The Guardian:

Aisha Down

Iran’s architecture of internet control is built on technologies from China, according to an analysis published by a British human rights organisation.

The report by Article 19 says the technologies include facial recognition tools used on Uyghurs in western China and a Chinese alternative to the US-based GPS system, BeiDou.

The report outlines the policies and imported hardware behind the growth of Iran’s fine-tuned censorship regime, which allowed authorities to almost entirely cut off its 93 million people from the global internet during the height of January’s anti-government protests.

The internet blackout has helped to obscure grave human rights violations, including mass killings. The death toll from the protests is still being reckoned.

Iran’s internet is still not back to where it was. Rather, a patchy censorship regime appears to be allowing users sporadic access. The capabilities that underpin this blackout are the culmination of a decades-long project, one that involved the collaboration of Chinese authorities.

Iran and China’s infrastructure contracts have been guided by a shared vision of “cyber sovereignty” – the idea that a state should have absolute control over the internet within its borders, says the report.

“A really significant turning point in the evolution of digital authoritarianism in China and Iran was 2010, when both countries started to make more significant steps towards a national internet,” said Michael Caster, the report’s author.

According to the report, Chinese companies have supplied Iran with several key categories of surveillance technologies including internet-filtering equipment from telecoms companies such as Huawei and ZTE and surveillance technologies from camera-makers Hikvision and Tiandy.

Researchers at the Outline Foundation and Project Ainita said there was a third category of equipment, manufactured by smaller providers in China. These tools are largely unknown and have “alarming” capabilities – meaning that it is difficult for researchers to know exactly how Iranian authorities can surveil users.

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