Phone firms under attack for supplying ‘spy’ technology

The firms helped the Iranian regime develop one of the world's most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet.

The system allows internet users to be individually monitored and censored.

Known as deep packet inspection', it allows the government to monitor and even alter information online.

In recent weeks it has led to an electronic cat and mouse game between iranians trying to spread word of unrest in the country via twitter.

Today it was revealed the monitoring capability was provided by a joint venture of Siemens AG, the German conglomerate, and Nokia Corp., the Finnish cellphone company, in the second half of 2008. "If you sell networks, you also, intrinsically, sell the capability to intercept any communication that runs over them," said Ben Roome, a spokesman for the joint venture.

The "monitoring center," installed within the government's telecom monopoly, was part of a larger contract with Iran that included mobile-phone networking technology.

Iran's monitoring system works using equipment installed into the telecoms network. It analyses the flow of online data, from emails and Internet phone calls to images and messages on social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Every digitized packet of online data is deconstructed, examined for keywords and reconstructed within milliseconds. 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 due to the monitoring.

Experts say the system could also be used by the government to targe individuals using twitter and other sites.

"Iran's pervasive surveillance of their digital networks and the use of unencrypted connections by dissidents could be a recipe for reprisals later down the line," Danny O'Brien, the international outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"The fact that Iran runs all of its Web traffic through a single bank of computers, which is how they block Web sites, is also a perfect way to monitor for key words. If you are not using strong encryption, then all those communications could be stored by the government," he said.