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

Since Donald Trump’s war on Iran started more than three weeks ago, United States military forces have allegedly attacked more than 9,000 sites, creating a climate of fear and constant uncertainty for Iranians in Tehran and across the country.

Without an advanced warning system from the government, and amid the longest internet shutdown in Iran’s history, Iranians are left in an information void.

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 has impacted tens of millions of citizens.

Since the 12-day Israel-Iran war last year, though, a group of Iranian digital rights activists and volunteers has been working to fill the gap with a dynamic, regularly updated mapping platform called Mahsa Alert.

The project can’t replace real-time early alerts that could come from a coordinated government service, but the tool sends push notifications when Israeli forces warn about attacks, details some confirmed strike locations, and offers offline mapping capabilities.

“There is no emergency alert in Iran,” says Ahmad Ahmadian, the 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 the traction, we saw the need, and we continued working on it with the volunteers, with some [open source intelligence] experts, and used this to map the repression machinery ecosystem of Iran and surveillance.”
Mahsa Alert is a website but also has Android and iOS apps, which were intentionally designed to be lightweight and easy to use on any device.

Given the heavy government connectivity control inside Iran and erratic access to the internet , volunteers also prioritized engineering the platform for offline use.

And it can be easily updated if a user does get connectivity for a brief period by downloading APK files that contain new data.

The team works to keep these updates extremely small; a recent release was 60 kilobytes, and Ahmadian says they are typically no more than 100 kilobytes.

The map also includes locations of thousands of CCTV cameras, suspected government checkpoints, and other domestic infrastructure.

Medical facilities, such as hospitals and pharmacies, are included on the map along with other resources like the locations of religious sites and past protests.

Proximally, Mahsa Alert grew out of a need for information about on-the-ground conditions across Iran.

It is named in reference to Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old whose death in police custody in Iran led to widespread reform protests in 2022 .

After years of upheaval and a concerted effort by the Iranian regime to exert extensive control over digital connectivity, people living in Iran and Iranians around the world have few trusted, centralized sources of information available.

While some Iranians have developed ways to circumvent the government’s restrictions, millions are without day-to-day information about what is happening in the country.

Media organizations operating in Iran, many of which have internet connectivity to broadcast internationally while millions of citizens are cut off from the world, are controlled by the state and push regime-backed narratives and propaganda.

Meanwhile, mainstream mapping services like Google Maps aren’t available due to the internet shutdown—unless users have previously done big downloads of local data sets.

Ahmadian says that since the launch of Mahsa Alert, and particularly since the start of the war last month, the platform has faced regular distributed denial-of-service attacks attempting to take it offline.

The group also recently published a security report on an alleged attempt to poison its domain name.

Separately, online records show that multiple copycat domain names using the Mahsa Alert branding were all registered on the same day in February.

The group behind the legitimate Mahsa Alert had nothing to do with these registrations, Ahmadian says.

As the US and Israel’s war with Iran drags on, crowdsourced tools like Mahsa Alert become significant not only for providing information as fighting plays out, but as potential resources in larger efforts to document the conflict and create a record of known attacks.

Volunteer projects have also been critical to recent documentation efforts in other conflicts, including the Syrian civil war and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine .

A volunteer project developed amid extreme conditions throughout years of unrest cannot replace an entire missing government service, though, and Mahsa Alert is limited by resource constraints.

Crucially, since the platform relies on crowdsourced reports that must be vetted by volunteers, there is no path—at least in the short term—of bringing the information on the site anywhere close to real-time.

“I wish we had more resources; we have a lot of ideas,” Ahmadian says.

But he adds, “Hopefully Mahsa Alert will someday become unnecessary to have.

Then it could be transformed for other coordination or emergency alerts for the future of Iran.”