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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome to The Takeaway. Thanks for starting your week with us. There are just eight days remaining to vote in this year's midterm elections.

Now, we continue to follow developments about the attack of Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Reports indicate that early Friday morning, Mr. Pelosi was confronted and attacked in his own home by 42-year-old David DePape. Allegedly DePape entered the home and repeatedly demanded to know where is Nancy. Reports further indicate that DePape struggled with Mr. Pelosi before striking him with a hammer even as law enforcement arrived.

Mr. Pelosi underwent surgery on Friday and is expected to make a full recovery. On Saturday, Speaker Pelosi published a letter to her congressional colleagues that read, in part, "Our children, our grandchildren, and I are heartbroken and traumatized by the life-threatening attack on our pop. We're grateful for the quick response of law enforcement and emergency services, and for the lifesaving medical care, he's receiving. Mr. DePape remains in custody and is expected to face multiple felony charges."

Across the globe, in Seoul, South Korea, more than 150 people were trapped and killed in a massive crush of Halloween revelers in a busy nightlife district in the city. In western India on Sunday, dozens lost their lives when a suspension bridge collapsed just days after it had been reopened following repairs.

Now let's turn to Iran, where protests and state repression continue.

The protests were ignited when 22-year-old, Mahsa Amini, died while in custody of Iran's morality police in September. Police arrested her in Tehran, on charges of being immodestly dressed for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly.

On Friday, the two women journalist who broke the story of her death were formally accused by Iranian ministry of intelligence of being, "CIA spies and the primary sources of news for foreign media." These are crimes punishable by death. Yet, despite the harsh government repression, Iranians have continued demonstrations across the country and the crackdown by Iranian authorities has been brutal. Security forces reportedly have used tear gas, beaten protestors with batons, and opened fire with live rounds in some places. As of Friday, Human Rights Group say that at least 253 people have been killed, including 34 children.

In addition to the brute force being used by Iranian authorities, a new report from the Intercept details how digital repression is being employed in response to the protests. Joining me now is Murtaza Hussain, reporter for the Intercept. Murtaza, welcome to The Takeaway today.

Murtaza Hussain: Thanks for having me.

Melissa: What do we know about the protests in Iran at this point?

Murtaza: The protest in Iran has gone on for about a month and a half now, triggered by the death of Ms. Amini as you mentioned earlier. They're quite interesting in the context of previous protests against the Iranian government due to the length and the consistency of the protests. I think the most comparable episode we've seen since the revolution in 1979 was the 2009 protests over a stolen election. I think what's distinct about these protests is that they're not coalescing around any particular party or leader.

They're not about a stolen election. They're not about price increases as some previous protests were. They seem very much to be driven by young people. They're very decentralized, and they are based on rejection and negation of the government and the ruling system as a whole.

Melissa: This seems critical to me the idea that it is not about any given policy, any given economic circumstance that certainly those are contributing. Your point that this is a broader movement over and against the authorities, is that why we are seeing this level of brutality and repression, or would you have expected that relative to the protests no matter what their initiating purpose?

Murtaza: It's interesting because in Iran, I would say over the last 10 years, you can empirically see that life has gotten worse for a lot of people. Prices have gone up. Yes, there's been-- economic horizons have constricted quite a bit. There's a growing water crisis. There are social tensions. Some of this has been exacerbated by the impact of international sanctions, and some of it is due to domestic mismanagement. The net result of that is that people, especially young people, they don't see a future many of them in the country anymore.

They feel the future has been taken away from them, they're very angry at the ruling party and the older generation which it represents. It's a gerontocracy in many ways, the Iranian government. The anger, it's manifested in some cases and very, very violent protests in some cases, which responded to with the far greater violence in some sense many, many dozen perhaps several hundred people have been killed by the security forces. Roughly I think 30 members of the security forces have been killed as well too. I think that in terms of the response has deferred to some degree based on where in the country it's taking place.

In the capital, perhaps tear gas and arrests have been the default response, but in the periphery areas, Kurdish areas, or Baloch areas, which are away from the major city centers, the response has been much, much more violent from the beginning. Massacres of dozens of people, live ammunition, very, very regular, and widespread killings. I think that's a reflection of the fact that the government is concerned that these protests could result in the exacerbation of other social tensions related to ethnic groups and potential separatism in the country.

They respond in a very harsh way, which also is intended to calibrate other people's perceptions of the protest. If they cracked on minorities even harder, then perhaps they can get the majority back online with them, it's a sense of national solidarity. I think it's been different in different parts of the country, but it's certainly been the largest unrest we've seen in many, many years. It's certainly posed a threat to the continuing rule of the Iranian government because it shows that many, if not perhaps a strong majority of people in the country are completely disillusioned with the outcome of its rule.

Melissa: Tell me about the digital repression that is part of this.

Murtaza: The Iranian government has been using internet shutdowns progressively over the last couple of years in response to uprisings and protests. In 2019, in the Winter, there were big protests in Iran over fuel price increases, and the internet for the first time ever was completely shut off in the country. It was the largest severance of an entire country of the global internet we've ever seen in any country to date. It was indicative that the Iranian government had been quietly developing or increasing capacity for internet controls as a form of social control in the country.

Now, if you fast forward to today, we're seeing slowdowns, internet shutdowns in certain areas. We're seeing very strange internet activity in the country, clearly a manipulation of internet capacity in the country, but we don't know much about it. Until a few weeks ago, the intercept received a cache of hacked documents from an Iranian internet cell phone provider, which showed many, many different things. What it did show is communications between the Iranian government and this company about a particular program called SIAM. SIAM was not something that anyone knew about before.

What we investigated at The Intercept was that it's a program for monitoring, surveilling, and controlling mobile and internet users individually in Iran. It was the first glimpse we've seen of, first of all, how seriously they take the whole project of surveillance of internet now in the Iranian government, and also how much control they really do have over individual phone and internet users. If you are an internet user inside Iran or a cell phone user inside Iran, and you're doing anything that the government doesn't like, you certainly are at very grave risk for various types of very pernicious surveillance and control.

Melissa: I do not want to stoke particular kinds of fears and anxieties, but is it not the case that many world governments potentially even the United States government also have this technological capacity?

Murtaza: It absolutely is the case that they have the capacity. Almost a decade now ago the Intercept did help report the Edward Snowden documents, the NSA documents that first revealed the capacity the US government was developing for surveillance. In some ways, there are some similarities. I'll give you one that the SIAM system is based on, surveillance of metadata. Metadata as opposed to content data. It's about not what you said specifically or what you wrote, it's about who you spoke to, where you were, what's your network connection with.

We know the US government does gather that data as well too. I think the thing that makes it more pernicious or more frightening in an authoritarian country, where there aren't even some semblance of democratic controls, is that there's no transparency, there's no guardrails or guidelines. There's no ACLU to help file lawsuits to put controls on what the government's doing, you get insight into it. I'll give you an example too. In this archive of the telecommunications company, there are emails between telecom company employees and Iranian government officials or regulatory officials, and they refer to a term called lawful intercepts.

Lawful intercepts is a term used in US too for when the government asks for a legal intervention in the company's data so they could see something that relates to a warrant that a judge has given for a criminal investigation. That's pretty recognized practice in US as well too. That the government will do that, they'll get access to data if a court authorizes it. The issue is that in Iran, there's not really free media, there's not free courts, not free oversight or inter regulators activity or government activity. The definition of what's lawful or not is quite different. It sense that people who are protesting are defacto considered to be breaking the law in many cases or most cases.

It's the context in which it's being introduced that these powers mean something very different. If they're China or Russia or Iran than they do in a country that has more open civil society. I think there are serious problems in the US and there's things to be concerned about, and they're very big fears about civil liberties. I think the Snowden documents gave a very stark picture into that. I think that the degree of difference is just enough that it's a bit more alarming in a country that's more close.

Melissa: Tell us how Iranians are responding, what new forms of communication, organizing, or civil society are being created to manage this repression from the government?

Murtaza: Yes, so there's a very vigorous and capable tech sector in Iran, and it's a very young country too. There's been a lot of interest in a story, for instance, around how people can organize to defend their data or protect themselves against surveillance using different technological tools, whether it be encryption, whether it be ways of organizing in physical world which negate the use of carrying your cellphone everywhere. That's one thing we've seen so far.

Melissa: Murtaza Hussain is a reporter for the Intercept. Murtaza, thank you for your time today.

Murtaza: Thank you for having me.

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