The secretary of Iran’s Headquarters for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Violence, Mohammad Saleh Hashemi Golpayegani, announced in a recent interview that the government planned to use surveillance technology against women in public spaces following a new decree signed by the hardline president of the country, Ebrahim Raisi. to restrict women’s clothing. The decree was signed on August 15, a month after the national “Hijab and Chastity Day” on July 12, which sparked protests across the country by women posting videos on social media of their heads uncovered on the streets, on buses and on the trains. In recent weeks, Iranian authorities have responded with a series of arrests, detentions and forced confessions on television. “The Iranian government has long toyed with the idea of using facial recognition to identify lawbreakers,” said Azadeh Akbari, a researcher at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. “The regime combines violent ‘old-fashioned’ forms of totalitarian control dressed up with new technologies.” A still from a video that led to the arrest of Sepideh Rashno, 28, for not wearing the hijab properly on a bus shows her accuser, Rayeheh Rabi’i, filming her. Photo: Brochure The hijab, a head covering worn by Muslim women, became mandatory after Iran’s revolution in 1979. However, in the decades since, women have pushed the boundaries of the prescribed dress code. Some of the women arrested for defying the new decree were identified after videos were posted online showing them being harassed on public transport for not wearing the hijab properly. One, 28-year-old Sepideh Rashno, was arrested after a video circulated on social media of her being reprimanded for “inappropriately dressed” by a passenger, who was then forced out of the vehicle by bystanders who intervened on Rashno’s behalf . According to human rights group Hrana, Rashno was beaten after her arrest and then forced to apologize on television to the passenger who molested her. Rasno is not the first person to suffer violent repression as a result of going viral on the internet. In 2014, six Iranians – three men and three women – were sentenced to a year in prison and 91 lashes after a video of them dancing in Tehran to Pharrell Williams’ song Happy had more than 150,000 views. Since 2015, the Iranian government has been gradually implementing biometric IDs, which include a chip that stores data such as iris scans, fingerprints and facial images. Researchers worry that this information will now be used with facial recognition technology to track down people breaking the mandatory dress code, both on the streets and in cyberspace. “A large part of the Iranian population is now in this national biometric data bank, as many public services depend on biometric identities,” Akbari said. “So the government has access to all persons. they know where people come from and can easily find them. A person in a viral video can be identified in seconds.” He added: “By doing this, the government is proving a point: ‘Don’t think that a little thing that happens on a bus somewhere is going to be forgotten. We know who you are and we will find you and then you will have to suffer the consequences.” An Iranian policeman talks to a woman in Tehran. Photo: Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images “Ebrahim Raisi is a real ideologue,” said Annabelle Sreberny, emeritus professor at the Center for Iranian Studies at Soas University, London. “There are dire economic and environmental problems facing Iran. Inflation may now be as high as 50%, but the government chooses to focus on women’s rights.” Sreberni added: “I think it’s part and parcel of a failed government that just doesn’t deal with these huge infrastructure, economic and environmental issues. And women are considered a soft target.”
