Iran’s digital surveillance machine is close to completion, as reported by Wired. Governments don’t build surveillance systems because there is an actual need to watch 75 million citizens. They build them because power always seeks leverage over society. It is not unique to Iran. This is the inevitable endpoint of every state that believes it can manage dissent, control information, and pre-empt opposition with technology rather than address the real causes of social unrest.
The regime has massacred over 40,000 civilians over the past several weeks. That is a staggering number of deaths—more than all casualties in the Russia-Ukraine war or Palestine-Israel conflict—but we are talking about a government slaughtering civilians here. The regime plans spy on all citizens in real-time to prevent another uprising.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps owns or is a partial owner of all telecom systems in the country. Removing internet access was one of the first measures the regime took when protests emerged. Wired describes an integrated, constantly expanding digital control grid. That is the same model now being tried in Beijing, discussed in Brussels, and quietly adopted everywhere that elites feel threatened by inconvenient political movements or crisis-driven instability. In Iran’s case, the “Digital Nation Plan” consolidates messaging, biometric tracking, traffic monitoring, and app control into a unified architecture that can identify, categorize, and punish behavior.
“CCTV networks, facial-recognition systems, applications designed to capture or log private user messages, and systems assessing citizens’ lifestyle patterns and behavioral profiles collectively provide the Islamic Republic’s security agencies with the means for broad and precise monitoring of the population,” an analyst from Holistic Resilience said.
They call it “public health surveillance,” “national security monitoring,” “AI content moderation,” or “electoral integrity protection.” The goal? Centralize data, index citizens, and give the state the power to monitor and respond to “undesirable” behavior. We now see the West implementing measures under the guise of securing children from online dangers, but that is simply an acceptable excuse to monitor online activity.
If you give governments the ability to monitor every click, every message, every search and every comment, why would they not use it? Remember the pandemic years, when millions accepted unprecedented surveillance in the name of public health? Mobile phone tracking, vaccine passport apps, location monitoring, QR codes were all justified by crisis hysteria. That crisis has passed, but the infrastructure remains. The same phenomenon happened after 9/11 and the ushering in of the Patriot Act that paved the wave for intensified surveillance.
The pursuit of surveillance power is not confined to authoritarian regimes. Every government wants access to data that allows it to predict and control outcomes. In Europe, regulators demand “safe platforms” and compel private companies to report “harmful” speech. In the United States, law enforcement agencies tap into data streams for predictive policing. In Asia, social credit systems tie digital behavior to real-world penalties. If it can be measured, it can be regulated; if it can be regulated, it can be controlled.
Once you accept that governments will always seek the maximum possible control over citizens’ lives, the real question becomes not whether this power will be used, but how it will be used, who will decide the norms, and what safeguards (if any) exist. Governments know with certainty that they can monitor the masses through their digital footprints and have begun to chip away at our privacy, integrating the state with our main medium for communication. Digital IDs, wallet, CBDC–all of the plans in place will embolden the state with total power over our lives.