Morality? There’s an app for that.

[STINGER]

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: So if you heard the last couple of episodes, you probably noticed we did
something a little different. We might have sounded a little like, well, a public radio show. There’s a
good reason for that. We created five special CLICK HERE shows that are going out to over 100 public
radio stations across the country. And if you didn’t hear them on the airwaves, we thought we’d give
you a chance to hear them here. We’re going to play all five of them here through the holiday season.

These are the same Click Here shows you’ve come to know: stories about the people making and
breaking our digital world. But these are in a little different format. And today’s show looks at modern
digital morality. We hope you like it.

[STINGER]

TEMPLE-RASTON: We begin in Iraq, where the government created an unusual app to police what it
perceives as ‘indecent content.’ And the app got its start, of all places, at a soccer game.

[MUSIC FROM THE GULF CUP]

TEMPLE-RASTON: The 25th Arabian Gulf Cup. Think of World Cup soccer but for the eight Gulf States.

[ANNOUNCER VOICE FROM OPENING CEREMONY IN JANUARY 2023]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Iraq hosted it back in January.

[HIGHLIGHTS IRAQ VS OMAN ARABIAN GULF CUP FINALS 2023]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Hundreds of thousands of people showed up to watch the matches. In fact there
were so many people, even fans who’d bought tickets couldn’t get into the stadium. With one notable
exception…

AIMAN: What happened then was a couple of, uh, social media influencers, or what they call
fashionistas, they were able to get VIP seats, uh, on almost all the games.

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TEMPLE-RASTON: This is Aiman. He’s a pharmacist in Iraq who is also an avid consumer of social
media. We are only using his first name because his own posts could get him in trouble with the
authorities. And according to Aiman, just seeing those influencers on social media sitting in VIP boxes
at the Arabian Gulf Cup game, it drove people crazy.

They got so upset that the influencers had used their connections to get these coveted seats, it
launched a kind of online resistance movement: ordinary people began to flag anything those
influencers posted from inside the game.

AIMAN: So that's what sparked the hashtag [Arabic] or what they call “cancel indecent content.”

TEMPLE-RASTON: And is it because they're really after “indecent content” or do they feel like these
influencers have too much power?

AIMAN: I think that's how it started, but the government also found a good way to like implement
such a law that gives them so much power of whatever is being published on the internet.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And that’s exactly what the government did. Just days after this all erupted, Iraq’s
Ministry of Interior said it would form a committee and figure out a way for Iraqis to alert authorities
to anything they found offensive on social media.

And then they created an app for that: they called it Ballegh! Or Report! Although Snitch! Is probably a
better description.

[MINISTRY OF INTERIOR BALLEGH ANNOUNCEMENT VIDEO]

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is a Facebook video post from the Ministry of Interior announcing the app.

[MINISTRY OF INTERIOR VIDEO AND FADE UNDER]

TEMPLE-RASTON: It’s easy to do, the video says. Open the app, there’s a field to paste links to any
“indecent content” you find and then all you have to do is hit send. And what sorts of things should
you report, it asks? Anything that seems an affront to, and I’m quoting here, “the general taste.”

AIMAN: General taste, no idea what that means. It's so vague and like doesn't have any meaning.
AIMAN: Also, what is indecent content and to who is it indecent? Those are the questions that we
should ask, right?

[MUSIC IN]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Something Aiman worries about, because of how he spends a lot of his time. When
he’s not taking care of his customers at the pharmacy, he does what a lot of people do: he pulls out
his phone and starts scrolling.

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TEMPLE-RASTON: Do you spend a lot of time on social media?

AIMAN: I kind of do. I guess I do.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: And Aiman’s favorite platform is X, formerly known as Twitter.

[TWEET SOUND FX]

AIMAN: I don't like Instagram and like the whole Mark Zuckerberg-thing. I'm not into that…

TEMPLE-RASTON: So he settled for Elon Musk. And during his breaks at work, he picks up his phone
and just starts typing

[TYPING FX]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Whatever comes to mind, even if it might get him in trouble.

AIMAN: I actually tweet a lot of controversial things, that doesn't go with the status quo, really
progressive ideas.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Give me some examples. What do you mean?

AIMAN: So let's say, right now in Ramadan, uh, you can get arrested if you eat during the fasting
hours. So I go on Twitter and say, “This is the dumbest thing ever.” People can eat and cannot eat
whenever they like. You should not be arrested for not practicing a religious act. And a lot of people
took offense to that.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And now he’s worried, people might not just take offense, they might get the
government to arrest him. And his concern isn’t without precedent, it feels like an echo from the past.

[MUSIC BUMP]

TEMPLE-RASTON: After Sadam Hussein was overthrown 20 years ago, Iraq got a new constitution.
And the constitution guaranteed things like freedom of expression. But there was a notable exception:
when that expression violated what they called public morality. But here’s the rub: There was no
definition as to what that meant, and that is what paved the way for the Ballegh! or Report! app.
Anything could be a moral violation, it was all in the eyes of the beholder. But people didn’t see it that
way at first.

AIMAN: A lot of people didn't really see how bad it was at first because they were really focused on
those quote unquote fashionistas.

TEMPLE-RASTON: As he saw it, ordinary Iraqis were too focused on annoying VIP soccer fans to see
the longer term ramifications.

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AIMAN: A lot of our parents and a lot of like the old demographic of Iraq, they grew up in war-torn
times. A lot of old Iraqis really gravitate towards authoritarian systems.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Because it makes them feel more comfortable?

AIMAN: Exactly. It makes them feel more comfortable cause they're really familiar with it, through the
whole Saddam Hussein era.

TEMPLE-RASTON: In fact, Aiman says when the Ministry launched the app even his dad thought it was
fine.

AIMAN: Me and my dad had a real long conversation about this, and we came to an agreement. He
was kind of for it at the beginning, but after we talked, he kind of changed his mind because I pointed
out some things to him that he probably didn’t see or, you know.

TEMPLE-RASTON: What happens when this app goes beyond tallying complaints about annoying rich
people, and morphs into a state-run app the government can use to silence any speech it doesn’t
like?

[MUSIC OUT]

ALI AL BAYATI: So to be honest, all of us as Iraqis, sometimes we feel that we are uh, trapped in this
system. We don't know whether we are in democratic or authoritarian.

TEMPLE-RASTON:This is Ali Al Bayati. He used to be a member of the Iraqi High Commission for
Human Rights. And he says nowhere is that tension more apparent than in the debate over what can
or can’t be said in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.

AL BAYATI: We don't know whether we need to stay silent because speaking out is useless, or we need
to do that because it is our system, our country, and it is part of the constitution.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Al Bayati says the app is a high-tech iteration of something that’s been going on in
Iraq for generations.

AL BAYATI: Before 2003, I can remember the advice of our parents in our house. And it was, be
careful, sometimes the door can hear you or listen to you when you are talking.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And the door can especially hear you when you’re posting on social media. Al Bayati
worries that instead of the government agents he saw as a child, physically tracking down critics of
Saddam’s Ba’ath regime, now the government has something much more powerful and pervasive…

[MUSIC FADING IN]

TEMPLE-RASTON: The app has turned everyone into a possible agent of the government, and all they
have to do is click.

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AL BAYATI: Repeating again the same copy of Ba’ath regime, but in a different way.

TEMPLE-RASTON: We asked Iraq’s Ministry of Interior to put us in touch with the government official
in charge of the app: His name is Ayad Radhi. His English wasn’t great, so he answered all our
questions via text. He justified the app with a phrase you often hear from governments that institute
these kinds of vaguely shaped morality crackdowns. He said that lots of people are reporting affronts
to what the government characterizes as “ family values.” People are reporting their neighbors, he
added, simply because they are quote, “fighting tooth and nail for their families.”

[MUSIC BUMP]

TEMPLE-RASTON: The fears around this app have already been proven out. In just the first few
months it was launched, at least a dozen people had been arrested. Aiman walked us through some
of those cases.

AIMAN: Let me tell you about two. One of them is called Hassan al-Shamri.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Hassan makes TikTok videos and he needed a woman for one of his skits, but he
lives in Southern Iraq, which is fairly religious.

AIMAN: They think women should not go on TV. So he had to make do, because he needed a female
character.

[HASSAN AL-SHAMRI TIKTOK SKITS]

AIMAN: So he dressed like one and they arrested him for playing a woman in his TikTok skits.

[HASSAN AL-SHAMRI TIKTOK SKITS]

AIMAN: So that was his crime, I guess.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Or consider the case of Assal Hossam, another TikToker with a huge following

AIMAN: She was sentenced to two years because, uh, she was dressing provocatively or something.
She showed a little bit of skin on her TikToks and she was sentenced for two years.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Do you know Abboud Skiba?

AIMAN: Yes, I do. Abboud Skiba was the next one on the list.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Abboud Skiba is a construction worker with a kind of unusual talent.

[ABBOUD SKIBA VIDEO]

AIMAN: He’s basically a guy who perfected the English accent without ever speaking a coherent
sentence or a word.

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TEMPLE-RASTON: He speaks gibberish essentially.

[ABBOUD SKIBA VIDEO]

TEMPLE-RASTON: So Why would that be flagged as indecent?

AIMAN: I guess some people find it not funny. You can be reported for just being annoying online.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Which is one of the many perils of having a rule that is so open to interpretation.
You say annoying, your neighbor says indecent.

AIMAN: And I think it was kept vague for a reason so they can, like, arrest people. And play within the
lines of the law.

[MUSIC OUT]

MARWA FATAFTA: I mean essentially you are turning citizens into police officers, right?

TEMPLE-RASTON: Marwa Fatafta works for the digital advocacy group Access Now and she says the
app has become a kind of open season on expression.

FATAFTA: Given it's, you know, it's very vague and elastic nature for me, it's almost like you're telling
Iraqis to walk between the raindrops without getting wet, like, good luck with that.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And the arbiter of right and wrong is now a government office with a very
checkered past.

FATAFTA: In a country like Iraq, as soon as the Ministry of Interior gets involved in regulating people's
speech and deciding what and what is not allowed to be said and done online, you know that freedom
of expression is in big trouble.

TEMPLE-RASTON: That’s because the Ministry of Interior is also the government body that oversees
policing in Iraq. Under Saddam Hussein one of the Ministry of Interior’s responsibilities was finding
and silencing his critics. Marwa Fatafta says now the government is silencing comedians and satirists.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Is there a reason for that? Lack of sense of humor?

FATAFTA: I wouldn't dare to say publicly that Iraqis don't have a sense of humor. I think the
government doesn't have a sense of humor.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Fatafta is concerned that the government will only widen the net. Comedians and
satirists and dancers today, political dissidents and investigative journalists tomorrow. And then,
everyday people after that.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Has your behavior changed at all as a result of this app?

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AIMAN: Well no, I don't have a big following.

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is Aiman, the Twitter loving pharmacist again.

AIMAN: So I don't really care. I'm relying on the incompetence of the government so they can’t find
me.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Got it. And when people actually say to you, Hey, I'm gonna report you, what’s your
response?

AIMAN: I just blocked them and moved on with my life.

[MUSIC OUT]

TEMPLE-RASTON: But before moving on with his life completely, Aiman did tweet out a thread about
the dangers of the snitch app, to try to get his friends and family to think twice about using it.

AIMAN: So this is in Iraqi dialect, so it's not like proper Arabic, just like, okay.

[AIMAN READS TWEET IN ARABIC]

AIMAN: You are bright and educated people. You can influence your friends and families. If you let the
country or the government control your freedom of speech, this is the beginning of the end.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Don't let the government tell you what to post and when not to post, because you
all know how easily it can be weaponized and they can arrest anyone that disagrees with them with
any idea. And we go back to the dark ages where you can be jailed solely for your thoughts.

TEMPLE-RASTON: It's very poetic.

AIMAN: I am very poetic, thank you very much.

TEMPLE-RASTON: When we hear about this kind of overreach in a country like Iraq, it is easy to write
all this off as a carry-over from the Saddam Hussein era, a despot’s effort to keep people in line. But it
turns out this kind of digital snooping and snitching is happening a lot closer to home, and you might
have already opted into it.

TEASER CLIP: Every app that you download, your phone is a snitch, it’s a snitch in your pocket.

TEMPLE-RASTON: That’s after the break. This is Click Here, stay with us.

[MUSIC]

[BREAK]

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[STINGER]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Today we’re bringing you stories about how some authorities are weaponizing
technology to enforce their standard of morality. Earlier, we saw how neighbors turned on neighbors
in Iraq. But this next story shows you may not even need a third party to rat you out. Your phone can
do it all on its own.

We all know now that the apps we use, the websites we visit — they’re all tracking our locations,
revealing our identities, tagging our interests. But what might be less understood is that all that
information is being sold to someone else, someone who might use that data against you in some
very unsettling ways.

[MUSIC IN]

TEMPLE-RASTON: For Lattice Fisher, It all started with a 911 call in Starkville, Mississippi. Lattice was
already a mother of three. And she’d given birth to a stillborn, so she called paramedics for help.

LAURIE BERTRAM ROBERTS: From the moment they arrived at her house, they alleged at least in
the media publicly, and even in, in other places that they found the scene suspicious.

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is Laurie Bertram Roberts, a local activist based in Jackson, Mississippi. And
while there was nothing to suggest that Lattice Fisher had had anything but a stillbirth, events
started to unfold with a momentum of their own. Suddenly there was an investigation, a grand jury,
and about a year after the stillbirth, Lattice Fisher was arrested and charged with second degree
murder for the death of her child.

ROBERTS: I get a Facebook message, it’s not even a phone call, with a link to the story with Latice’s
mugshot on the front of the story.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Which is how Laurie Roberts got involved. She started helping Lattice Fisher. And
while Lattice declined to talk to us on the record, she did agree to allow Laurie Roberts to tell her
story because Laurie was right there when it all happened.

If you Google the Lattice Fisher mugshot it’s heartbreaking, it captures a woman in an oversized
orange prison shirt who looks like she’s just stopped crying long enough to pose for the photograph.
There’s one of those police measurement tapes behind her on the wall. 63 inches tall, 5’3” but she
looks even smaller.

ROBERTS: If you're not moved by her mugshot, like just the visible pain and anguish on her face.
Um, I don't know what to say about you as a human. I was just so disturbed by that picture.

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[MUSIC OUT]

TEMPLE-RASTON: The mugshot, and the story, made national headlines, and the grand jury
indictment accused Lattice Fisher of a particular kind of murder. They said baby Fisher wasn’t a
stillborn, but instead was killed quote, evincing a depraved heart, which is actually a legal term. It
essentially means Fisher showed indifference to a human life.

ROBERTS: They had her all over the newspaper as this person who had murdered a baby, when she
did no such thing.

TEMPLE-RASTON: But the more Roberts looked into the case, the more concerned she became.
Because it appeared to hinge on a “test” that dates back to the 17th century.

ROBERTS: It's literally from the sixteen hundreds. It's an invalid, non-scientific test.

TEMPLE-RASTON: It’s called the float test and it’s performed by placing lung tissue into water and
observing whether the tissue floats or sinks. According to the state of Mississippi, an airless lung,
one that has never taken in air, sinks. And a lung that floats is seen as an indication of having taken
at least one breath.

It all sounds bizarrely like the test they used in the witch trials in the 17th century. They used to tie
up someone they suspected was a witch and they’d throw them into deep water. If they sank to the
bottom, they were human, if they floated, well, they were witches. The lung float test appeared
around that same time.

ROBERTS: It's one of the things that's used to prosecute people in stillbirth cases for home birth. So
it's one of the things that if you're in the birth justice community, you know!

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: But there was something else that Fisher’s case hinged on. When she was arrested
by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation the agents asked if she had her cell phone with her.

ROBERTS: As she's leaving, they're like, make sure you have your phone so you can call your
husband when you're done. She's like, okay. So she gets her phone when she gets in the SUV.

TEMPLE-RASTON: They drive downtown, they lead her into an interrogation room, and they ask her
to surrender her phone.

9
ROBERTS: And she tried to resist that, but they were like, we'll hold you here until you give us your
password.

TEMPLE-RASTON: They have a warrant to search it.

ROBERTS: And then they went through her search history and they were, like, she said, they were
giddy when they found it.

TEMPLE-RASTON: The “it” in this case was what she had been searching for on her phone. It turns
that her search history revealed that at some point during her pregnancy she had looked for
abortion pills. Abortion was legal at the time, and there was no indication that she had bought any
or taken any, but prosecutors said the search itself went to motive and intent, it suggested she
didn’t want this baby.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: The case was eventually dismissed without any real explanation. But in the wake
of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade it has raised an uncomfortable question. As
states begin to outlaw abortion, will people’s private digital footprints become evidence against
them in court? Researcher Zach Edwards says there’s no need for a neighbor to snitch on you.

ZACH EDWARDS: Your phone is the snitch in your pocket. Every app that you download, the
permissions that you give that app, all of the other companies that are integrated into that app also
get those same permissions. And that's where the trust fall happens.

TEMPLE-RASTON: The thing is we leave digital footprints behind us all the time. Sometimes
intentionally but just as often without realizing that we’ve given the apps on our phones permission
to follow us around… to track our locations and searches and then bundle up all that information
and sell it to some third party. And then they can use that data in ways we never dreamed of.

Consider this thing that happened in 2015. A mobile marketing firm had a handful of anti-abortion
clients. And one of the people in that firm offered, in a very market-y way, to identify people who
were seeking abortions and then try to stop them. He said he could send targeted ads by text or
email to women who were actually sitting inside Planned Parenthood clinics and then send them
messages urging them to “be informed” and “get the facts first.”

Then they’d provide links to the anti-abortion group websites. Imagine getting one of those while
you’re waiting to see the doctor. It would freak people out.

EDWARDS: Those types of ads have been happening for years and that's easy peasy.

10
TEMPLE-RASTON: Zach Edwards is an expert in data brokers, the people who package your data and
sell it to marketers and advertisers. And he says that kind of location targeting is pretty
straightforward.

EDWARDS: The concept of just being like, I have a hundred thousand a month and I want to target
around this circle a half mile circle. Yeah. So you may get some of the residential people around
them. Who cares? You're going to definitely get that abortion clinic, too.

[MUSIC IN]

TEMPLE-RASTON: The phones we carry, the apps we download, the things we search for all reveal a
little bit about who we are: our interests, our demographics, who we hang out with. Lots of things
that we don’t think twice about because it never occurred to us that it would ever be public. And
data brokers can vacuum all that up, package it, and create an anonymous profile from these daily
routines. Then they sell it to people. There’s a name for it: it’s called pattern data.

EDWARDS: There's at least half a dozen data brokers that are selling pattern data at the moment.

TEMPLE-RASTON: They can figure out that someone is a woman of childbearing age or that she
recently visited an abortion clinic.

EDWARDS: Let me get my screen sharing going on here…

TEMPLE-RASTON: Edwards showed me exactly how it worked and it was crazy how easy it was.

EDWARDS: So placer.AI is one of the data brokers that…

TEMPLE-RASTON: On his screen is the homepage of a data broker called placer.AI. It has a system
that holds all the data they've gathered on people. And all you have to do is login and then you can
do a search through that data really easily. You just go to the search bar and, say, type in an address
or even just the words ‘Planned Parenthood.’

Zach Edwards shows how easy it is to track someone who visited a Planned Parenthood in Texas. He
hits a couple keys and what pops up is one of those satellite images from google maps, he zooms in
on three houses set in a very velvety green field.

EDWARDS: So right now, we are looking at a map of a rural location where one of the three houses
on this screen visited a Planned Parenthood.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So how do you know that?

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EDWARDS: When you have access to this system, you're able to search for a property name…

TEMPLE-RASTON: A property name like, say, Planned Parenthood….

EDWARDS: And then immediately you will be shown details about where people started before they
came to that location.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So you can see where people were right before going to the clinic. And if you zoom
into the starting point and it happens to be a house, well, you’ve probably found where they live.

EDWARDS: And you can also parse different details about the audience. So this is a data broker, so
they are going to have demographic data and other data that's available to layer on top of this
location data.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Demographic data that reveals whether a woman lives there, which could explain
who might have just been at Planned Parenthood. Or perhaps a doctor lives there, and that person
might be performing abortions. And if the person looking through all this data happens to be sitting
in one of those states where abortion is now criminalized, this kind of search could give them all
they need to call the police and report someone they suspect of having or performing an abortion.

EDWARDS: It’s a choose your own non-compliant data adventure brought to you by big tech and
basically allowed because we have no laws to speak of.

TEMPLE-RASTON: In a statement, placer.AI said that aside from a few researchers, they have no
record of anyone doing this kind of search. But anyone could have done it right up until last year,
when a story in Motherboard revealed how easy it was. After that story, placer.AI tweaked its search
engine to make it hard to pinpoint things like this, but it didn’t remove the underlying data. So while
you can’t automatically search the phrase “Planned Parenthood” anymore, you could put in the
address, if you knew it…

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Placer.AI said it has an ongoing effort to quote “remove all sensitive places from
our system.” But even after their tweaks, Edwards says he can still re-create his search without too
much trouble. He just kept modifying it until he got what he was looking for. Say there was a florist
or a drugstore a block away from the Planned Parenthood, you could search for that and trace the
activity from there to narrow it down.

EDWARDS: You just search for something else. You add a word or two, you remove a word or two to
just refine your own query…

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TEMPLE-RASTON: A searchable dataset like this is especially troubling in a place like Texas. They’ve
passed a law that provides a $10,000 bounty to citizens who report abortions.

EDWARDS: This is the dystopic scenario where everyone is a sheriff, you know, uh, I am the law type
of stuff. And the snitch in your pocket is the snitch next door that wants to get a $10,000 bounty
that costs them a dollar 50 to buy your pattern data.

TEMPLE-RASTON: All of this gets even more troubling if you’re doing these searches in rural areas,
where there are fewer people, it’s easier to pinpoint who is who. And with all of this data floating out
there, right now there is very little regulation around how it is collected and sold. So companies have
relatively free rein to do what they want. And while there is some momentum building for some kind
of data protection law here in the U.S., that could take years. In the meantime, some people are
taking data protection into their own hands.

[MUSIC UP AND OUT]

FUGATE MONTAGE: I’ve used Garmin fitness tracking apps, Samsung fitness tracking, Apple fitness
tracking…

TEMPLE-RASTON: Rayven Fugate lives in Tennessee. And until recently she was one of those people
who had downloaded all those health apps on her phone.

FUGATE: Like MyCycle. I used to use, um, Flow…

TEMPLE-RASTON: The Flow app tracks when you’re having cramps or other period systems.

FUGATE: And I used it to track the variations of my period as it came and went to try and seek
proper contraception.

TEMPLE-RASTON: It can predict ovulation, and then, if you were to become pregnant, you can add
that information to the app, too.

FUGATE: You can export the data and take it to your doctor. So if you were to become pregnant and
you were having high blood pressure or something like that, the app tracks that, and you could take
it to your doctor and let them see it.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Sounds simple enough, and super helpful. But Fugate says she now sees it
through a different lens.

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FUGATE: But if you're someone who has no intention of keeping the pregnancy and need to seek
termination and they have that information through an app, they might be able to track you down
and use it against you.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So, are those still on your phone?

FUGATE: They are not. As soon as I got wind of the potential overturn, I deleted the data and deleted
the apps to try and make sure that none of my information was there because the fear of someone
trying to see that data and use it against me somehow is not something that I'm interested in.

TEMPLE-RASTON: One company called “Narrative”sold user information linked to specific apps
including from those period tracking apps you can download. While the data didn’t include
information harvested from fertility apps themselves, it did provide a list of devices that have
installed the apps, which means it could have identified users like Rayven.

When news stories reported on this, many brokers, including Narrative, stopped selling data linked
to fertility apps. Even so, if this seems alarmist or hypothetical, ask the Catholic priest who was
outed after a Catholic news site was able to analyze data on Grindr, the gay dating app. People are
actually using app data to target others.

[MUSIC IN]

ROBERTS: I feel like I sound like a conspiracy theorist, but this is all stuff that's verified. Like this isn't
stuff that like Laurie says, like I'm not no big tech guru. This is all stuff that I had to learn because of
the work I do.

TEMPLE-RASTON: That’s Laurie Roberts again, the person who helped Lattice Fisher with her case in
Mississippi. And she says even if you take steps to protect yourself digitally, the weakest link might
not be the technology. As with most tech issues, the biggest problem is probably of the human
variety.

ROBERTS: I want to stress right now, not just that you erase the digital evidence and that you use a
VPN and that you use stuff like Signal and that you, you know, that you use these things to protect
yourself digitally. But also, close your mouth.

TEMPLE-RASTON: The snitches, it appears, are everywhere.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: When we come back, we go to Iran where protestors are skirting a government
crackdown in really creative ways.

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TEASER CLIP: I think people who post these videos just want to be seen or they want their voice to
be heard.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Stay with us.

[BREAK]

[STINGER]

TEMPLE-RASTON: I'm Dina Temple-Raston. And this is Click Here. Today, we’re looking at what
happens when authorities use digital weapons to impose their vision of morality on ordinary citizens.
Across the globe, authorities have launched apps, tracked phones, and used people's data against
them in increasingly hostile ways. All of which has forced people to get creative. And it turns out this
virtual battle can be sparked by things that take on an unexpected life of their own. Which is how our
third story begins: with a single photograph taken from inside an Iranian prison.

[SOUND FX]

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: It showed a young man named Khodanoor Lajei. His hands and feet were shackled
to a pole, and there was a glass of water a short distance away from him.Apparently he complained
to his guards that he was thirsty, so they got Khodanoor some water and then put it just out of his
reach. The photograph went viral.

[SOUND OF PROTESTS]

TEMPLE-RASTON: And then as fate would have it, a few weeks later, a young woman named Mahsa
Amini was arrested. Apparently she was not wearing her hijab modestly enough for Iran’s morality
police. And then she died while in custody. So the Khodanoor photograph sent ripples through
Iranian society. And then the death of Mahsa Amini seemed like the final straw. Something seemed
to snap. The headline on the protests was regime change…

[PROTEST SOUNDS]

TEMPLE-RASTON: But beneath the surface the demonstrations were really about small, deeply
personal things. Young Iranians want the freedom not just to dress how they want to dress, but to
love who they want to love and say what they wanted to say.

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[SOUND OF PROTESTS]

TEMPLE-RASTON: All of which was unacceptable to the conservative leadership in Tehran. The
crackdown was swift: there were shootings, large-scale arrests, and public executions.

[MUSIC OUT]

TEMPLE-RASTON: And the protests died down, or at least did on the surface.

HOSSAIN: Thousands of people in the street protested against the regime or the supreme leader.
But now you can see some more creative ways to show their protest.

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is someone we’ll call Hossain. We spoke to him when the protests were at
their height, and we reached out to him again this past spring. He was living in Tehran, and he says,
if you know where to look, the green shoots of dissent are everywhere. Take what happened when a
rare snow fell on Tehran last winter sending everyone into the parks to play.

HOSSAIN: Usually people, mostly young people, go outside to play with the snow. They make
snowmen.

TEMPLE-RASTON: But here’s the thing, they weren’t just making traditional snowmen. This other
figure began to appear…

[MUSIC IN]

TEMPLE-RASTON: A snowman who was hunched over, his arms wrapped around a pole in a familiar
position.

HOSSAIN: It was formed like Khodanoor Lajei.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Khodanoor, the prisoner reaching for water, whose photo went viral.

HOSSAIN: And that made me so emotional that you see people are playing with the snow, but at the
same time they are thinking of protestors who are not [with] us today.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And it isn’t just snowmen. Khodanoor Lajei seems to pop up in the most
unexpected place now. Students have been recreating his tortured pose in flash mobs on campus.
On the soccer pitch, players have taken to doing a Khodanoor on the field after they score a goal.

[SOUND FROM SOCCER GAME]

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[MUSIC OUT]

TEMPLE-RASTON: But the protests went well beyond snowmen and soccer games. They shifted into
the virtual world where protesters could more easily mask their identities and where it was harder
for the authorities to track them. The VPN or Virtual Private Network became a must have. Think of a
VPN as a kind of head fake in cyberspace. It hides your IP address, making it look like you’re logging
in from somewhere else. You could log in from Tehran, but the VPN makes it look like you’re in Texas
so anyone can log into a website that Iran has banned, like Instagram or Facebook. But when the
authorities realized what was happening, they started targeting the VPNs themselves.

MANI MOSTOFI: They've always disrupted VPNs, but now what we see is like a daily aggressive effort
on their part to do it.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Mani Mostofi is an Iranian lawyer and human rights advocate. He leads the Miaan
group, which, among other things, helps protect Iranians online. He’s based in the U.S. but works
with protestors on the ground in Tehran. And he says finding a working VPN in Iran, and staying on
it, is getting harder and harder.

MOSTOFI: Keeping VPNs online in an authoritarian setting is always a cat and mouse game, so the
VPN goes up, it's working for a little while, the Iranian government gets bored of it or sick of it and
attacks it. And then the VPN provider has to provide a response.

TEMPLE-RASTON: It is a constant, ongoing battle.

MOSTOFI: We talk to and work with a lot of these VPN providers, and they are really struggling to
keep up with both the demand but also the tactics of the government.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Normally, you can expect a VPN to work for weeks, months even. But in Iran, Mani
said he’s seeing VPNs go down after just a few hours. Some of that might be linked to a huge
increase in demand, but it’s also due to stepped up attacks by the regime.

MOSTOFI: The way the Iranian government is handling these moments is by just making the overall
environment more restrictive. And I am sure there are people who have these videos or document
these acts of civil disobedience that we don't see in part because they're not getting online or, or
they're just being discouraged, right? They don't want to try the 10th VPN.

TEMPLE-RASTON: But that’s not always efficient, attacking one VPN at a time.

MOSTOFI: They could eventually block that VPN. It's just like how much energy do they need to put
into doing it successfully?

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[MUSIC IN]

TEMPLE-RASTON: So the government appears to be getting sneakier. Consider the case of Argo.

MOSTOFI: Then we saw a couple months later, more recently, attacking of a very popular VPN called
Argo VPN, which was doing better than other VPNs and getting people online during all of this crisis.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Argo, like the Ben Affleck movie. Remember, it was about Canada hiding
Americans in Tehran during the hostage crisis.

MOSTOFI: And all of a sudden, fake versions of our Argo VPN were circulating, and those fake
versions were stealing people's users. They were forms of spyware.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Social engineering at its best. Here’s a free VPN. All you have to do…is click.

MOSTOFI: It very strategically uses people's own desperation to get online against them to make the
internet less secure for them.

TEMPLE-RASTON: But it isn’t just VPNs. When Elon Musk announced he’d introduce Starlink internet
access in Iran, state-sponsored hackers began creating fake links. “Click here, and you can
download Starlink on your phone, your computer,” it said. And then when you click, malware is
loaded on your device.

[SOUND EFFECT: “Accessing database”]

TEMPLE-RASTON: And it isn’t just Iranian citizens in the crosshairs. The government is also targeting
anyone who’s trying to help them. Consider the case of a human rights worker in the US working
with Iranians. She got an email from someone posing as a journalist from the Washington Post. They
were asking for help with a story and asked to meet her on Zoom and they sent her a link to the
meeting. Sherrod DeGrippo, who does threat research, said she found that the link wasn’t what it
seemed.

SHERROD DEGRIPPO: You click the link and it looks like a login to Zoom, but in fact it's a login to a
threat actor's landing page.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So they're playing on comradery.

DEGRIPPO: A hundred percent. That's the best way to do it.

[MUSIC IN]

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DEGRIPPO: I think certain kinds of social engineering are most benefited by an idea of common goal
because rapport is hard to build over internet communication. But you can have a little bit of
rapport instantly if it appears that you're a part of the same circles.

TEMPLE-RASTON: That's pretty smart.

DEGRIPPO: Oh, yeah. The threat actors are smart. They know what they're doing.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Sherrod and others suspect at least some of these attacks are the work of some
hackers with an unexpected name. They’re called Charming Kitten. They’re a hacking group linked
to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, which appears to be leading not just the suppression of the
original street protests, but the online offensive too. And the voices online are only growing louder.

[MUSIC BUMP]

TEMPLE-RASTON: They are also just generally trying to slow down communications. Months after the
protests had died down, we spoke with someone we’ll call Amin. He was one of the people in Tehran
out in the streets protesting and he has since moved to New York. And he says, even a simple phone
call home is an exercise in frustration now.

AMIN: So I would say when we want to talk around, only around half the time it works. The other
time I wanted to talk to my sister, we spent almost an hour trying to talk to each other. Every time
we get connected, we would lose the connection after 30 seconds or a minute. And, you know, she
just collapsed emotionally and she started crying and we had to do it some other time.

TEMPLE-RASTON: In a lot of ways the Iranian leadership’s attempts to muzzle the opposition were
easier during the street protests. They could just detain and arrest people. Digital protests are more
diffuse, so authorities have a harder time knowing where they’ll pop up and how to stop them. Like
this video, documenting defiance on the fringes of an engineering conference in Tehran.

ZAINAB KAZEMPOUR: Hello…

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is Zainab Kazempour, an engineer attendee of a conference captured on a

cellphone video back in February. She’s wearing dark skinny jeans, an oversized black jacket. And
her headscarf is draped around her neck. And as she begins to address the crowd, an ordinary
meeting becomes an extraordinary moment of protest. Zainab pulls a long shiny ponytail onto her
shoulder and the crowd began to cheer.

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[SOUND FROM KAZEMPOUR VIDEO]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Zainab explains that someone just told her that in order to run for a seat on the
organization’s board, her hair must be covered, and she’s having none of it. “I won’t legitimize an
association that doesn’t allow women in without a Hijab,” she says.

[SOUND FROM KAZEMPOUR VIDEO]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Someone, somewhere, cuts her mic in mid-sentence. And as she exits, she slowly
unwinds her scarf from around her neck and tosses it over her shoulder. The audience watches as it
floats in midair and then softly lands in front of a giant portrait of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah
Khamenei.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: This solitary moment of protest committed behind auditorium doors in a corner of
Tehran might never have gone any further, had someone not captured it on their cell phone and
then posted it online. The video slipped past censors, found its way to one of those functioning VPNs,
and then spread like wildfire.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: The government authorities seem to have caught up to her a short time later. Less
than a week after that video went viral, Zainab appeared in a new one.

[SOUND FROM KAZEMPOUR VIDEO]

TEMPLE-RASTON: This time, her hair was covered and her face was solemn.

[SOUND FROM KAZEMPOUR VIDEO]

TEMPLE-RASTON: And she was apologizing for her outburst at the conference. And, according to
Iranwire, an independent news service for the Iranian diaspora, the state has charged her with
disrespecting the Hijab.

MOSTOFI: What we've seen in those cases is they sometimes don't try to punish people who are that
visible because these are sort of one-off acts. What they do is they try to get these people to basically
take back their act in some way.

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TEMPLE-RASTON: The problem for the regime is that even apology videos can’t undo what is done.
They don't make people unsee what they have seen: a prisoner who just wants a glass of water or a
woman engineer who asks for some semblance of equality.

MOSTOFI: Those videos you're talking about are still getting out because yes, VPNs are still working.
But what's happening is that a user has to basically try four or five, six VPNs, so they find the one
that gets them online, that allows them to use some application like WhatsApp or Signal or
Telegram to get a video out onto a social media platform that millions will see it.

TEMPLE-RASTON: The videos rack up views, and likes, and shares, and there’s nothing the regime
can do to stop that.

[SOUND FROM VIDEO]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Like this video viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Five young women outside
an apartment complex in the capital city, dancing in unison, all long hair and swinging hips, midriffs
showing.

[SOUND FROM VIDEO]

TEMPLE-RASTON: It was one of those choreographed videos for TikTok, and it somehow slipped
through the regime’s fingers.

[SOUND FROM VIDEO]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Or this one, which is less catchy but powerful nonetheless. It shows a woman
putting up a protest banner on a billboard over a highway in Iran. The traffic roars below her as she
balances on the billboard’s scaffolding.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: And there are countless others — ordinary people, ordinary videos, in
extraordinary times.

TEMPLE-RASTON [INTERVIEW]: Who, who are these videos for? Do you think it's for the diaspora and
the outside world, or do you think even sharing them within Iran has an effect?

MOSTOFI: I think that the answer is, is they’re for everyone. Right. I think people who post these
videos just want to be seen, right? They want or they want their voice to be heard.

[MUSIC]

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TEMPLE-RASTON: There is one protest song that has been heard more than anyone expected. This is
“Baraye” or “For.” And it was posted on Instagram and then not only went viral, it won a Grammy,
presented by First Lady Jill Biden.

JILL BIDEN: This song became the anthem of the Mahsa Amini protest.

[BARAYE SONG]

BIDEN: The first winner of the Recording Academy’s best song for social change to Shervin Hajipour,
an Iranian singer-songwriter.

TEMPLE-RASTON: The video was viewed 40 million times in 48 hours. Suddenly everyone seemed to
be doing a Baraye cover.

[SHORT MONTAGE OF VARIOUS BARAYE COVER VERSIONS]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Even Coldplay performed it. They were in a stadium in Buenos Aires…

CHRIS MARTIN: We’re going to send this from here with love to Iran, and here we go….

TEMPLE-RASTON: Accompanying a video of the songwriter, Shervin, singing the haunting lyrics…

[SOUND FROM COLDPLAY CONCERT]

TEMPLE-RASTON: “Because we want to be free and play outside in the streets,” he sings. “Because
we feel terror when it is time to kiss. Because of my sister, your sisters, all our sisters.”

[FEMALE VOICE SINGING]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Their voices are getting out into the world because even the most autocratic
regime can’t stifle a creative impulse. It can’t stop people from building prisoner snowmen or from
tossing a hijab to the ground at a conference or giving voice to deeply felt despair in a song that has
rocked the world. Thankfully, all the technology in the world still can’t silence that.

[MUSIC POST]

JADE ABDUL-MALIK: Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News. This week’s episode was
written and hosted by Dina Temple-Raston, and produced by Sean Powers, Will Jarvis and me, Jade
Abdul-Malik. It was edited by Karen Duffin and Lu Olkowski, and fact-checked by Darren Ankrom. It
contains original music from Ben Levingston, who also wrote our theme. Other music comes from

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Blue Dot Sessions, and it was engineered by John DeLore. That’s it for this week. We’ll be back on
Tuesday.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Next week on a special holiday episode of Click Here: Meet a member of Ukraine’s
all volunteer IT Army.

TEMPLE-RASTON [INTERVIEW]: Are you like a computer science guy?

IT ADMIN: Um, more like an enthusiast.

TEMPLE-RASTON: (Laughs) Okay. You love computers…

IT ADMIN: Yes.

TEMPLE-RASTON: He’s one of the thousands of people who joined the fight. He’s an IT professional
by day, hacking Russia by night.

I’m Dina Temple-Raston. That’s next Tuesday on Click Here.

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