Mohammad Sarafraz, a member of Iran's Supreme Council of Cyberspace, the body that sets the country's internet and filtering policy, and the former head of state broadcaster Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), said in a 23 May interview that Chinese Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) hardware had already arrived in Iran1. DPI is network equipment that reads the content of internet traffic at the application layer and can selectively block encrypted communications, the technical step beyond a simple on-off shutdown.
The disclosure points past the blunt instrument Iran has used so far. The wartime three-tier blackout, which Euronews documented running at a fraction of normal connectivity and costing the economy over a billion dollars cumulatively, suppresses dissent by switching the country offline, but it also paralyses banking, logistics and merchants. That billion-dollar bill alienates the commercial base the state depends on.
The design intent Sarafraz described is a tiered, switchable system rather than a nationwide kill switch, modelled on the way China sealed Xinjiang from the internet for ten months in 2009. Restrictions tighten during politically sensitive moments and loosen when the economy needs traffic. Future protest waves would face selective, encrypted-traffic blocking that is harder to circumvent with a virtual private network than a crude blackout, while shops and banks stay online.
Sarafraz noted one limit: Iran imports the technology rather than owning it, which caps how absolute the control can be and leaves Tehran dependent on a foreign supplier for the dial it is building. The shift is an economic calculation as much as a security one, and it deepens China's export of authoritarian network control, with Iran as a live reference deployment of a model first proven on its own population.
