Israel has blocked Hezbollah from using communication technologies. They have been pushed to use basic tools but the recent incident showed even those tools cannot be trusted. That was a huge blow because this interrupts communication.
The same trick is being used here. Whatever I watch may contain some keyword that Iran can use to pretend I want to send a signal. For example, I exercise on Friday mornings and listen to something normally. Today I decided to watch tech news. Then I decided to watch the physics news and searched for the term “physics news”. But realized all videos contained some problematic keywords in their titles, things that could be used to pretend I wanted to send a signal. At first, I thought I shouldn’t watch anything because those videos were traps (the videos themselves were normal physics videos but there were keywords on the title). But then thought if I wanted to play this game I shouldn’t do anything online because anything can contain something that Iran can pretend that I used as a signal. The main trick was to force me not to use online tools and websites at all because any normal activity could be interpreted in a problematic way. I don’t send signals by things I do online unless I mention it. For example, I wrote about Home Alone last week.
The method Iran/Russia is using is problematic for themselves. Whatever anyone does (or doesn’t do) can be said to be sending a signal to a colleague, for example, things as simple as scratching one’s face, etc. That’s important because in systems that rely on total trust in a leader when that trust becomes shaky people in that system will start asking questions about things they have been asked to do.
To disrupt the coherence of such a system complicated secret activities are not needed, once the trust becomes shaky people in the system will start asking questions themselves. But those people of course won’t publicly say it to their colleagues so hidden signals can be used for this purpose, very simple gestures people do every day can be used to send signals between these people. This is really bad for those systems where anything can be interpreted in any way.