Iran preparing internal version of Internet

WASHINGTON — The Iranian government, determined to limit Western influence and defend itself against cyberattacks, appears to have laid the technical foundations for a national online network that would be detached from the Internet and permit tighter control over the flow of information.

The concept of a self-contained network has been reverberating within Iran for almost a decade and has often been treated with skepticism, given the significant investment in infrastructure and security that would be required. But Iranian officials and outside experts say that development of the network has accelerated following cyberattacks aimed at the country’s nuclear program.

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Last month, Iran’s communications and information technology minister unveiled a plan to take key government agencies and military outfits offline and onto the new network by the end of September. U.S. security researchers say they are for the first time seeing evidence of an operational network that is consistent with Iran’s publicly stated plans.

The researchers, working under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Global Communications Studies, say in a report to be released this week that they have found functional versions of the sites of government ministries, universities and businesses on the network. They also found evidence of an already operational filtering capability.

At the core of the network was high-end equipment manufactured by the Chinese firm Huawei that is capable of sophisticated online surveillance of traffic. The network is already “internally consistent and widely reachable,” concluded the report, a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post.

William Plummer, vice president for external affairs at Huawei, said: “Huawei has not sold equipment to the Iranian government nor does it support monitoring traffic. Huawei only sells commercial equipment built to global standards to commercial operators.”

The findings are likely to worry Internet freedom activists and the Obama administration, which has spent tens of millions of dollars on initiatives designed to ease access to the Internet in Iran and other countries with repressive governments. Officials had expressed concerns even before the release of the latest research.

“We have concerns from not only a human rights perspective, but about the integrity of the Internet,” David Baer, deputy assistant secretary for the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, said in an interview. “When countries section off parts of the Web, not only do their citizens suffer, everyone does.”

Experts say the Iranian government has a handful of reasons to establish a state-run alternative to the Internet. A protected Iran-only network could help officials counter U.S.-funded programs that allow Iranian activists to evade online surveillance. It could also help insulate Iranian computers from a covert campaign of cyberattacks that Iranian officials assert the United States and Israel continue to wage.