As furious anti-government protests swept Iran, the authorities retaliated with both brute force and digital repression. Iranian mobile and internet users reported rolling network blackouts, mobile app restrictions, and other disruptions. Many expressed fears that the government can track their activities through their indispensable and ubiquitous smartphones.
Iran’s tight grip on the country’s connection to the global internet has proven an effective tool for suppressing unrest. The lack of clarity about what technological powers are held by the Iranian government — one of the most opaque and isolated in the world — has engendered its own form of quiet terror for prospective dissidents. Protesters 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.
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.”
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Based on the manuals, SIAM offers an effortless way to throttle a phone’s data speeds, one of roughly 40 features included in the program. This ability to downgrade users’ speed and network quality is particularly pernicious because it can not only obstruct one’s ability to use their phone, but also make whatever communication is still possible vulnerable to interception.
Referred to within SIAM as “Force2GNumber,” the command allows a cellular carrier to kick a given phone off substantially faster, more secure 3G and 4G networks and onto an obsolete and extremely vulnerable 2G connection. Such a network downgrade would simultaneously render a modern smartphone largely useless and open its calls and texts to interception
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downgrading users to a 2G connection could also expose perilously sensitive two-factor authentication codes delivered to users through SMS.
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SIAM also provides a range of tools to track the physical locations of cell users, allowing authorities to both follow an individual’s movements and identify everyone present at a given spot. Using the “LocationCustomerList” command allows SIAM operators to see what phone numbers have connected to specified cell towers along with their corresponding IMEI number, a unique string of numbers assigned to every mobile phone in the world. “For example,” Miller said, “if there is a location where a protest is occurring, SIAM can provide all of the phone numbers currently at that location.”
SIAM’s tracking of unique device identifiers means that swapping SIM cards, a common privacy-preserving tactic, may be ineffective in Iran since IMEI numbers persist even with a new SIM
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user data accessible through SIAM includes the customer’s father’s name, birth certificate number, nationality, address, employer, billing information, and location history, including a record of Wi-Fi networks and IP addresses from which the user has connected to the internet.
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SIAM allows its operators to learn a great deal not just about where a customer has been, but also what they’ve been up to, a bounty of personal data that, Miller said, “can enable CRA to create a social network/profile of the user based on his/her communication with other people.”
By entering a particular phone number and the command “GetCDR” into SIAM, a system user can generate a comprehensive Call Detail Record, including the date, time, duration, location, and recipients of a customer’s phone calls during a given time period. A similar rundown can be conducted for internet usage as well using the “GetIPDR” command, which prompts SIAM to list the websites and other IP addresses a customer has connected to, the time and date these connections took place, the customer’s location, and potentially the apps they opened. Such a detailed record of internet usage could also reveal users running virtual private networks, which are used to cover a person’s internet trail by routing their traffic through an encrypted connection to an outside server. VPNs — including some banned by the government — have become tremendously popular in Iran as a means of evading domestic web censorship.
Though significantly less subtle than being forced onto a 2G network, SIAM can also be used to entirely pull the plug on a customer’s device at will. Through the “ApplySuspIp” command, the system can entirely disconnect any mobile phone on the network from the internet for predetermined lengths of time or permanently. Similar commands would let SIAM block a user from placing or receiving calls.
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Source: Iran’s Secret Manual for Controlling Protesters’ Mobile Phones
Robin Edgar
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