The Intercept has obtained a cache of hacked documents from an Iranian cellular carrier that reveal exactly how Iran’s government can track and control protesters’ mobile phone and internet access.
Understanding how the authorities can monitor and manipulate phones could be a life-and-death matter in Iran, with hundreds killed and thousands more arrested in the last six weeks of anti-government protests.
But this hack includes hundreds of thousands of emails and documents, and our team is racing to uncover more secrets of repression that could be within — including whether Western companies aided Iran’s surveillance and internet crackdowns.
Reporting on this kind of document trove is a special expertise of The Intercept, but it’s also expensive and time-consuming, requiring specialized technology, skilled translators, and top data experts.
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Documents obtained by The Intercept show that Iranians’ fears of smartphone surveillance are well-founded. Software provided to the government by mobile carriers includes a broad menu of remote commands to alter, disrupt, and monitor how customers use their phones.
The tools can slow their data connections to a crawl, break the encryption of phone calls, track the movements of individuals or large groups, and produce detailed metadata summaries of who spoke to whom, when, and where.
Our reporting is already spreading widely among Persian speakers online, but there’s still more we need to uncover. How does the government use these tools in practice? What access do they have to the content of texts and calls? Who built this system, and did foreign companies help them do it?
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