That’s because it requires replicating global infrastructure with domestic resources while pruning global web access. “This is really hard to do,” says Kian Vesteinsson, a senior analyst for the global democracy nonprofit Freedom House. The seeds of today’s digital repression trace back to 2006, when Iran announced plans to craft its own intranet-an exclusive, national network designed to keep Iranians off the World Wide Web. “The reason for this action is the government’s fear, because there is no freedom of speech here.” “This is not the first time that the internet services have been disrupted in Iran,” Elmira says. Severely restricting internet access has been a way for the regime to further crush dissent. The crackdown has been especially brutal in largely Kurdish western Iran, where Amini was from and Elmira now lives. “The world realized that the matter of hijab, which I myself believe is a personal choice, could become an incident over which a young girl can lose her life,” Elmira says.Īccording to rights groups, over 300 people, including at least 41 children, have been killed since protests began. But it’s reached a crisis point over the past two months, during a growing swell of anti-government protests sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini on September 16 after Iran’s Guidance Patrol-more commonly known as the morality police-arrested her for wearing her hijab improperly. This isn’t, broadly speaking, a new phenomenon in the country. “They listen and control almost all communications in order to counter demonstrations,” says Elmira. The third, Amazon, directed MIT Technology Review to a 2019 blog post in which a product manager described steps the company has taken to minimize the “abusive use of domain fronting practices.” “A cat-and-mouse game”īy now, Iranian citizens largely expect that their digital communications and searches are being combed through by the powers of the state. Two of the three major service providers that previously allowed domain fronting, Google and Microsoft, could not be reached for comment. Still, no major companies have publicly said they will consider launching or restoring the anti-censorship tool. “We recognize the possibility that we might not come back home every time we go out,” says Elmira, an Iranian woman in her 30s who asked to be identified only by her first name for security reasons. “They need to be investing in helping with circumvention technology, and having stamped out domain fronting is really not a good look.”ĭomain fronting could be a critical tool to help protesters and activists stay in touch with each other for planning and safety purposes, and to allow them to update worried family and friends during a dangerous period. Now activists who work at the intersection of human rights and technology say reinstating the technique, with some tweaks, is a tool Big Tech could use to quickly get Iranians back online.ĭomain fronting “is a good place to start” if tech giants really want to help, Alimardani says. From 2016 to 2018, secure messaging apps like Telegram and Signal used the cloud hosting infrastructure of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft-which most of the web runs on-to disguise user traffic and successfully thwart bans and surveillance in Russia and across the Middle East.īut Google and Amazon discontinued the practice in 2018, following pushback from the Russian government and citing security concerns about how it could be abused by hackers. In the days of domain fronting, “cloud platforms were used for circumvention,” Alimardani explains.
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