Filterwatch, an organization that campaigns for digital freedoms in the Middle East, has published a report about IMSI-catchers being used to instruct women in the Iranian city of Isfahan to wear a hijab in public.
One woman who received such a threatening SMS told Filterwatch that minutes before receiving the message, she was on a WhatsApp call that was suddenly cut off and she lost access to the internet–although she regained it shortly after receiving the message.
Another person who was uploading a photo on Instagram in the Naqsh-e Jahan Square (also known as the Imam Square) area told Filterwatch that they experienced a brief disruption, which ended after receiving a message from the “Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” headquarters.
The article is undated but was published to the web on April 17. The claim that SMS messages are sent to warn women to cover themselves is consistent with an April 8 article by Jamaran News about a draft law to force Iranian women to wear a hijab in public. The article refers to a pilot project that sends warnings by SMS to inhabitants of Isfahan. The following excerpt was translated from the original Farsi.
Amir Hossein Bankipour, a member of the Islamic Consultative Assembly’s Cultural Commission, said about sending text messages to Isfahan citizens: “It started a long time ago and its effects have been seen, and approximately 80 to 90 percent of those to whom the text messages were sent complied. This is a very good way that does not create social tension.”
The Filterwatch report presents examples of SMS messages that people say they have received. For example, a man was warned about “one of the women assigned” to him. A woman received a message telling her to “please take action to comply with the law and correct your cover”. The messages sign-off by stating they are from the headquarters of Isfahan’s Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.
Filterwatch theorizes that IMSI-catchers are also being used for surveillance. However, that does not make much sense given Iranian authorities already have surveillance interfaces to the country’s mobile network operators. There seems little benefit in spying on the phones of women who do not wear hijabs using sophisticated man-in-the-middle attacks when the state already has unlimited access to everything that crosses phone networks, unless the Isfahan committee is working outside of the bounds of law. There are also problems with other claims made in the article. For example, it refers to 95,000 hijab warnings being issued in Isfahan but does not clarify that the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice says this is the number of warnings they have given in person, not by text message. Nevertheless, the eyewitness reports about SMS warnings appear genuine and are consistent with what we know about the way SMS blasters function in practice.
The interruption of internet service during the sending of warning SMS messages implies the mobile phone’s connection was downgraded to 2G before the messages were sent. Filterwatch refers to phones being downgraded to 2G in their report but they misunderstand why such a downgrade affects security. There would be no reason to downgrade a phone connection to 2G just to send a conventional SMS message to a phone number that is already known. It is likely that religious enforcers in the vicinity, who will sometimes but not always know the names of the people they target, are using basic short-range SMS broadcasting techniques to warn women who they see with uncovered heads, without drawing attention to their own presence nearby.
Commsrisk typically reports about scammers carrying high-powered SMS blasters in cars, but a low-powered hand-held SMS blaster, which might have a range of around 10 meters, would be better suited to a task like this. The use of SMS blasters to send a message to somebody physically nearby is consistent with both the interruption to the phone’s usual network service and the method only being implemented in one city by a specific faction within that city, without anyone replicating it elsewhere in Iran. An interview by Asr-e Iran of Mohsen Mazaheri, Secretary of the Isfahan Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice asked why tourists in Isfahan had also received these messages. He implausibly claimed that their details must have been registered with one of a vague list of entities that provides services in Isfahan. His answers then became evasive when told that some of these tourists had not registered their presence in the city.
Fear will prompt people to imagine surveillance is more sophisticated than it really is. Scammers also use fear to manipulate victims into acting on their emotions rather than thinking rationally. The recipients of ominous messages like these may jump to conclusions instead of noticing how a message uses non-specific language. For example, if a man is told to take responsibility for “one of the women assigned” to him then why he is not told her name or given other details to identify the woman? Bullies use methods like these to intimidate. If these fanatics could confidently identify and punish individuals who had broken the law then they would not make such vague threats. The claim is that the method is effective at avoiding ‘social tension’ but the goal is psychological manipulation. Ordinary people are terrorized without being able to precisely determine who their accusers are.
You can read the Filterwatch report here.
