“Siam”, The Hidden Tool of the Islamic Republic for Suppressing Protests

Nima Eskandari uses a front company in the UK on behalf of ArianTel and helps the development of SIAM, a technology that has been helping the Islamic Republic of Iran to track down protestors and dissidents in Iran.
Eskandari was not a known person before the publication reports of The Intercept and Citizen Lab in November 2022 and January 2023, respectively. Both reports were published based on leaked emails from ArianTel, a telecommunication company based in Tehran that developed SIAM for Iran’s regime. The reports explained in detail how Eskandari, with his company, Tenisol, helped ArianTel acquire software and hardware to develop SIAM (سیام) for the Islamic Republic

According to the SIAM documentation, Iran’s Communications Regulatory Authority (CRA), which is under the US and the EU sanctions, has the capacity to acquire details of any SIM card holder in Iran in real-time and apply different restrictions on the communication of those SIM cards or identify the location of any active SIM card. For example, SIAM allows Iran’s regime to disable 3G/4G of SIM card holders in a particular area, such as areas where Iranian citizens are protesting against the regime. It also allows the regime to identify individuals with an active SIM card in an area where anti-regime protests happen.
According to our analysis of more than 750 emails, other key players in the development of SIAM for ArianTel were aware of what they were doing and carrying out business with ArianTel was not in their interest. For example, Michael Chackal, Business Development Director at PortaOne, on 29 October 2018 said, “…we prefer not to mention any company or country in the contract”. In another instance on 12 June 2019, Chackal asked ArianTel and Eskandari not to communicate with ProtaOne via the official email address of ArianTel and requested that Eskandari create either telinsol.co.uk or a generic email address such as Gmail or Yahoo! for ArianTel’s team (See Image 7 in Appendix A).

For more information, please read the investigative dossier included below