Every Iranian who joins the latest demonstrations against the Iranian regime is taking a risk that is greater than it might have been because of China-provided surveillance technology. Which in turn is much more effective than it might have been because of the assistance provided to the Chinese Communist Party by such U.S. firms as Oracle, IBM, Dell, Cisco, Seagate, Nvidia, Thermo Fisher, Motorola, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Western Digital, and Hewlett Packard.
The Times (UK) reports (December 30, 2025):
“Ultimately, it is the economy that can bring this regime down [says Ellie Borhan, a British-Iranian activist]. The day people cannot afford bread and basic necessities, they will inevitably come to the streets. We are now witnessing something very significant.”
Yet protesting remains a huge risk, experts say. The regime uses state-of-the-art surveillance to track citizens. “Iranians try to use VPNs, throw-away devices and other techniques, but these are risky and often do not conceal anything, leading to further arrests and repression,” said Jonathan Hackett, a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer who wrote a book on Tehran’s intelligence apparatus.
“The challenge of operating in Iran, which is widely covered with ubiquitous technical surveillance systems provided by China, was very clear during the Mahsa protests,” he said. “The regime used extensive social media investigations, Osint [open-source intelligence] tools and signals intelligence technologies to track down, capture and disappear protesters. Additionally, the regime is able to turn the internet off in the country, which it did during the June war this year.”
He said that Iran’s dramatically reduced role in the region, as its allies suffer in Lebanon and Syria, has led some in the country to see “that this regime is weak”.
It will all end, we must hope, with the end of the current regime, which could hardly be worse. But I doubt that any government which takes over in Iran would just throw away the means of ubiquitous surveillance provided courtesy of the People’s Republic of China and Silicon Valley.
