More than half of detained Iranian journalists had devices seized since protests began.
This statement was originally published on cpj.org on 16 February 2023.
Five months after the death of a young woman in morality police custody sparked widespread protests, Iranian authorities are charging journalists who covered the uprising with anti-state crimes. In many of these cases, authorities have powerful tools at their disposal to aid in convictions: journalists’ phones and laptops. CPJ counted at least 95 journalists arrested since the start of the protests. More than half — at least 48 — had their devices seized, according to news accounts and interviews with sources inside the country.
CPJ senior researcher Yeganeh Rezaian knows firsthand what happens when Iranian officials gain access to personal devices. In 2014, Iranian authorities arrested Yeganeh and her husband, Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, and seized their iPhones and laptops. Forensic analysis conducted later showed that the Rezaians’ computer files were copied using Disk Drill, a kind of file recovery software for phones and computers developed in the U.S. and widely available online.
Yeganeh was forced to sign hundreds of pages of printouts of her personal communications, a safeguard, she believes, in case she later claimed that evidence compiled against her was falsified or extracted under duress. She was detained for a total of 72 days and charged with assisting a spy, but never tried. Jason was sentenced to an unspecified prison term in 2015 on espionage charges, and released in 2016.
“There was nothing problematic or legally forbidden among [my messages],” Yeganeh said. “My only worry was that I didn’t want any of my friends and family [to] get in trouble… I kept whispering to myself, ‘I wish I never saved any phone numbers.’”
Her experience is consistent with accounts from other Iranians who have been released from state custody, and concerning in light of the wave of detentions that propelled Iran to the position of the world’s worst jailer of journalists in CPJ’s 2022 prison census. If Iranian authorities accessed more than 48 devices – some of the detainees surrendered phones, some computers, and some both – they could amass a significant database of personal information about the journalists and their networks. Because security forces are known to deliberately intimidate witnesses to stop details of the detentions getting out, the number of device seizures is likely much higher.
Under a legal system that has included journalists among those sentenced to corporal punishment or death — editor Roohollah Zam was executed in 2020 for reporting on Telegram — the stakes could not be higher. Elahe Mohammadi and Niloofar Hamedi, reporters who first covered Amini’s arrest for wearing her compulsory hijab too loosely and helped bring the story of her death to an international audience, were in Qarchak women’s prison in Tehran in February facing a possible death penalty for espionage. Both had their devices seized.
Iran is hardly the only country that seizes devices for prosecutorial purposes. Police around the world use forensic tools to extract private data from phones and computers during criminal investigations, a concern for journalists, as well as their sources, family, and colleagues. For authorities, devices are a shortcut to obtaining private emails, photos, and location data that would otherwise need to be collected piecemeal from different service providers and social media firms. When state agents have a journalist’s phone, sophisticated forensics can bypass passcodes, enabling authorities to read messages sent via encrypted apps like Signal and WhatsApp; Israeli company Cellebrite claims it can crack any iPhone.
It’s not clear whether sanctions-hit Iran has been able to add phone-cracking tools to its extensive surveillance arsenal since the intelligence officials of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps arrested the Rezaians more than eight years ago. But the use of Disk Drill to investigate the couple underscores that common consumer software can also be used against the press.
In many cases, officials don’t need any kind of technology at all to get into a journalist’s phone.
“You can give us your password the easy way, or the hard way,” one journalist remembers being told by security officials who had seized the individual’s phone and computer in 2019. The journalist spoke to CPJ from outside Iran, but asked not to be named to avoid future repercussions.
“I didn’t try the hard way,” said the journalist. “They went through my Twitter, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Gmail.”
Like Yeganeh, the journalist recalled being shown pages of private correspondence during interrogation, including WhatsApp messages that agents had retrieved from a backup saved on a device.
The journalist was ultimately prosecuted for spreading “propaganda,” punishable by one year in prison, and undermining national security, which carries up to five years – the same charges many of the journalists covering recent protests now face.
“They asked me to sign [the printouts], to use them against me as evidence for my guilt,” the journalist told CPJ. Authorities kept the devices for a month.
“Two weeks after I was released on bail, I received a call to go to a metro station in the city… Someone came up to me saying ‘Hey, here’s your phone and laptop.’” Fearful that the devices had been infected with spyware, the journalist got rid of them before seeking exile to escape a prison sentence.
