Internet Butcher

Sahab Pardaz

Samaneh Gostar Sahab Pardaz is one of the contractors of the Telecommunication Infrastructure Company of Iran. This relationship has existed since 2017, when Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi was in charge of the infrastructure company, and it continues to this day. The first contract between this company and the infrastructure organization was titled “Development of a System for Aggregating Components of the Comprehensive Cultural-Social Protection Plan,” worth approximately 100 billion tomans.

The company specializes in “big data, data mining, artificial intelligence and machine learning-based systems, distributed or scalable systems, network engineering or traffic analysis, and software testing and quality control.”

After the nationwide protests escalated in the fall of 2022, and as the government increasingly attempted to sever effective communication among citizens by manipulating network access, the U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned Sahab Pardaz, describing it as “one of the main operators of social media filtering services in Iran that actively provides censorship, surveillance, and espionage tools using big data analytics to analyze private data of Iranian citizens for the Iranian government.”

According to the U.S. government’s statement, Sahab Pardaz collects raw internet records from Iranians to build its filtering systems. It is engaged in developing and technically supporting filtering tools for the Iranian government and assists the Islamic Republic by using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) tools to log, identify, and block various types of internet traffic.

In January 2018, internet infrastructure expert Collin Anderson revealed that Iranian internet service providers were handing over user data to a company named Sahab Pardaz to be used for smart filtering purposes.

─ Source: factnameh