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Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, how information spreads across mass media has been tightly controlled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All television and radio broadcasts within Iran are from state-run stations. Satellite dishes remain ostensibly illegal, though they are plentiful, drawing occasional attacks from bat-wielding government enforcers. Journalists face restrictions in what they can cover and where they can travel across a country of 80 million people that\u2019s nearly two-and-a-half times the size of Texas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The internet helped collapse that distance. During Iran\u2019s 2009 protests surrounding the disputed re-election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, still nascent social media spread word of the events among Iranians and brought videos of the shooting death of 26-year-old Neda Agha Soltan to the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Iran\u2019s government, overseen by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, violently suppressed the demonstrations. The crackdown killed dozens and saw thousands imprisoned, with some tortured by their jailers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even before the 2009 protests, Iran blocked access to YouTube. Twitter and Facebook followed amid the unrest, as did many other sites later. Some in Iran began using virtual private networks, or VPNs, which allow users to bypass government censorship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The chief difference between then and the protests that rocked the country coming into 2018 was the massive proliferation of smartphones. As recently as 2014, only an estimated 2 million Iranians possessed one. Today, estimates suggest Iranians own 48 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That explosive growth was spurred by the administration of President Hasan Rouhani, a cleric who is a relative moderate within Iran\u2019s system. His officials allowed more mobile phone service providers to offer 3G and 4G internet, suddenly making sharing photos and images possible. Home internet connections became faster. The encrypted messaging platform Telegram spread like wildfire. Over 40 million Iranians are estimated to use it, for everything from benign conversations to commerce and political campaigning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the recent unrest, protesters used Telegram\u2019s mass-messaging channels to share information and videos across 75 cities and towns where demonstrations erupted. Some showed people openly in the streets shouting, \u201cDeath to Khamenei!\u201d It shocked many, especially as such cries could bring a death sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the government temporarily blocked Telegram as well as Instagram, it helped smother the protests within days. Notably, however, Telegram\u2019s silencing quickly brought complaints from businesspeople who use its channels to promote and sell their goods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even after the unrest, Rouhani argued it was futile trying to shut off an indispensable tool of modern life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIf you want cyberspace to be useful to the community, come forward with a solution using it to promote the culture instead of blocking it,\u201d he said, noting that past Iranian government tried to stop people from listening to the radio \u201cbut this prevention was useless.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The danger \u2014 and potential \u2014 of the internet as a weapon came into focus for Iran when it faced the world\u2019s first cyberweapon almost a decade ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the height of tensions between Tehran and the West over its nuclear program, thousands of centrifuges enriching uranium at Iran\u2019s underground Natanz facility suddenly began spinning themselves to death. They had been hit by the Stuxnet computer virus, widely believed to be an American and Israeli creation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Material leaked by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who exposed U.S. government surveillance programs in 2013, suggested Iran at the time was the country where American spies collected the most electronic data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Beginning in 2011, Iran worked to strike back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among the most spectacular cyberattacks attributed to Iran is Shamoon, a virus that hit the state-run giant Saudi Arabian Oil Co. and Qatari natural gas producer RasGas, deleting hard drives and displaying a picture of a burning American flag on computer screens. Saudi Aramco ultimately shut down its network and destroyed over 30,000 computers. A later iteration of Shamoon in late 2016 caused even more damage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The U.S. blames Iranian hackers for a denial-of-service attack that overwhelmed six major American banks in 2012. U.S. prosecutors in 2016 accused hackers believed to be backed by Iran of attacking dozens of banks and a small dam near New York City. They also have been suspected of targeting the email and social media accounts of Obama administration officials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Analysts and security experts believe many of these hackers likely receive backing from Iran\u2019s Revolutionary Guard, a powerful paramilitary and economic force in the country answerable only to Khamenei himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Guard employs more direct means as well, like its wresting away of the passwords of Rezaian and his wife, recounted in a lawsuit he filed against the Guard and Iran in U.S. federal court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Similarly, it seized control of the Facebook and email accounts of Iranian-American dual national Siamak Namazi, who remains detained in Iran along with his octogenarian father Baquer. The Guard then pretended to be Namazi in correspondence with U.S. government officials and others, like New Yorker journalist Robin Wright, tricking them into opening a file that gave the hackers access to their computers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cyberespionage is even used in Iran\u2019s internal rivalries, with attacks on members of the government, particularly officials in Rouhani\u2019s Foreign Ministry, including Zarif, according to a recent report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe targeting of members of government \u2014 individuals that have already been vetted by the regime \u2014 reflects the importance of cybersurveillance as a tool of the hard-line security establishment to monitor potential rivals for power,\u201d the report said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then Iran moved to target the internet itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The idea of Iran setting up its own \u201chalal,\u201d or \u201cpermissible,\u201d internet first came in 2011 in the wake of the 2009 protests. It\u2019s evolved into what\u2019s known as the National Information Network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is essentially a net neutrality supporter\u2019s nightmare: The network has some 500 government-approved national websites that stream content far faster than those based abroad, which are intentionally slowed, according to a recent report by the Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. Service providers offer cheaper packages to customers accessing only the NIN websites. Search results also are gamed within the network, allowing the government to censor what users find.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the principal designers of the network is the Iran Telecommunications Co., owned by proxies of the Guard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It resembles in a way China\u2019s \u201cGreat Firewall,\u201d which blocks access to thousands of websites, from Facebook to Twitter to some news outlets. Chinese internet users also find access to websites outside of the country slower.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIran\u2019s National Information Network may lack the name cachet of the \u2018Great Firewall,\u2019 but its performance in strangling access to opposition content during the most recent protests proved that Iran is hard on China\u2019s heels in terms of controlling the flow of information,\u201d the private U.S. intelligence firm Stratfor wrote in a Jan. 17 analysis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Firuzeh Mahmoudi, the executive director of the San Francisco-based group United for Iran, said authorities have had success in getting businesses to operate on the NIN. The more they do so, she warned, \u201cthe easier it will be for them to shut down or throttle the real internet when they want to.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hard-liners have suggested removing Iran entirely from the internet and creating its own at home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cCyberspace was the kindling in the fire of the battle,\u201d hard-line cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami recently told worshippers at Friday prayers in Tehran. \u201cWhen cyberspace was closed down, the sedition was stopped. The nation does not support a social network that has its key in the hands of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Amid the protests, the Trump administration said it wanted to help Iranians access the internet. The U.S. Treasury sanctioned the Guard, Iran\u2019s Supreme Council of Cyberspace and other officials for \u201cengaging in censorship.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Top Trump administration officials have met with Google, Facebook, Twitter and other leading tech companies to ask what more they can do to help people in Iran and other authoritarian-run countries communicate freely, according to U.S. officials briefed on the meetings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But fear of crossing U.S. sanctions has made companies skittish. Some firms don\u2019t allow their services to be used in Iran. That prevents Iranians from accessing many encrypted communication apps or VPNs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even when the Trump administration has floated the possibility of easing some sanctions or offering carve-outs, some tech companies have been reluctant to offer more services in Iran, said the officials, who weren\u2019t authorized to discuss the conversations and demanded anonymity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So it remains in question whether Iranians will have access to an open internet if anger over the economy boils over into protests again, as many predict it will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe believe that the U.S. government could do more to enable the free flow of information in Iran and establish a thriving entrepreneurial civil society independent of the regime,\u201d said Morad Ghorban of the Washington-based Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans. \u201cThis movement has continued despite persecution by hard-line elements.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Associated Press writers Josh Lederman in Washington and Gillian Wong in Beijing contributed to this report.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Iran\u2019s theocratic government has long sought to strictly control cyberspace and social media \u2014 and, thereby, the flow of information to the public. But the Islamic Republic\u2019s relationship with the web is far more complicated than simple repression.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":80628,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[106,29,32],"tags":[],"coauthors":[5179],"class_list":["post-27748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-brief","category-home","category-newsletters"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"7I3MR63XMRHI7GX6ZYEGL2VBKA","arc_canonical_url":"\/international\/2018\/01\/29\/halal-internet-means-more-control-in-iran-after-unrest\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/AP18026392837242.jpg.jpg\")
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