The time of wailing and rejoicing has passed, for now. The Iran deal has been announced and, if the votes come through, IAEA monitors will set up shop in Iran to ensure Tehran has relinquished its efforts to build a nuclear bomb. The fact that the Obama administration, its partners, and others have such confidence in the inspections process is why there’s a deal at all. The technology for enforcement has advanced considerably over the last decade, but cheats are just a few hacks away.

Inspections Technology: One Step Forward

“Better technology really has helped the inspection process,” said David Kay, a former United Nations chief weapons inspector who ran the Iraq Survey Group, the inspections body that unveiled serious flaws in the intelligence that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “In the old days, inspectors had to put paper seals” onto containers or facilities that were off limits or undergoing investigation, Kay said “You had to go physically look [at them] to see if they had been broken. New seals can digitally transmit in real time back to Vienna. In the old days, digital cameras recorded either to a disk, or, the more modern ones, to [memory] cards. But you had to go pull out the cards and physically send them.” Now, he says, live camera feeds at a wide variety of inspection sites can “lessen the inspection burden tremendously and raise your confidence” as an inspector.

Portable sensing devices have advanced well beyond that old Geiger counter your high school physics teacher gave you on lab day. Mass spectronomy equipment, which measures the mass-to-charge ratio of gaseous ions, can track not only radiation levels but the types of particles in the air or on surfaces. They’ve gotten much smaller and more capable in the last decade. “Say you do an environmental swipe, a sampling of a wall, and you want to know what you’ve detected,” said Kay. “A mass spec will very quickly tell you whether it’s iron, cadmium, lead, or uranium or plutonium, and what is the isotopic composition. Is it an uranium isotope that you have to worry about? Is it one that will fission? Or is it one that’s a by-product of enrichment separation?”

Beyond mass spectrometers, IAEA inspectors have a variety of portable devices such as multi-channel analyzers, which, unlike low-tech radiation detectors, “can be used to search for and locate an unknown source of radiation, determine the relative dose rate, and isotopically identify the source,” according to this IAEA document. Inspectors also have alloy detectors to discover if objects have come into contact with various materials.

Cheating Technology: Two Steps Back

Despite the new gear, monitoring Iran’s nuclear activity will be incredibly challenging, Kay said. For one thing, the agreement allows Iran scientists to continue some nuclear research — just not bomb-building. The Iranians will be allowed to keep several centrifuges and uranium hexafluoride. The Arak heavy-water reactor will be modified to reduce plutonium enrichment but will still have fuel cores.

They enriched uranium to a high level. Well, environmental sampling from now for eons will detect that. David Kay, former United Nations chief weapons inspector

All this radioactive residue will make it far more difficult to figure out what’s new and what’s old. “They enriched uranium to a high level. Well, environmental sampling from now for eons will detect that,” Kay said. “The Iranians have an easy out, having acknowledged that they did it in the past. They can say, ‘That’s from the old program’...It’s one thing inspecting in a place like Iraq after the first Gulf War where everything was prohibited. The background was supposed to be null.”

Even the promise of real-time camera feed monitoring will likely become a matter of dispute and argument. “Modern equipment has outages. The Internet goes down,” Kay said. “Every time an anomaly occurs, it will require another inspection effort to verify it was a genuine anomaly and not an intentional one.” Inspectors, in short, will be asked to look for signs of nuclear activity in a place where the signatures of such activity abound.

Moreover, they’ll be working under the gaze of Iranian internal security. The regime’s cyber espionage forces, which include the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security and the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps Cyber Defense Command, have shut down popular uprising attempts for years through domestic counterintelligence efforts that rival China’s. A few inspectors calling home on BlackBerry phones won’t pose an intelligence-gathering challenge.

Kay said any inspector working in Iran should assume constant phone and email hacking attempts. “You can’t believe how hard it is on inspectors when you know every conversation is going to be overheard, that there’s probably video monitoring in your hotel room,” he said. “The sense of privacy disappears. For the IAEA, maintaining the integrity of the inspection process is going to be a constant concern.” It will be a concern that will last for years.