Iranians Don’t Have a Missile Alert System, So Volunteers Built Their Own Warning Map

Since the arrival of Donald Trump The war against Iran began more than three weeks ago, with U.S. military forces reportedly attacking more than 9,000 sites, creating a climate of constant fear and uncertainty for Iranians in Tehran and across the country. Without an advanced warning system from the government, and in the midst of the longest internet shutdown in Iran’s history, Iranians find themselves in an information vacuum.

Even before Israel and the United States began dropping bombs, Iran’s lack of a public emergency alert tool and severe state-controlled digital oppression impacted tens of millions of citizens. Since the 12-day war between Israel and Iran last year, a group of Iranian digital rights activists and volunteers have been working to fill the void with a dynamic, regularly updated mapping platform called Mahsa Alert. The project cannot replace real-time early warnings that could come from a coordinated government service, but the tool sends push notifications when Israeli forces warn of attacks, details some confirmed strike locations, and offers offline mapping capabilities.

“There is no emergency alert in Iran,” says Ahmad Ahmadian, president and CEO of the US digital rights group Holistic Resilience, which is behind Mahsa Alert and has been developing the platform since last summer. “That’s where we saw the interest, the need and we continued to work on it with the volunteers, with some of them. [open source intelligence] experts, and used it to map the ecosystem of Iran’s repression and surveillance mechanism.

Mahsa Alert is a website but also offers Android and iOS apps, intentionally designed to be lightweight and easy to use on any device. Given Iran’s strict government control of connectivity and spotty internet access, volunteers also prioritized engineering the platform for offline use. And it can be easily updated if a user gets connectivity for a brief period by downloading APK files containing new data. The team strives to keep these updates extremely small; a recent version was 60 kilobytes, and Ahmadian says they usually don’t exceed 100 kilobytes.

An overlay on Mahsa Alerts traces the locations of “confirmed attacks” that Ahmadian says his team or other OSINT investigators have verified, using video footage or images submitted to a Telegram bot or shared on social media. There are also warnings about areas where Israeli forces have issued evacuation alerts, as well as the crucial element of people submitting reports about what is happening around them.

“We have to go through a due diligence and verification process and identify them before we put them on the map,” Ahmadian says of the reported attacks and incidents, adding that the team has a backlog of more than 3,000 reports that it is either working through or unable to verify. In addition to attempting to map the strikes, the team behind Mahsa Alert also mapped out “dangerous areas” that could be at risk of attack, such as sites linked to the nuclear program or the Iranian military, so that ordinary citizens could stay away. Ahmadian claims that 90 percent of confirmed attacks took place on sites already on the map. “Some of them we can confirm, we do because [a user] shared a photo or shared certain details that make them verifiable,” he says.

The map also includes the locations of thousands of CCTV cameras, suspected government checkpoints and other national infrastructure. Medical facilities, such as hospitals and pharmacies, are included on the map, along with other resources such as the locations of religious sites and past protests.

Mahsa Alert has become more visible on global social media as Iranians around the world share details of the map, encouraging people to check out the service and reporting it to friends and family who might use it as a resource. “The app went from almost zero to over 100,000 daily active users in a matter of days,” Ahmadian says, adding that in total there have been around 335,000 users this year, with people first turning to the app during the Iranian regime’s brutal crackdown on anti-government protesters in January. Thanks to the limited user information collected by the app, Ahmadian says there are signs that 28% of users are accessing the platform from Iran.