Will Iran #KeepItOn? Remotely Observing Granular Internet Availability in Iran and Iraq
When it comes to state-backed Internet shut-downs, Iran and Iraq have got game, so we’re publishing insights from millions of observations.
Iran is gripped by another wave of protests. After three days of denial its government admitted shooting down the Ukrainian passenger plane UIA 752, killing all 176 passengers and crew.
The missile that brought down the plane on the 8th of January was launched hours after Iran fired more than a dozen missiles at two Iraqi military bases hosting US troops. An act of retaliation for the US killing of Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani in Iraq in December 2019.
The assassination ignited protests across Iran, however, now the crowds are tearing up pro-Soleimani posters and demanding the resignation of senior leaders.
Shutdowns: a sadly common occurrence in Iran
Protests, like other significant political events, are often a spur for internet shutdowns — a common tool for governments to restrict access to information, dialogue, limit the spread of information and depress online organizing.
Only last November Iran experienced civil unrest over the fuel price hikes. The authorities responded with a weeklong internet shutdown. It is considered to be the longest most widespread blackout, effectively leaving the entire country offline.
The region has a long history of government-led internet shutdowns. Blackouts were reported during the protests in December 2017 and January 2018, Twitter and Telegram are permanently blocked in Iran by court order.
A regional tool of suppression
In 2014, Iraq’s Ministry of Communications asked internet service providers to “shut down the internet totally” in five of the nation’s 19 provinces and block access to VPN and social networks including Facebook and Twitter in the rest. Aljazeera recently published a series of articles, investigating how middle eastern governments use cyberspace laws to shut down activism.
Internet shutdowns harm access to information, freedom of expression & economic growth. Internet research firm Top10VPN recently published a report, estimating that Middle East suffered over $3 billion economic losses associated with the internet shutdowns in 2019. Iraq alone lost $2.3 billion, suffering 263 hours of deliberate connectivity disruptions, and impacting almost 19 million internet users.
An eye on shut-downs, 1 million observations a day
The Monash IP Observatory conducts systematic, continuous scanning of global internet availability and quality by measuring active, geo-located internet connections.
By grounding our measurements to sub-national geographic regions, we are able to provide granular information to citizens and NGOs on when and where the internet is degraded or unavailable.
Across Iran and Iraq, we are following 132 individual sub-districts for which we have statistically large enough information on internet availability. Our measurements have a temporal granularity of 3h, meaning that significant, within-day disruptions even to single districts, are visible.
Since 10 January 2020, we’ve collected over 4 million observations across there region, or a little under a million observations a day, enabling the sensitive detection of degraded or blocked internet in small geographic areas.
Given the historically precise use of internet shut-downs to quell protests in both countries, this geographic accuracy is vital to uncovering the pattern of any state interference with the availability of Internet.
Our coverage of the Iranian crisis follows our coverage of the most recent Iranian internet shut-down, Venezuelan pro-democracy movement and electricity outages, shut-downs in Ethiopia, the ICT impact of Earthquakes in Puerto Rico, Hurricane Dorian, Cyclone Fani, Hurricane Florence, and the 2018 Russian Presidential elections.
Methods | Connectivity, Latency
To generate the data behind these observations, we combine a commercially available geo-located IP database with our powerful scanning technology which measures the online or offline status of millions of Internet addresses globally every hour.
Our observational methodology uses the most basic Internet messaging protocol that is widely used billions of times a day to establish routes for your email, tweet, or share. After developing a carefully selected set of Internet addresses (IPs) to measure, we periodically send them one of these tiny messages, essentially asking, ‘Are on you online?’. These online/offline answers form the basis for our ‘connectivity’ indicators.
In addition, we also receive back from these measurements the responsiveness, or latency, of the IP (measured in round-trip-time, or rtt). Latency is a reasonable proxy for the experienced speed of connection, especially for any user who is interacting with a major social platform where even basic chat activities to other users nearby must travel to a server well beyond national borders (and back again!). Given that our team has previously leveraged significant changes in rtt to identify instances of repressive internet throttling by authoritarian leaning regimes, we also make available latency indicators on our dashboard.
For both connectivity and latency, we have developed an automated anomaly detector. The detector is tuned to pick up major deficiencies in connectivity or slow-downs in latency, relative to a long-run baseline. Anomalies are immediately reported in the dashboard and can be interacted with by the user.
Importantly, the IP Observatory has no access to any content being shared, viewed, visited, or generated by a user at a given IP, and, all IP Observatory activity works in aggregates of thousands of randomly sampled measurements across geo-spatial sub-regions.
The mission of the Monash University IP Observatory — ‘internet insights for social good’ — is to monitor the availability and quality of the Internet during critical events such as elections, natural disasters or conflicts. The IP-Observatory is fully compliant with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (EU-GDPR). The IP-Observatory does not collect, hold or process personal data. The IP Observatory was founded by Klaus Ackermann, lecturer in Econometrics and Business Statistics, and Simon Angus, and Paul Raschky, Associate Professors in Economics. The observatory is a project of SoDa Laboratories at the Monash Business School, and tweets @IP_Observatory.
