Even before Israel and the United States began dropping bombs, Iran’s lack of public emergency warning tools and severe state-controlled digital oppression have affected millions of citizens. However, since the 12-day Israel-Iran war last year, a group of Iranian digital rights activists and volunteers have been working to fill the gap with a dynamic, regularly updated mapping platform called Mahsa Alert. The project cannot replace real-time early alerts that might come from a coordinated government service, but the tool sends push notifications when Israeli forces are warned about attacks, details some confirmed strike locations, and provides offline mapping capabilities.
“There is no emergency alert in Iran,” says Ahmad Ahmadian, president and CEO of US-based digital rights group Holistic Resilience, which is behind Mahsa Alert and has been developing the platform since last summer. “This was where we saw traction, we saw the need, and we continued to work on it with volunteers, some [open source intelligence] experts, and used it to map Iran’s repression machinery ecosystem and surveillance.
Mahsa Alert is a website but also has Android and iOS apps, which were deliberately designed to be lightweight and easy to use on any device. Given the heavy government connectivity controls and irregular access to the Internet inside Iran, volunteers also prioritized engineering the platform for offline use. And it can be easily updated if the user gets connectivity for a short period of time by downloading the APK files containing the new data. The team works to keep these updates extremely small; A recent release was 60 kilobytes, and Ahmadian says they typically don’t exceed 100 kilobytes.
An overlay on the Mahsa alert plots the locations of “confirmed attacks,” which Ahmadian says his team or other OSINT investigators have verified using video footage or images submitted to Telegram bots or shared on social media. There are also warnings about areas where Israeli forces have issued evacuation alerts, as well as significant components of the public submitting reports on what is happening around them.
“We have to go through the due diligence and verification process and tag them before we put them on the map,” Ahmadian says of reported attacks and incidents. He said the team has a backlog of more than 3,000 reports that it is working on or unable to verify. As well as attempting to map attacks, the team behind Mahsa Alert has also plotted “threat zones” that could be at risk of attack – such as sites linked to Iran’s nuclear program or the military – so that civilians can stay away from them. Ahmadiyya claims that 90 percent of the attacks it has confirmed were at locations that were already on the map. “Some of those we can confirm, we do this because [a user] They’ve shared a photo or they’ve shared some details that make them verifiable,” he says.
The map also includes the locations of thousands of CCTV cameras, suspected government posts and other domestic infrastructure. Medical facilities, such as hospitals and pharmacies, are included on the map along with other resources such as religious sites and locations of past protests.
Mahsa Alerts have become more visible on global social media feeds as Iranians around the world share details from the map, encouraging people to check out the service and flag it to friends and family who can use it as a resource. “The app went from almost zero to 100,000 daily active users in a matter of days,” says Ahmadian. The total has grown to about 335,000 users this year, he said, adding that people first turned to the app during the Iranian regime’s brutal crackdown on anti-government protesters in January. Through the limited user information collected by the app, Ahmadian claims there are indications that 28 percent of users are accessing the platform from inside Iran.
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