A Deeper Look at Iranian Filtering
A researcher finds telltale signs that the Iranian government has become more efficient at filtering.
Looking into Iran’s portion
of the Internet is not an easy task.
But the network security
firm Arbor Networks recently released traffic data for both internal and
external-facing Internet service providers in the country. This data shows that
the country continues to filter Internet traffic and that its ISPs can filter larger
quantities of data than before.
Arbor Networks uses data gathered
from distributed network sensors to monitor the data going to Iran from the
global Internet.
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In a post on Sunday, the firm showed that the overall trend for the
first three weeks of July was an increasing amount of traffic headed into Iran.
The country has a single national provider that handles Internet traffic, but a
handful of internal providers. The picture painted by the data is of an ISP
that is becoming increasingly skilled in filtering, says Craig Labovitz, chief
scientist for Arbor Networks.
“It was speculated
early on that they lacked capacity,” Labovitz says. “It wasn’t that
traffic was being filtered, it was that it was being dropped because they
lacked capacity. Now, it looks like they are navigating 5 gig of traffic again,
and I don’t think they have turned off filtering.”
In a second post on Tuesday, Labovitz showed some interesting
patterns in the traffic heading to six of the country’s internal network
providers. All of the providers showed an enormous drop in traffic following
the contested June 12 election, then nearly normal traffic patterns until June
26, then five of the six ISPs showed an 80 percent drop in traffic for
approximately three weeks. The one internal ISP that
continues to see significant traffic during those three weeks counts many
government ministries among its clientele.
Because Iran does not have
many connections with global businesses, and very little consumer penetration
of the Internet, the populace will likely not complain about the filtering as
much as, say, China, where expectations of the Internet are much higher, Labovitz
says.
“China’s filtering is
a much more substantial effort involving business partners and business
development relationships involving partners,” he says. “It is a much
broader business ecosystem that China has evolved over time.”
