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Iran's government sent threatening text messages to protesters days after demonstrations in late 2025—without seizing phones, without informants. Your phone's presence at a protest location was enough. This is the Iran surveillance state in full operation, and it's drawing urgent attention from the crypto and privacy world.
According to a February 13, 2026, New York Times investigation, Iranian authorities tracked protest attendees through cell tower data alone. After a near-total internet blackout lasting 20 days, systematic detentions began—interrogators armed with facial recognition matches, location logs, and social media screenshots.
Vitalik Buterin, on X, called out a critical mistake privacy advocates make: framing surveillance as merely "dystopian" without explaining the concrete harm. He argued the real danger is the shift in the power balance between individuals and the state—a shift that allows a regime to survive with a coalition of only a handful of people backed by surveillance and automated enforcement.
The 40-Function Platform Nobody Talks About
At the core of this system sits SIAM—the Subscriber Identity and Activity Monitoring platform—embedded directly into Iran's cellular networks. First exposed in The Intercept's 2022 "Iran Cables" leak, SIAM gives government operators real-time access to location data, call records, internet history, and financial activity for all 90+ million mobile users. No warrant. No judicial review.
Operators can also act—remotely suspending SIMs, forcing devices onto slower 2G networks, or hijacking calls to government lines. The system doesn't just watch; it controls.
A protester's journey through this system is methodical. Cell towers log every device at a protest via SIAM's LocationCustomerList function. IMSI catchers deployed nearby harvest device identifiers silently. CCTV feeds run through facial recognition against the national ID database. Then, weeks or months later, the knock on the door arrives—by design, to maximize fear and self-censorship.
As Vitalik Buterin noted on X, when you combine dictatorship with automated warfare and surveillance, a regime can survive with a "coalition of size 1"—an all-seeing army of drones and cameras that can suppress an entire population.
China and Russia Built the Infrastructure
Iran didn't construct this alone. According to a February 2026 report by Article 19 titled "Tightening the Net," Chinese firms including Huawei and ZTE supplied hardware and the architectural framework behind Iran's National Information Network—a domestic internet capable of operating completely severed from the global web.
Russian company PROTEI supplied Deep Packet Inspection systems, SMS infrastructure, and mobile signaling components. DPI allows authorities to throttle encrypted apps like Signal or Telegram while state-monitored Iranian platforms run uninterrupted. The technology behind Iran's Digital Iron Curtain is an active export model—already spreading to governments worldwide.
Buterin drew a distinction between surveillance types: Iran and similar states exercise intense control over a defined territory, while Western intelligence operates with broader but shallower global reach. Neither is harmless—but the former, he argued via X, poses an existential threat to political pluralism itself.
Why Digital Privacy Is Now a Global Stakes Issue
The myprivacy.blog deep-dive on Iran's system makes one point undeniable: the technology refined in Tehran today gets marketed globally tomorrow. Deep packet inspection tools, facial recognition algorithms, and IMSI catchers have no borders—they work the same in any country that buys them.
Buterin proposed that privacy technology and censorship-resistant internet—potentially treating basic internet access as a human right beyond nation-state control—could reduce the risk of total government lock-in. But he acknowledged no clean solution exists yet.
What Iran proves is that the question is no longer whether mass surveillance is technically achievable. It already is. The remaining question is how fast that model travels.
This Article First Appeared on:https://www.cryptonewslive.org/article/vitalik-buterin-exposes-irans-siam-system-tracking-90m-phones-without-warrant