Interesting article about how Iran is using deep packet inspection and the kind of gear they are using. The center is located within the government controlled telecom business. Can we blame the companies that sold them the gear?
The sale of the equipment to Iran by the joint venture, called Nokia Siemens Networks, was previously reported last year by the editor of an Austrian information-technology Web site called Futurezone.
The Iranian government had experimented with the equipment for brief periods in recent months, but it had not been used extensively, and therefore its capabilities weren’t fully displayed — until during the recent unrest, the Internet experts interviewed said.
“We didn’t know they could do this much,” said a network engineer in Tehran. “Now we know they have powerful things that allow them to do very complex tracking on the network.”
DPI is much easier when telecom is centralized and smaller in scale:
In Iran’s case, this is done for the entire country at a single choke point, according to networking engineers familiar with the country’s system.
Users in the country report the Internet having slowed to less than a tenth of normal speeds. Deep-packet inspection delays the transmission of online data unless it is offset by a huge increase in processing power, according to Internet experts.
Iran is “now drilling into what the population is trying to say,” said Bradley Anstis, director of technical strategy with Marshal8e6 Inc.,
via Iran’s Web Spying Aided By Western Technology – WSJ.com.
