How Iran ‘Jams’ Election News

In the age of the iPhone, the $200 netbook and youtube, how can a government “jam” communications from a country like Iran, full of young, furious, tech-savvy people, in cities spread over a massive land area? Iran has nearly 70 million citizens, most of them with cell phones. Does the President just flip a switch?

Actually, it takes a couple of switches, for cell phones, for internet, and for satellites.

Jamming cell phones requires actively interfering with the signal, with equipment the Iranian government would have needed to have had ready to go. “The channels we use for cellular communications are predetermined channels, like the channels we use for television, where channel three is channel three and channel six is channel six,” explained Bob Gorham, an engineer at On Call Communications, a Southern California satellite communications firm (full disclosure: Bob is an old family friend and worked with my father for many years).

So Vodaphone is channel X and TMobile is channel Y, and “it’s pretty easy to build a device that puts out garbage on some or all those particular channels.” Turn that machine on, and all the phones in the area can’t talk to each other through the noise. “Jamming” is the right word, because it’s not taking the signal down, it’s just making it unable to do its job. Like trying to have a conversation in a loud room.

Shutting down the internet is a little different. It’s relatively simple to identify the IP routes for a service like skype, and catch it at the server level, blocking that data from passing. If the server is controlled by the government, say by a public telephone company, that’s probably happening to some degree. The problem is there are a lot of servers are out there, and someone savvy wouldn’t find it too hard to set one up and send information down the line undetected.

It’s further down the pipeline — where any call/packet of data/email/bit of video that’s gotten far enough to actually become part of a transmission abroad — that things get more complicated.

To the best of anyone’s knowledge, Iran doesn’t have its own communications satellites. It launched its first satellite in the nation’s history into space just four months ago, in February of this year — a fact noted by, indeed, the country’s Communications Minister, rather than its Defense Minister. (SpaceDaily.com has some details of the Iranian satellite launch here.) Lacking its own bird, Iran’s telephone carriers and anyone else who needs to send a signal over the horizon would have to use a private satellite company, leasing a channel. It’s like borrowing someone’s cell phone to have your own conversation. Those signals, once bounced off the orbiters, are more or less out of the Iranian government’s hands.

This undated list of commercial communications satellite operators who support Iranian channels includes American Intelsat, AsiaSat (a Hong Kong company partly owned by General Electric) and Saudi Arabia’s ArabSat, which announced in 2006 (linked page in Arabic) that it had added three Iranian channels.

Iran could in theory mess with the signals on those birds, by sending disruptive data streams up to the orbiter — like sending corrupted data or a particularly large picture of your dog around your office LAN. “Just flat disturb everything,” said Gorham.

But to do that would disrupt signals from other clients using the spacecraft as communications nodes, and “the sat world doesn’t like that.” Messing up phone calls from Dubai to block ones from Shiraz isn’t wise in the long term.

An image grab from the Arabic-language Iranian TV station Al-Alam taken on August 17, 2008 shows the communications satellite Safir Omid being launched into space by Iran. Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife

It’s more likely they’re catching the information streams at the source: the Earth station. “Someone would have to have a technical background and know what [information] they’re passing,” and pick that information out of the stream before sending it into space — minus those photos of burning motorbikes. “The Chinese have gotten very good at this.” said Gorham. That’s a country twelve times the size of Iran, with a far greater number of loose cell phones and cheap internet cafes. Still, China manages to censor a lot international conversation. Not completely. But more than you’d think in a country of 300 million. “They’re a typical example.”

It’s not foolproof. Satellite technicians can be bribed. And it’s getting easier to avoid established earth stations for small, portable satellite dishes. Those are a little more advanced than the one you’ve got bolted to your balcony, but not much bigger or heavier. “It’s fairly easy to have a mobile satellite communications antenna. Meter, three feet. I can broadcast Hi Definition video on a 1 meter antenna. And it’s mobile.” To stop that, the Iranian government would have to find the physical transmitter and turn it off. Blocking the signal — from a mobile dish, perhaps changing location daily — would be nearly impossible.

It’s not the sort of thing an average Iranian is going to have in his or her garage. But they’re around, and it would only take a small team of annoyed soldiers, news crews, an oil exploration team with some foreign gear, to escape notice for quite a while. “The satellites are up there 22,300 miles in space, and with a little technical knowledge, you can point at it.”

Much of what’s happening is, sadly, not in space. Just two weeks ago, Chinese officials foiled coverage of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests by having plainclothes officers open umbrellas in front of probing cameras. Iran appears to be using similarly analog solutions to close down access in a digitized country. The easiest way to stop an image, of course, is to hit the photographer; take the tape off the camera operator; and either shoot or throw anyone else in jail. From what we have managed to get off the birds in the past few days, it seems like that’s the strategy Iran’s rulers have found most reliable.

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Like this post on the Iranian election aftermath? Check out these other posts from True/Slant contributors:

Phil Zabriskie: ‘Winds of Tehran Part II’
Jonathan Curiel: In droves, Iran’s women have come out of their political closet
Mark Drapeau: How the Iranian Elections Turned “CNN Fail” Into a Media Success
Joshua Kucera: What if Twitter is leading us all astray in Iran?
Ethan Porter: Obama engages by not engaging
Kate Klonick: This is no green revolution
Ryan Sager: Iran: Knowing Nothing