Transcription
It needs to be filled.
Dear viewers, dear friends, I must make a statement. It's time to confess, Gap works for the authorities. So, are you an agent of the Kremlin after all? The company TS Information Technology, registered in the English county of West Sussex, owns Gap and transfers user information to the Prosecutor General's Office. So, you are an MI6 agent in the Prosecutor General's Office of the Islamic Republic of Iran. What the hell, are you working for the Iranian special services? What do I have to do with it? My channel, actually, is called MyGAP. I'm talking about Gap – it's one of the Iranian messengers that they launched there instead of Telegram. In 2022, correspondence between technological companies and the Iranian committee for identifying criminal content was leaked online. This, just so you know, is a whole cell within Iran's cybersecurity structure. A little later we will tell you about this state censorship machine. So, there, the developers of GAP coordinated technical requirements with the committee for different numbers of users. Just so you know, the MyGAP brand is not related to it in any way. I work only for you, my dear viewers.
Yes, really.
I think that Iranian mobile applications leaking user information to the authorities is far from a sensation for you. Something else is interesting here. Last year, I released a video about the Chinese messenger VChat, which became almost a synonym for mobile internet for the residents of the Celestial Empire. Practically all services that can be used from a smartphone are united there under one icon. And although VChat is completely loyal to the Communist Party and serves as an open book for the authorities, it was created by the private corporation Tencent in a free market, without any state subsidies, blocking of direct competitors, and certainly without decrees from the country's leadership. This is the key difference between the Chinese one and our parking messenger.
With this messenger, you will never experience loneliness. And I know that they always hear me and know where I am. Last year, they also tried to sell us the idea that we have it exactly like in China. Although, in reality, the history of the Iranian internet is much closer to Russian realities. Messenger Gap is not like VChat and not even like Max. It's closer to some TamTam. If we sum up the number of downloads in Play Market and two other local stores, we will get a number of about 8 million. With a population of Iran of 92 million, one can say that the result is not bad, but it doesn't quite live up to the name of a national messenger, whether appointed by decree or arisen in competitive conditions. Instead of one central application, the Iranians decided to launch a pleiad of state and, of course, secure applications. But it's not just about individual applications. In fact, they built a clone of the global network. So to speak, a correct Orthodox, a correct halal internet. In this episode, you will learn what a soft war is and why social networks are perceived there as a threat to the authorities. Why a whole cyber police department appeared in Iran, which searches rooftops of houses? What do Iranian national messengers represent? Why, even with the support of the authorities, domestic counterparts could not defeat foreign platforms? How mass blockages of Telegram led not to digital sovereignty, but to the total VPNization of citizens? Why do Iranian authorities periodically shut down the entire internet, even despite colossal losses for their own economy? And how does digital apartheid arise with the help of white SIM cards? You are on the MyGAP channel, and we are starting.
The story with the Iranian internet is much more important than it seems. The internet has long turned into an infrastructure of power, as basic as banks, energy, or oil. He who manages data and digital systems manages how reality around us is structured. And this already concerns not only the internet, but also neural networks. AI is literally built into everything: recommendations in social networks, banking services, navigators, text and video generation. And behind all this are ML engineers and data scientists. They train models, work with data, and implement the technologies on which everything rests. Such personnel are now worth their weight in gold. Demand exceeds supply threefold, and salaries start from 200,000 rubles. And such specialists are trained by the online master's program, Applied Data Analysis and Machine Learning from MIF and Skill Factory. This is a full-fledged master's program with a full-time diploma. At the same time, training takes place completely online with the retention of all student benefits, including deferment from the army. You don't just learn to launch libraries, but also deeply understand how models work, how to check data, choose methods, and explain results. All knowledge is reinforced by practice, taking into account current trends in ML, MLOPS, and AI products. Plus, it's possible from 230 rubles per month. To enroll, you need a diploma of any completed higher education, and preparatory courses will help improve your math. To become an in-demand specialist, follow the link in the description or the QR code and start your training.
Supreme Council of Cyberspace. Sounds cool, right? It just makes you want to continue with the Supreme Council of Cyberspace of the Galactic Empire. Immediately, squads of cyber stormtroopers come to mind, mercilessly destroying malicious content in the name of security and prosperity of the Great Islamic Galaxy. But in reality, everything is much more modest. The cyber squad commands look not like that, but like this. This is the President of Iran. Around him are various ministers and security officials. But until recently, the real Darth Vader here was not him, but this gentleman. This is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ruled the country for almost 45 years. First as president, and from 1989 as Supreme Leader and Rahbar. Presidents in Iran are elected for 4 years and no more than two consecutive terms, so they periodically replace each other and are more involved in various operational matters. All fateful decisions are made by the Rahbar, who holds his post for life. True, as we recently learned, life can end at any moment.
It's dangerous to be an Ayatollah. However, this video is not about Iranian politics, but about the Iranian internet. Its history began briskly and well. In 1992, the country became the second in the Middle East to connect to the global network. Considering that Israel was the first, one can say that Iran became such an internet flagship of the Islamic world.
Initially, the network was mainly used by university staff, but in the second half of the nineties, internet cafes began to appear in Tehran, fiber optic lines were actively being laid, and by 2000, the number of users exceeded half a million. Well, our LiveJournal enthusiasts already sense which way the wind is blowing. On September 25, 2001, young journalist Alexey Hossein Derakhshan created the first socio-political blog in Farsi. These were notes about pop culture, technology, and the country. The notes there were uncomplimentary. If you are young and ambitious, Iran is not the best place to stay there now. There are literally restrictions on everything you want to do, from entertainment and studies to earning money.
With these words, young Hossein packed his suitcase in December 2000, got on a tractor, and left for Toronto, from where he wrote his critical comments about the state. Unlike Russia, where the internet did not interest the authorities until 2011, in Iran, the loss of monopoly on information was immediately regarded as a significant threat. Therefore, they started tightening the screws there almost with the appearance of blogs. In the noughties, internet cafes were forced to obtain licenses. Providers were required to implement blocking mechanisms, and blogs and websites were obliged to register. The government created a committee for prescribing measures regarding prohibited web resources. It develops prohibition criteria, and by early 2003, more than 15,000 websites fell under blocking, and some journalists and bloggers received prison sentences for their publications. True, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami stated in 2003 that censorship only concerns those websites that contradict, as we would say, spiritual bonds, that is, it blocks all indecent content incompatible with Muslim culture. But no one is engaged in political censorship. You can't scold Prophet Muhammad, but President Muhammad as much as you like. Khatami said this in an interview with the BBC Persian service and provided an ironclad argument in confirmation of his words.
The BBC website, you see, is not blocked in Iran. Freedom of speech.
But a year and a half passes, and the relatively liberal Khatami is replaced in the presidential post by the much more radical Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And six months later, the BBC is blocked after all. Despite prohibitions and blockages, the number of users continues to grow rapidly and by the end of the noughties reaches 30 million, which is more than 40% of the country's population. For comparison, in Russia at that time, only 30% used the internet. By the number of blogs, Iran becomes a leader in the Middle East, and Farsi becomes one of the most popular languages. The Iranian blogosphere even gets its own nickname. You are Blogistan. In general, the call of progress and the urge for communication prove stronger than internet repressions. But this is just a prelude. Everything changes in 2009. On June 12, presidential elections are held, in which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wins again. The results are announced just 2 hours after their completion, and the other three candidates immediately accuse the authorities of falsifications. The people are indignant, and on the morning of the next day, mass clashes begin, which escalate into the largest protests in 30 years, named the Green Movement. They do not subside for several months. During the suppression of the Green Movement, dozens of people die, hundreds are wounded, thousands are arrested and subjected to torture. If such a thing had happened ten years earlier, the brutality of what was happening could have been easily hidden by banning undesirable media, seizing newspaper circulations, and arresting journalists. But now every act of violence is filmed on a phone.
I'm filming on... And immediately appears on YouTube.
Practically immediately after the start of the protests, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps threatens bloggers and websites that they must remove materials that rock the boat. MIT Iran accuses CNN, BBC, and other Western media that encourage disorder and participate in cyber warfare against the country. But another term began to be used much more actively - soft war. Soft war is attributing agency to media propaganda that exerts psychological influence on citizens, stimulating them to take to the streets. Therefore, all institutions of power, including the Ayatollah himself, attach great importance to controlling the information environment. Addressing students, the most susceptible and active category of the population, he calls them officers of the soft war. Dear students, you, young officers of Iran and the Islamic Republic, in confrontation with both the soft war of enemies and the satanic current, formed on the basis of power, deception, and wealth.
The image of danger in the form of a soft war was consistently scaled up. When Khamenei spoke before the local Rosgvardiya, he marked the transition from direct clashes to soft war. Soft war is now a priority. This war is waged through culture, through influence, lies, and slander with the help of means of communication that did not exist 10-15 or 30 years ago. Soft war means sowing doubts in the hearts and minds of people. And there should be no doubts, because they can be regarded as a violation of public morality or spreading corruption on Earth. Yes, there are real articles there for which you can even receive 74 lashes. Therefore, in 2009, after the start of the Green Movement, Iran declares war on soft war and emerges victorious. A year and a half later, the Arab Spring begins, and protests erupt throughout the Middle East, in which Western social networks would serve as the main communication channels between participants. But Iran, unlike its neighbors in the region, proved ready for such a scenario, because it had already gone through it all in 2009. While dictatorships were being overthrown in Egypt and Tunisia, Libya and Syria were moving towards civil war, Iranian authorities managed to gradually suppress solidarity actions, preventing them from growing to threatening scales. The Arab Spring never becomes Persian.
In September 2009, when the post-election protests had subsided a bit, but were still ongoing, the largest deal in its history took place on the Iranian stock market. A consortium called MobinTrust acquired 51% of the shares of an Iranian telecommunications company. This is something like our Rostelecom, but with one important feature. Unlike Rostelecom, Iran Telecom has a de facto monopoly on fiber optic lines. The Russian internet is like a web, which numerous private providers wove in the nineties and noughties. Now, by the way, there are more than 400 of them. And if I wanted to turn our internet into an Iranian one, I would start by reducing the number of players. Fewer players, easier control, just like in Iran. [music] There, instead of an internet web, there is a tree. It also has many branches belonging to providers, but this is only the last mile, that is, the cable leading directly to the router in the apartment, and the trunk of this tree's lines belong to Iran Telecom. If in Russia traffic travels through numerous private networks, in Iran it inevitably passes through gateways controlled by the monopolist. I, of course, really miss the times when one could wander through these gateways. Now, when a website doesn't open, you no longer know if your own people or strangers are blocking you. And I want to basically, without a VPN, open my neural network, upload work materials there, get useful results back. And so that all these neural networks are in one place, so that with one click you can switch from GPT to Claude, and then to Gemini, and in general to all the main ones for working with text. But not only with text, so that the main tools for design like Nanoban, Midjourney, and others are collected, where I could create covers for myself and make edits with prompts, so that I could animate visuals and create the necessary audio track. And then Syntax AI came to the rescue. The service has a convenient interface in the web version, you've seen it, but there's also Telegram. You can send a request directly through it. All neural networks in one place. No need to connect a VPN. And the most pleasant thing is that one subscription works for all neural networks at once. And the subscription starts from 756 rubles. You can even pay with rubles. Get free internet via the link in the description and prompt until your fingers get calluses. Don't forget the promo code MyGAP. It will give a 15% discount on any subscription for new users. And we return to Iran, or rather to the structure of its internet, whose trunk is fully controlled by the monopolist Iran Telecom. But what's more interesting here is not Iran Telecom, but its buyer. Most likely, the name MobinTrust doesn't tell you anything, but you've probably heard another, more formidable name. Yes, I myself just said it a few minutes ago.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the most influential security agency in Iran, which obeys neither the president, nor the government, nor the parliament, and is controlled only by the Supreme Leader. If you combine the FSB and the Russian Orthodox Church, you get the IRGC. As you may have guessed, it is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that controls the MobinTrust consortium, and through it, Iran Telecom and the internet traffic passing through its nodes. A year and a half after the entire internet came under the control of the IRGC, in January 2011, the cyber police were created. This is as if our formally civilian Roskomnadzor was assigned police cyber squads that are engaged in identifying citizens who, by their activity, spread corruption on Earth, and after detecting the unfaithful, they are summoned for questioning and people are arrested for sins committed online. For example, a year after the creation of the cyber police, its valiant employees detained two men and two women for the mass dissemination of shamelessness on the internet. Their crime consisted of holding a virtual beauty contest on a social network. As you understand, beauty is shamelessness. Is it worth saying anything about the fate of those criticizing the government? In addition to the cyber police, Iranian authorities, impressed by the protests and the Arab Spring, created a bunch of other structures related to digital security. Remember, we said at the beginning of the episode that there was a committee for identifying prohibited websites. It was subordinate to the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution. But time passed, and the octopus began to grow. The Committee for Websites is transformed into the Committee for Identifying Criminal Content. As you understand, the речь is not limited to websites, it's about content. They, for example, determine what image, music, behavior, events, and so on are prohibited. The Ministry of Communications is responsible for the blockages themselves. This is the technical executor of the criteria developed by the committee, and the cyber police, if anything, will come to your home and take you to the station. At a high level, the civilian internet works very closely with military departments, the Ministry of Intelligence, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Well, to promptly identify seditious thoughts from abroad that could sow doubts in local minds and hearts. The overall picture looks like this. And above all this fuss reigns the Supreme Council of Cyberspace, which coordinates all these structures and tirelessly thinks about how to make the Iranian internet even more sterile and secure. This council includes the president himself, the minister of communications, culture, science, education, the head of the judiciary, the prosecutor general, the minister of intelligence, the head of the IRGC, the head of police, the Ministry of Defense, the organization of Islamic propaganda, and the head of state broadcasting IRIB. Some kind of madness. Literally all branches of government are members of the Internet Control Council. No, not all. The Ayatollah is not a member of this council. Well, thank God, at least some independence. The Ayatollah is not a member, but the creator of this council. It is he who appoints the participants and defines their mission. In general, in the first half of the 2010s, the Iranian state turned into such an octopus, extending its tentacles into all corners of the global network. Ayatollah Khamenei becomes an internet Sauron, from whose all-seeing eye no social media post will now escape. However, social networks by that point anyway no longer work. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were blocked back in 2009. But with other social networks and messengers, the story took a more interesting path.
Imagine your grandmother calls you and says offendedly: "Grandson, why aren't you answering my messages?" Just in case, you check WhatsApp and Viber and say that you haven't received anything from her. "How is that? I sent you so many beautiful postcards." "Where did you send them to me?" "Well, in that, what's-its-name, messenger Max." "Grandma, I'm not on Max. I didn't even install it." And then it suddenly turns out that you are very much in it. Although you have never logged into it. It turns out that someone created a clone of your Telegram account there, copied all photos, and even posts the same things you do there. Sounds like the premise of a Black Mirror episode. No, this is a very real story that happened in Iran in 2021. Only instead of Telegram, it's Insta here, and instead of messenger Max, it's its local analogue called Rubika, belonging to the very same Iran Telecom that owns the internet lines. A certain user named Houman Ghorbanian decided out of curiosity to type his name there. Imagine his surprise when he discovered an exact copy of his Zapetogram account, and even with a blue checkmark. He published a tweet about it, and hundreds of other indignant users came into the comments, also having discovered copies of their pages in Rubika. It turned out that in an attempt to attract an audience, the service administration itself created influencer accounts there and began copying the content they posted. Apparently, the calculation was that their subscribers would gradually switch from Zapetogram to the national analogue, and then, you see, they themselves would be forced to migrate after their audience. Another Iranian service called Bale did not shy away from similar practices. This messenger was created with money from the Iranian central bank, so a fast payment service was also embedded in it. Such a Fast Payment System-Messenger turned out. And a whole deputy of the Iranian parliament discovered his account there, which he announced at one of the sessions. There were also more familiar examples of transferring audiences from foreign services to national ones. First, civil servants were obliged to use them, then students were forced to install a local messenger, and during the time of COVID, vaccination appointments were also made through it. This, by the way, is not the Gap I mentioned at the beginning of the video, but another one, unrelated to the first. It was created by other developers, and ultimately, through a chain of sales to quasi-state structures, it becomes one of the other national messengers. So we already have three Gaps, but only one of them is correct. Don't confuse them. Despite all these attempts, Iranian users are not in a hurry to import substitute. Even long-blocked Facebook and Twitter are periodically used by 20% of the population here. YouTube by 40%, and Telegram and WhatsApp by 3/4. They were also blocked in Iran, but significantly later, in 2018 and 2022. And this is a halal clone of Telegram. Why halal? Firstly, its name can be translated as "voice of heaven," or it can be translated as "obedience." Secondly, along with ordinary functions, it has, for example, a prayer schedule. Well, and thirdly, just check out the stickers there. This is Ayatollah Khamenei. Here it says: "Death to America," and here "Death to Zionism." And the other inscriptions maintain the degree of extremism. For some reason, Iranians are not in a hurry to use the voice of heaven. More than 70% prefer our cozy Telegram. In attempts to transfer users to Soroush, the authorities even tried direct pressure. In 2018, several administrators of Telegram channels were summoned for questioning and threatened with fines for bypassing blockages. You probably thought that we were talking about some opposition or news resources. Nothing of the sort. These were culinary channels. And no, they weren't discussing a recipe for overthrowing the regime. But ordinary recipes for sweets and pastries. Local analogues of foreign services in Iran are formally private, but to some extent affiliated with the authorities. Some were created by large mobile operators, some were financed by the National Bank, some by a State University, some were made with state loan money. In general, the story is similar to ours. Instead of natural growth in a competitive market, state funding and a green light from the authorities. And even despite this head start, Iranian applications could not compete with their foreign counterparts. And, of course, none of the local services use end-to-end encryption. Moreover, messengers also exchange data through an internal server process called Message Exchange Bus. This is a security official's dream. Look, in a normal case, if a messenger user writes a message to a friend, the message first goes to the server, and from there to your friend. Such a pipe for communication is formed between you. And each messenger has its own such pipe. If someone external wants to penetrate, there are different methods for each pipe. But the Iranians have a killer feature. Message Exchange Bus allows communication between different messengers. The message goes to the application server, and then to the common circuit of this ExeBus, and from there to any other application. Therefore, it is transparent for the state what happens both inside each messenger and on the bridges between them. That is, the applications seem different, but there are keys to everything. The second feature is link modification. If you click a link in a messenger, you are actually going not to it, but to a slightly modified one. Instead, it becomes like this. This link is processed by the messenger's server, and this means that now there is a fact that such-and-such a user clicked on the link at such-and-such a time from such-and-such an application. Thus, one can prohibit the user from the transition itself or allow the transition, but, for example, then come to his home, because he accessed extremist material. The evidence is undeniable. Iranian messengers are an open book for special services, similar to VChat in China. But if Chinese users have resigned themselves to control, Iranians prefer Vietnamese pho noodles. Remember how in the spring of 2018 in Russia they tried to block Telegram for the first time? It turns out that in Iran they also started blocking it literally in the same days. But if our first attempt failed, theirs was quite successful. Moreover, in Russia, Telegram was used by only 15 million people out of 140 at that time, and in Iran by 40 million out of 80. Half the country. The reason for its popularity is the coolness and convenience of the application. Not a bad internet. At that time, the Iranian network occupied the very bottom positions of the rating with an average mobile internet speed of just over 1 megabit. And Telegram is the least resource-hungry messenger, working even with a slow connection, which is the norm for Iran. In combination with our favorite channels and features for business, it becomes the number one messenger. And while conservatives bet on mosques and state media in the elections, reformists promoted their narratives through Telegram. And when, after another popular unrest, the messenger was decided to be blocked, the dynamics of search queries began to look like this. The blocking of Telegram launched the mass VPNization of the population. As a result, now Vietnamese pho noodles are already eaten by 86% of Iran's residents. Such mass use of VPNs worsens the performance of the national internet. But this is not yet the end of the confrontation. Iranian authorities made another move. Perhaps, while watching this video, you get a feeling of déjà vu. There is a feeling that we are currently living through the Iranian experience. Is this really so? And how do Russian blockages differ from Iranian ones? You will find out in the bonus supplement to this video on Boosty and Patreon. Link below in the pinned comment.
At the beginning of this year, this meme happened in Iran. Only its character was not a programmer, but an ordinary entrepreneur. [music] You probably know from the news that in January, another wave of protests swept across the country, in response to which the authorities simply cut off all internet. Iran plunged into digital darkness, and no VPN could save it anymore. This is not the first such case. For the first time, a prolonged blackout was arranged in 2019 during protests against rising gasoline prices. It lasted a week, during which life in the country froze. Exchangers and delivery services stopped working. Travel agencies stopped selling tickets. Embassies stopped issuing visas, ships lost communication with ports. Importers lost the ability to track cargo, and total losses from the week-long blackout were estimated at 155 billion dollars. As history showed, those were just the beginning. In January of this year, the internet was disconnected for 2 and a half weeks, during which the economy again lost tens of millions. But when you think the bottom has been reached, someone will surely knock from below once again. At the time of writing the script, the country has been offline for 74 days, and by the time the episode is released, it will be even more. [music] In early January, Iranian authorities came up with a simply brilliant solution that impresses with its elegance and progressiveness. Business owners were graciously allowed to access the internet for a full 20 minutes a day. For this, they were required to register and appear at the Chamber of Commerce. There they received access to email, and behind their backs, the figure of an inspector grew, carefully monitoring the content of the emails they sent. Internet by coupons became a reality.
Wait, so if the entire internet was cut off, where did this twenty-minute access to email come from?
Here we come to the most interesting part. At the end of last year, Iranian users of the former Twitter noticed a strange thing. A new automatic geolocation display function appeared there. Since Twitter has been blocked in Iran for a long time and everyone accesses it via VPN, everyone's location was some European one. But for some reason, for some users, instead of the Netherlands and Luxembourg, Iran was still indicated. That is, they accessed Twitter without a VPN, directly through Iranian servers. How did they do it? It turned out that since 2013, some lucky ones started receiving white SIM cards. Remember our initiative with white lists of websites that should work even when the internet is disconnected? So, in Iran, they also made white SIM cards, giving access to the global network without any restrictions. Even Twitter-lists and even undesirable ones, even foreign agents. There were 16,000 happy owners of white SIM cards. These were mainly officials, journalists, and politicians, both loyal and opposition, among whom, for example, a minister from the local Ministry of Digital Development was caught. And I remind you, his service is precisely responsible for implementing blockages. In general, all these owners became such an Iranian internet aristocracy with unlimited network access. And the system itself received the nickname digital apartheid. That is, a two-tiered internet emerged in Iran: separate gateways for the elite and a large internal network for the common people, which can be cut off at any moment. Perfect.
Space became the last frontier in the battle for the internet. Since 2011, the Yahsat satellite, launched by the Emirates, hangs over the Middle East and distributes uncensored video streams. This is not really the internet, but rather receiving content via satellite dish. Such a signal is harder to block, so Iranians receive non-halal content, and this, according to the authorities, can provoke the spread of corruption on Earth. And this year, Iranian users gained another ally, Elon Musk. In recent months, thousands of Starlink terminals were secretly smuggled into the country and the subscription fee was canceled. The authorities cannot jam them, so the cyber police now searches rooftops of houses in search of receivers. While our Kazakh brothers receive the benefits of civilization and catch high-speed internet right in the steppe, our Iranian brothers receive up to 2 years for using these benefits. And if espionage is recognized, then the death penalty. 20 years ago, Iranian authorities blocked undesirable websites and blogs. Social networks replaced them. When they were also blocked, the nation massively turned on VPNs. In response to this, the entire internet was disconnected and white SIM cards were distributed to the chosen few. Some Iranian residents try to catch bits of free information from space, but the state hunts for these unfaithful daredevils. Where does this spiral lead? Perhaps the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps believes that it leads to a bright future, and perhaps, specifically their bright future is in the past. In this case, the whole country plunges into the past. You know who to send this video to. And we thank the Intellectual Revolutionary Guard Corps on Boosty and Patreon. Lyova, Asa, Glasfr Global, as well as all supreme masters, wise consuls, and heroes of the IP-niks. See you at the next meeting. Ah yeah. Ah