If the Iranian authorities resort to tactics as brutal as archaic to suppress the movement of revolt that is shaking the country, they can also embrace modernity.
Since last September and the murder of Mahsa Amini by the country’s morality police for having worn her hijab badly, huge demonstrations have broken out across the country, to demand more freedoms, especially for women. The latter are also more and more likely to come out with their hair in the air in protest, a movement that the Iranian authorities want to stop by all means, including facial recognition.
Entrust inhuman work to robots
Iran’s government isn’t particularly known for its softness on opponents, but the past few weeks have shown just how brutal it can be, starting to execute more and more young protesters after speedy trials. To these executions must be added the more than 19,000 arrests made since the start of the movement. While a large proportion of them are carried out by old-fashioned “law enforcement” work, Iranians have noticed that they are increasingly occurring several days after the alleged events, especially when these facts are a refusal to wear the hijab.
Facial recognition is obviously not the only way to explain this phenomenon, but Iranian and international observers are still looking in its direction with insistence. And they have good reason to do so: two weeks before Mahsa Amini’s death, Iranian lawmakers had explicitly recommended the use of facial recognition to identify ” inappropriate behavior ” including ” disobeying the law of hijab “.
Iranians in the footsteps of the Chinese
If this transition to facial recognition to force the wearing of the hijab is proven, it constitutes a sad first: the first time that this technology is used to impose a dress code on women in the world. This would follow the trend observed by human rights researchers in the region. Cathryn Grothe is one of them, and interviewed by Wired, she explains that for years now Iran has gradually moved away from informants and human labor to focus on the possibilities offered by the new technologies.
In 2021, a report showed that this technology had been developed in Iran thanks to a partnership with China, which has become a world expert in policing its own population for years now. But conversely, the Chinese opponents have shown that it could also be possible to a large extent to thwart the tool, by wearing outfits with patterned faces or by using an obvious irony, but that the machine can not understand, for example.
Sources: Wired, Gizmodo
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