Iran Is Aiming To Use Chinese Technology To Permanently Throttle Internet Access

Source Domain: www.rferl.org

A senior Iranian official has revealed that Tehran has imported advanced Chinese technology in a bid to permanently cut off access to the global Internet.

The revelation came amid an unprecedented Internet blackout in Iran, where the authorities imposed a shutdown after the start of the war with the United States and Israel on February 28.

Mohammad Sarafraz, a member of Iran’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace and former head of state broadcaster IRIB, told the online newspaper Faraz on May 23 that the Chinese hardware was already in the country.

The purpose of the technology, he said, was to lay the groundwork for the permanent throttling of the Internet while only allowing tightly monitored access for select users in the country of some 90 million people.

Now in its third month, Iran’s nationwide Internet blackout is the longest since Libya’s nearly six-month outage during the Arab Spring protests in 2011. But with Iran’s population around 15 times larger than Libya’s, the shutdown in the Islamic republic is the largest government-directed communications blackout in recorded history, experts say.

Internet monitoring watchdog NetBlocks has described the disruption in Iran as “unsurpassed in scale and severity in a connected society.”

The authorities have attempted to justify the Internet blackout by claiming that it prevents foreign cyberattacks, protects officials from assassination during wartime, and preserves public morale.

But Sarafraz rejected the government’s main justifications. He argued that some of the most severe cyberattacks on the country have occurred during Internet shutdowns. The official also said the Internet had failed to prevent the assassinations of scores of officials by the United States and Israel during the current conflict.

Sarafraz rejected that the Internet shutdown was safeguarding public morale. Prolonged digital isolation — compounded by unequal access policies such as “white Internet” access for regime-connected…

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