>Several harsh prison sentences were handed down during the reporting period in retaliation for online activities. Mostafa Abdi, an editor of the news site Majzooban Noor, was sentenced to 26 years in prison and 74 lashes in August 2018. Five other journalists at the outlet received sentences ranging from 7 to 12 years (see C3).
Did they draw the government's attention because they were connecting to banned websites or because they were running a high-profile news outlet?
It's seems unlikely to me that the Iranian government would be able to prosecute even a small fraction of instances of the former, whereas there's only a small number of high-profile news outlets at any given time.
Due process is not really a thing in Iran. If the Government wants you in prison, they will throw you in on flimsy pretexts. Which is why journalists need to be extra careful: they don’t just need to hide their activities but need to hide any trace or hints of participating in those activities. Outspoken people will be monitored closely, and even an attempt to access signal (say) could be used by the Government to imprison the user.
Signal is end-to-end encrypted. The only thing the network surveillance would be able to determine is that you were connecting to Signal via an open Signal proxy, not the people you were talking to, or the content of your messages.
When proxying, who you're talking to can be determined from large-scale network surveillance. You look for patterns of messages sent from your device and messages of the same size received by another device immediately after.
Yes? To some people just that fact would be revealing of needing to use Signal, it could be used in prosecution. Especially in the case where most people would not be using it at the moment.
Revealing the fact that one uses Signal can be an issue on itself.
https://freedomhouse.org/country/iran/freedom-net/2019
>Several harsh prison sentences were handed down during the reporting period in retaliation for online activities. Mostafa Abdi, an editor of the news site Majzooban Noor, was sentenced to 26 years in prison and 74 lashes in August 2018. Five other journalists at the outlet received sentences ranging from 7 to 12 years (see C3).