Microphone 1: Thank you for your talk. You, if I'm not wrong, you mentioned some
government supporters being arrested. Is this correct? Do you see any kind of clash
between the Revolutionary Guard or the religious power and the government?
MA: Yeah, absolutely. I mean after the nuclear negotiations the foreign minister
Javad Zarif, who is like kind a little bit westernized, he speaks perfect
English. And he had, he has a huge fan base in Iran because he established the
nuclear deal. He had like almost physical confrontations in Parliament with the
hardline elements. So, yeah there definitely is that, and the reason why
some of the Telegram administrators, who are actually supporters of Rouhani, were
arrested is because of this kind of clash between hardline elements like the
Revolutionary Guards and the more moderate administration. So, there is this kind of,
yeah, differentiation and nuance that happens.
H: I guess we're moving to the last question at microphone number 3 please.
M3: Oh hey. I just want to ask a question.
What can we... First of all thank you for your great talk, it was very
well researched and great information and for your very brave proclamation. What can
we in the room do, other than fund your work? Can we put pressure on the companies
that, you know, work inside of Iran? Can we put pressure on the governments of the
nations we're citizens in? What's the next step for people who are listening and want
to do something? Thank you. MA: Yeah, I mean especially if you're not
American, I think, *laughs*, Iranian government would be more open to hearing
kind of the non-western perspective. But I think the reason why I think it's so
important to be here in Europe, is because Europe is actively engaging in dialogue
with Iran. So, if there's way to put pressure through the different companies
that are going into Iran, like I mentioned there's you know the British Vodafone and
like Frances Orange that are going in. If they can make certain demands for, you
know, human rights standards and things like that. That would be, that would also
be really great. I mean campaigning and putting pressure different ways through
social media is always helpful. The main thing that I think we could perhaps have
effect on is, hopefully a company like Telegram is listening and they can make
the security and privacy of Iranians one of them one of their bigger priorities. So
that's really the place that I think can have the most change, because we can have
more, we can have easier dialogue with like Facebook, Telegram and all these
different platforms to ensure that privacy and security is upheld.
H: Mahsa Alimardani, thank you very much for the talk. And please give her a warm
round of applause.
*Applause*
*Music*