I have my own concerns about DPI, but for all those concerns it really bothers me when poor fact checking from a major paper leads to hysterics about non-issues about this technology. I think that it’s blatant inaccuracies like this that has, in part, led to many DPI vendors and ISPs going to ground and not wanting to talk about this issue with the public, on the basis of the often poor information the public actually has on the tech. Thanks for the visit and comment!

My sense is that the WSJ caught wind that Iran was doing some level of surveillance on the Internet communications that have garnered so much publicity as of late, and took that supposition to the nth degree without doing the necessary due diligence on the technology. It may seem like semantics, but the reality is that mistakes like this from someone with a large bullhorn such as the Wall Street Journal can create widespread misconceptions, cost companies money and cost people jobs.

David

From the outside there is no way to know if a data stream has been inspected or not. As no data changes, the surveillance is completely passive.

Even active shaping or blocking devices are hard to detect. On my network I have almost a dozen such devices, and when a particular network traffic type is dropped it even takes me a while to figure out which device did it, or even if it is one of my devices. Sometimes a service is just unavailable due to some other outage. And this is for a network I designed and manage.

A question: is there actually some ‘test’ that can be done to see if content analysis is going on, beyond just realizing that a lot of stuff is being filtered or something like that? I’m unfamiliar with a technique that would definitively prove that such analysis was going on. I can’t see how there is a direct and/or necessary correlation between not being able to access particular websites, and DPI being used for packet analysis techniques.

There is no deconstruction that takes place. There is no opening, it is not a file. They are data packets.

Again, DPI devices don’t have the storage capability to do deep analysis of keyword content. As you point out, its much more effective to dump to another device. And Nokia (or “Western”) devices are not necessary for this. There’s no betrayal of Western ideals in selling this technology. The Open Source community has provided tools that can analyze data dumps for years now. You don’t even have to pay to do this, you just need a few really smart network engineers.

This is another case of hyperventilating about DPI. As I keep harping on, there’s nothing deep, (or magical), or new about DPI. Packets are transmitted in the clear and they are open to inspection at any time. We really need to start harping on that point, as everyone needs to be educated on that.

The article does not mention that SSL encryption would be sufficient to avoid content filtering. The WSJ is hysterically spreading ignorance and that is a massive disservice to their readers and to the technology community.

Whatever communications interception and monitoring capability the Iran regime has at present, you cam be sure that they using it to the fullest extent they are able.