Iran Steps up Internet Crackdown One Year After Mahsa Amini Death 

A woman speaks on a cell phone while a man next to her browses a phone along a street in Tehran on September 4, 2023. (AFP)
A woman speaks on a cell phone while a man next to her browses a phone along a street in Tehran on September 4, 2023. (AFP)
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Iran Steps up Internet Crackdown One Year After Mahsa Amini Death 

A woman speaks on a cell phone while a man next to her browses a phone along a street in Tehran on September 4, 2023. (AFP)
A woman speaks on a cell phone while a man next to her browses a phone along a street in Tehran on September 4, 2023. (AFP)

One year after young Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini died in police custody while under arrest for improper hijab, Iran has stepped up internet restrictions to stop a resurgence of the widespread mass protests that swept the country last year.

Ahead of the Sept. 16 anniversary of Amini's death, days before her 22nd birthday, government opponents say Iran is conducting a wide-ranging crackdown to stifle possible dissent.

At least 22,000 were arrested in the protests and seven people executed. The demonstrations - the biggest and most widespread since the 1979 revolution - were sparked after images spread on social media of Amini lying unconscious in a hospital bed following her arrest.

Now Iran is doing everything it can to prevent the same thing happening again, rights groups and activists say.

As well as blocking thousands of websites, Iran regularly shuts down the internet altogether, or imposes "digital curfews" - stopping access in the evening when protests are more likely. It also blocks messaging apps and has criminalized virtual private networks (VPNs) used to get around the curbs.

Iran ranked third globally in the number of times it shut down the internet last year, according to digital rights group Access Now.

This included shutting down mobile networks, both nationally and in targeted areas, while also blocking access to Instagram and WhatsApp, the only two major platforms not already subject to outright bans, Access Now said.

"Internet shutdowns violate human rights," said Access Now policy and advocacy manager Marwa Fatafta. "They are a disproportionate and a draconian attack on human rights, implemented by governments in order to keep people in the dark, stop information flows, hide atrocities and human rights abuses, and consequently shield authorities from accountability."

Minorities targeted

Internet access has never been as bad in Iran, said Amir Rashidi, director of digital rights and security at Miaan, a Texas-based group that advocates for human rights in Iran.

That is true especially, he said, in regions where most belong to one of Iran's ethnic and religious minorities, which saw some of the most virulent protests and violent crackdowns.

These include Kurdistan in the west, where Amini lived and was buried, Khuzestan in the southwest, home to many Iranian Arabs, and the province of Sistan and Baluchistan in the southeast, where many belong to the Baluch ethnic minority.

Rights groups say police fired from rooftops near the main mosque in Zahedan, the capital of Sistan and Baluchistan, and killed up to 96 people as they protested after Friday prayers on Sept. 30 last year. But weekly protests have continued.

"Authorities have been shutting down the internet every week during Friday prayers in Sistan and Baluchistan and its capital Zahedan at a specific time for a year," Rashidi told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Internet shutdowns have economic costs

Already struggling with international sanctions, high inflation and unemployment, internet shutdowns cost Iran an additional $773 million last year, digital privacy research group TOP10VPN estimated.

The impact is felt by small businesses across the country.

"We haven't had one day without the internet causing some sort of problem. It's impossible to have a normal life in these conditions," said Saeed Souzangar, who said he was struggling to keep his Tehran technology company afloat.

"I had to sell my house and my car just to keep the office lights on," he said.

VPNs are vital for Iranians to connect to social media and communications apps. A member of parliament said last month that around 80% of Iranians used VPNs to bypass censorship.

A 30-year-old web designer in Tehran said not having access to VPNs would have serious financial consequences. Without them, she is unable to work or study, she said.

"It would mean more isolation, more living in darkness," said the woman, who declined to be named.

'Militarizing the internet'

Despite the cost, Iranian authorities have called for yet tougher measures. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has the final word on all matters in Iran, in June called for the judiciary to crack down harder on online dissent.

Meanwhile, Communications Minister Issa Zarepour last month said the country had "twice" the internet access it needed. The ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Iran's hardline government introduced a bill to parliament in 2021 that would effectively hand over control of the internet to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which reports directly to the supreme leader, and criminalize the use of VPNs.

Facing opposition from some within parliament and a public backlash, the User Protection Bill has languished in the assembly, but opposition groups say hardliners have bypassed parliament and brought in most elements of the bill anyway.

An as-yet unpublished report by Miaan said the IRGC was seeking to gain absolute control over the internet in Iran.

"Infractions will be dealt with by the military and the internet will become untouchable," Rashidi said.

Internet freedom community

Despite the risks, some in Iran have tried to fight back. Rashidi said the internet crackdown had given rise to a digital rights community including tech specialists, journalists, lawyers and civil society members seeking to limit the changes.

"It's a real thing and they are doing real work," he said.

The internet freedom community is viewed as a threat by Iranian authorities as it endangered state control of what information is consumed by the public, said Simin Kargar, a fellow at Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab.

"We have had tech activists go to jail for teaching people about circumvention tools and privacy preservation online," Kargar said from Washington.

Security forces arrested prominent digital rights advocate Amir Mirmirani, better known by his online name Jadi, and several others in October for protesting internet shutdowns. Jadi said in February he had been released from prison.

The Thomson Reuters Foundation spoke to several activists inside Iran who spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisals.

They said authorities had been shutting down the internet and employing filters and surveillance, as well as slowing down internet speeds to suppress opposition narratives on social media and messaging applications.

But Iranian internet freedom activists have nevertheless gathered signatures for online petitions inside Iran to stop the Internet User Protection bill officially passing through parliament.

"I'm not optimistic that the government will loosen its internet restrictions, but if we don't fight, if we don't try, things will get even worse," said one activist.

"Even though the bill is being implemented for all intents and purposes, at least the one million signatures the petition gathered show the world that Iranians are vehemently against it," Rashidi said.

Another activist in Iran campaigning against restrictions said policies restricting internet access were to be expected given the country’s human rights record, but said it was disappointing the outside world did not seem to care.

"I wish someone out there would hear our voice and do something," said the source.



Iran Holds Military Drills as it Faces Rising Economic Pressures and Trump's Return

A handout picture provided by the Iranian Army media office on October 4, 2023 shows locally-made drones during a military drill at an undisclosed location in Iran. (Photo by Iranian Army office / AFP)
A handout picture provided by the Iranian Army media office on October 4, 2023 shows locally-made drones during a military drill at an undisclosed location in Iran. (Photo by Iranian Army office / AFP)
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Iran Holds Military Drills as it Faces Rising Economic Pressures and Trump's Return

A handout picture provided by the Iranian Army media office on October 4, 2023 shows locally-made drones during a military drill at an undisclosed location in Iran. (Photo by Iranian Army office / AFP)
A handout picture provided by the Iranian Army media office on October 4, 2023 shows locally-made drones during a military drill at an undisclosed location in Iran. (Photo by Iranian Army office / AFP)

Iran is reeling from a cratering economy and stinging military setbacks across its sphere of influence in the Middle East. Its bad times are likely to get worse once President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House with his policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran.

Facing difficulties at home and abroad, Iran last week began an unusual two-month-long military drill. It includes testing air defenses near a key nuclear facility and preparing for exercises in waterways vital to the global oil trade.

The military flexing seems aimed at projecting strength, but doubts about its power are high after the past year's setbacks.

The December overthrow of Syrian President Bashar Assad, who Iran supported for years with money and troops, was a major blow to its self-described “Axis of Resistance” across the region. The “axis” had already been hollowed out by Israel’s punishing offensives last year against two militant groups backed by Iran – Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel also attacked Iran directly on two occasions.

According to The AP, an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general based in Syria offered a blunt assessment this week. “I do not see it as a matter of pride that we lost Syria,” Gen. Behrouz Esbati said, according to an audio recording of a speech he gave that was leaked to the media. “We lost. We badly lost. We blew it.”

At home, Iran’s economy is in tatters.

The US and its allies have maintained stiff sanctions to deter it from developing nuclear weapons — and Iran's recent efforts to get them lifted through diplomacy have fallen flat. Pollution chokes the skies in the capital, Tehran, as power plants burn dirty fuel in their struggle to avoid outages during winter. And families are struggling to make ends meet as the Iranian currency, the rial, falls to record lows against the US dollar.

As these burdens rise, so does the likelihood of political protests, which have ignited nationwide in recent years over women's rights and the weak economy.

How Trump chooses to engage with Iran remains to be seen. But on Tuesday he left open the possibility of the US conducting preemptive airstrikes on nuclear sites where Iran is closer than ever to enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels.

“It’s a military strategy,” Trump told journalists at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida during a wide-ranging news conference. “I’m not answering questions on military strategy.”

Iran insists its nuclear program is peaceful, yet officials there increasingly suggest Tehran could pursue an atomic bomb.

Europe's view of Iran hardens. It's not just Trump or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a longtime foe of Tehran, that paint Iran's nuclear program as a major threat. French President Emmanuel Macron, speaking Monday to French ambassadors in Paris, described Iran as “the main strategic and security challenge for France, the Europeans, the entire region and well beyond.”

“The acceleration of its nuclear program is bringing us very close to the breaking point,” Macron said. “Its ballistic program threatens European soil and our interests."

While Europe had previously been seen as more conciliatory toward Iran, its attitude has hardened. That's likely because of what Macron described as Tehran's “assertive and fully identified military support” of Russia since it's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

France, as well as Germany and the United Kingdom, had been part of Iran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. Under that deal, Iran limited its enrichment of uranium and drastically reduced its stockpile in exchange for the lifting of crushing, United Nations-backed economic sanctions. Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the accord in 2018, and with those UN sanctions lifted, it provided cover for China's to purchase oil from Iran.

But now France, Germany and the United Kingdom call Tehran's advances in its atomic program a ”nuclear escalation" that needs to be addressed. That raises the possibility of Western nations pushing for what's called a “snapback” of those UN sanctions on Iran, which could be catastrophic for the Iranian economy. That “snapback” power expires in October.

On Wednesday, Iran released a visiting Italian journalist, Cecilia Sala, after detaining her for three weeks — even though she had received the government's approval to report from there.

Sala's arrest came days after Italian authorities arrested an Iranian engineer accused by the US of supplying drone technology used in a January 2024 attack on a US outpost in Jordan that killed three American troops. The engineer remains in Italian custody.

- Iran holds military drills as worries grow

The length of the military drills started by Iran's armed forces and its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard may be unusual, but their intended message to the US and Israel — and to its domestic audience — is not. Iran is trying to show itself as capable of defending against any possible attack.

On Tuesday, Iran held air-defense drills around its underground nuclear enrichment facility in the city of Natanz. It claimed it could intercept a so-called “bunker buster” bomb designed to destroy such sites.

However, the drill did not involve any of its four advanced S-300 Russian air defense systems, which Israel targeted in its strikes on Iran. At least two are believed to have been damaged, and Israeli officials claim all have been taken out.

“Some of the US and Israeli reservations about using force to address Iran’s nuclear program have dissipated,” wrote Kenneth Katzman, a longtime Iran analyst for the US government who is now at the New York-based Soufan Center. “It appears likely that, at the very least, the Trump administration would not assertively dissuade Israel from striking Iranian facilities, even if the United States might decline to join the assault.”

There are other ways Iran could respond. This weekend, naval forces plan exercises in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. Iran for years has threatened to close the strait — a narrow lane through which a fifth of global oil supplies are transported — and it has targeted oil tankers and other ships in those waters since 2019.

“Harassment and seizures are likely to remain the main tools of Iranian counteraction,” the private maritime security firm Ambrey warned Thursday.

Its allies may not be much help, though. The tempo of attacks on shipping lanes by Yemen's Houthis, long armed by Iran, have slowed. And Iran has growing reservations about the reliability of Russia.

In the recording of the speech by the Iranian general, Esbati, he alleges that Russia “turned off all radars” in Syria to allow an Israeli airstrike that hit a Guard intelligence center.

Esbati also said Iranian missiles “don't have so much of an impact” and that the US would retaliate against any attack targeting its bases in the region.

“For the time being and in this situation, dragging the region into a military operation does not agree (with the) interest of the resistance,” he says.