Iran’s revolution isn’t just being televised: it’s being deepfaked, wiretapped and surveilled by big tech. A year after the Woman, Life, Freedom protests convulsed the country, what does the future of dissent look like in Iran?
This story is taken from the autumn 2023 issue of Dazed. Pre-order a copy here.
It’s an irony of protest movements in Iran’s modern history that technology is both a medium for protesters to coordinate their resistance and a mainstay of dictators’ technocratic counter-response. Even before the advent of the Islamic Republic, it was through cassette tapes that future Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini, while he was in exile in Iraq and France, sowed the seeds of the revolution that brought him to power in 1979. 30 years later, the Islamic regime found themselves on the receiving end of a technology-driven movement, faced with what became known as the world’s first ‘Twitter revolution’ in the wake of the disputed election that delivered religious hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term as president, and culminated in the protests that became known as the Green movement.
But in the Woman, Life, Freedom protests, whose one-year anniversary is in September, technology has played a much more instrumental role by rendering a figurehead redundant. While the Green Movement gathered around reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi – whom protesters argued had been robbed of the presidency – Woman, Life, Freedom had no organised leadership, meaning that the protests couldn’t be quashed simply by targeting their leader.
Scholars such as Steven Feldstein, writing on digital repression, have attributed this to a broader shift in our communications from broadcast networks (information disseminated from a central node to multiple receivers, such as radio) and peer-to-peer communication (such as the telephone) to hybrid modalities like social media, that connect disparate networks of actors. In the Woman, Life, Freedom protests, crowds gathered in response to local farakhans, or callouts, from Twitter, Instagram and Telegram users, making it harder for security forces to find the bulk of protesters, or to work out how to divide forces between numerous protests happening concurrently.
The protest movement emerged organically, as tensions that bubbled below the surface for years spilled over on September 16, 2022, when 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in Kasra hospital, Tehran. She had been arrested by the morality police (gasht-e ershad, literally the ‘guidance patrol’), two days earlier for an ‘improperly’ worn hijab and, according to women also detained in the van with her, severely beaten by the regime’s officers. Within hours of Amini’s death, protesters gathered in her hometown of Saqqez in the Kurdish region of Iran and in front of Kasra hospital in the capital, chanting the Kurdish women’s movement slogan “woman, life, freedom”. By dawn, the protests had spread across the country. In the ten days that followed, the Persian hashtag ‘Mahsa Amini’ was tweeted more than 100 million times, which some media outlets reported was an all-time global record for any hashtag on Twitter. Reflecting the multifaceted roots of the protests, singer Shervin Hajipour drew on tweets where ordinary Iranians expressed what they were protesting for in the song “Baraye” (“For...”), which he released on Instagram 12 days after Mahsa Amini died. It was viewed more than 40 million times in less than 48 hours, before Hajipour was arrested and forced to remove the song from his page.
The Iranian regime responded with disinformation. State spokespersons released a video of Amini collapsing in the police station, arguing her death was related to a neurological condition. However, in a live interview with BBC Persian, her father debunked these claims. He began to explain that the video was a deepfake, and that his daughter had been in perfect health before she had been arrested; then, a click could be heard, and the line cut. The producers tried to reach him again, as interviewer Rana Rahimpour filled time. Once they got hold of him, she asked quickly, perhaps sensing that time was not on her side, “What do you think the truth is?” “The truth is,” he began – and the line abruptly cut off. The same cycle of denial repeated ad nauseam.
A week after Amini was killed, 16-year-old YouTuber Sarina Esmailzadeh was beaten to death by officers at a demonstration in Karaj. Protesters began to leave comments on one of Esmailzadeh’s blogs in which she described the hopes and dreams of young girls, writing, “Dear Sarina, you have made your dreams come true – we are freeing Iran for you” and “We’re making this land for those who have gone and of whom only a video is left.” The regime also turned to social media, releasing a video – whose veracity is now disputed – of Esmailzadeh’s mother saying that her daughter had previously tried to take her own life and that she had jumped off a building. Amnesty International later verified that she had died after being “severely beaten in the head with batons”.
Two months after Amini was killed, 15,000 people had been detained for protesting. After 227 of Iran’s parliamentarians signed a statement lobbying for the protesters to be seen as engaging in moharebeh (‘waging war against God’), which carries the death penalty in Iran, the threat of mass executions into the thousands loomed, though, thankfully, did not materialise. The turn of the year even seemed to suggest that concessions from the regime may be possible: In December 2022, Iran’s then-serving attorney general, Mohammad Jafar Montazeri, announced that the morality police had been disbanded. But, as many activists predicted at the time, such concessions were only aimed at the regime’s self-preservation and therefore proved short-lived. In 2022, 582 people were executed in Iran, representing a 75 per cent rise on 2021. As the Woman, Life, Freedom movement ceased to be a major news story in the international media, the regime announced that the morality police would resume patrols in July 2023, this time with body cameras, and that speed cameras would be adjusted to identify women wearing improper hijab.
“Dear Sarina, you have made your dreams come true – we are freeing Iran for you. We’re making this land for those who have gone and of whom only a video is left” – A tribute to Sarina Esmailzadeh
The regime has followed through with its threats. Announcements earlier this year revealed that more than a million women have received text messages threatening the confiscation of their vehicles if they travel unveiled, and that thousands of vehicles have already been confiscated. But many Iranians seem non-plussed. “Technology has always been oppressive,” one protester tells me, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of regime surveillance. “Wiretapping, censorship – we’ve seen it all.” Indeed, Iranian traffic officials had already announced the use of facial recognition in 2020 to send women warnings by text message about the wearing of hijab while in a vehicle, and the head of Iran’s parliamentary legal and judicial committee spoke about “exclusion from social services and financial fines” for improper hijab before the protests last year, in language that aped the Chinese ‘social credit’ system of surveillance.
Whatever the regime's aspirations, the use of surveillance technology in Iran today is still limited. Where protesters had seen this technology being mobilised, it had been in low-tech formats. “Most of the tech I’m seeing right now is phones in the hands of officers or undercover agents who walk around recording with their phones to capture material for facial recognition,” one protester says. “The regime released some promotional videos of this technology which tried to argue it was high-tech, but we haven’t seen any of that on the streets.” Another demonstrator felt that the regime was simply too incompetent to use such technology effectively: “Even if the regime has the tech, they’re too incompetent to do much with it. The most technocratic bunch are reformists and centrists, and they’re out of the government now that the hardliners have taken over.” Protesters I spoke to attributed the regime’s announcements of its surveillance technology to its fears that it would lose the support of its base, who had grown frustrated with its failure to brutally and swiftly crush the protests as they first erupted a year ago.
What protesters remained most fearful of was the renewed presence of the morality police combined with the mass mobilisation of the paramilitary volunteer militia (called basij, literally the ‘mobilisation’). As scholar Saeid Golkar has argued, such forces exist to “protect the regime from society”, and therefore act as its eyes and ears. During the Green movement, basiji militia would report on which homes protest slogans were being shouted from, using their localised bases in each neighbourhood to monitor their neighbours’ conduct. In this context, the camera, for some protesters, is nothing more than a symbol of how women’s and protesters’ bodies are seen and captured through the gaze of the regime via its network of agents and bases. “Cameras are just an extension of how the basiji look at us on the street each day,” one protester says wearily.
The effect of the technology has also been to bring geopolitics onto the streets. The tech that forms the backbone of the regime’s surveillance is international in origin, drawing upon the growing use of AI from liberal democracies to autocracies worldwide. (This, is a well-established pattern of Iranian dictatorships: Savak, the intelligence agency of the Shah who was overthrown in the Islamic revolution of 1979, was established with support from the CIA and Israel’s Mossad.) A 2021 report by NBC identified Chinese company Tiandy as a major provider of network video recorders to the Iranian military. “You have to consider foreign politics with these protests, even if they’re an internal affair," one protester told me. “China is only going to increase its tech assistance to Iran, and a lot of that is surveillance-related.”
“Even if the regime has the tech, they’re too incompetent to do much with it. The most technocratic bunch are reformists and centrists, and they’re out of the government now that the hardliners have taken over” – Women, Life, Freedom Protestor
When asked about the future of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, protesters described themselves as torn between two exigencies: the exhortation of the international community to do something, and a sense that the Islamic regime cares little about international isolation. But when it comes to digital repression, protesters found an opportunity. Many of the companies offering surveillance technology to Iran either benefit from lucrative western contracts, or are located in the west. Tiandy has previously published details of a contract designing and installing cameras for Britain’s Heathrow airport (which the airport has denied). Worse yet, an investigation by The Intercept found that British, Canadian and Russian companies had assisted the Iranian regime in developing a system called Siam, which allows intelligence agents to access mobile phone data, slow down the internet on a phone and break the encryption of calls. “How can companies working directly to harm Iranians’ human rights be legal in the west?”, one protester asked. Still, there was cause for cautious optimism: Tiandy has now been blacklisted by the US, and with President Biden imposing robust new sanctions on Iran, there is ample room to blacklist others.
However, the potential profit to be made globally on surveillance was a major cause of concern for many protesters, with fears that it could impede decisive action from the international community. Furthermore, many of the people I spoke to warned that we should not discount the regime just yet. “Yes, the regime is incompetent but they’re learning: just look at our drones,” one protester said. “Ten years ago who would have thought they’d make, let alone sell, a semi-operational drone to Russia?” Though unlikely to impact the protest movement much more than the brutal crackdown and executions already have done, the regime’s nascent use of surveillance technology makes one thing clear: there are dark clouds on the horizon.
This story is taken from the autumn 2023 issue of Dazed. Pre-order a copy here.
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