The streets of Iran are a story of rebellion and fear in the middle of the most serious unrest in the country ever witnessed. Burned out banks, closed government buildings and graffiti demanding an end to the rule of the clerics are seen next to the presence of heavily armed patrols at major intersections. However, there is another fighting that is going on in the invisible world of communication, out of the physical battle.
Officials acted promptly to isolate Iran in order to bring the nation offline, shutting down internet connectivity and restricting majority of the phone calls. This power outage was meant to stop the stream of pictures and witness of an act of protest that has swept to almost every province. Technology has made that plan complicated. The Starlink satellite service offered by SpaceX which is illegal in Iran, yet smuggled there since 2022 has become a lifeline to those who are insistent on informing the world about what is going on the ground. According to activists, the corporation has also recently removed subscription charges and aggressively promoted updates to circumvent government jamming, allowing tens of thousands to access state restrictions.
This kind of connectivity has seen the rise of videos of rows of corpses in the morgues of such centers as the Kahrizak Forensic Medical Centre near Tehran. To human rights groups, these pictures have strengthened the estimates of the dead which has reached up to 2,500 people, majority of whom are protesters. The eyewitnesses report the security forces firing live rounds into the crowds, motorcycles with armed Basij members riding across alleys, and the plainclothes agents halting people when they met. In other cities, the citizens claim that the dead were buried earlier than the sunrise and the family was required to pay the money used in shooting their family members.
Within Tehran, it is a tense but not absolutely silent environment. Shopkeepers have been instructed to open up despite the unrest and the Grand Bazaar conducts with low foot traffic. When there are conversations, they usually lead into the danger of foreign intervention. President Donald Trump has already made the threat of the Iranian authorities in connection with further killings, even hinting at very powerful measures in case of the start of executions of demonstrators. His administration has considered cyber activities up to sanctions and even approached Elon Musk regarding the use of Starlink to keep the communications alive.
The leadership of Iran has retaliated by making threats of its own, making U.S and Israeli military installations a legitimate military target in case of any attack. State media presents the protests as being backed by foreigners as acts of terrorism and demonstrations in favor of the government are shouted down with anti-American and anti-Israel slogans. Individuals arrested have been indicated by the prosecutors as possible offenders of “enmity against God” which is a capital crime according to the Iranian laws.
To the Starlink users, these risks are personal and immediate. The satellite dishes must be left in an open location in order to connect and hence can be seen by security patrollers. They are masqueraded into solar panels by many or even embedded in rooftop buildings, and raids still go on in neighborhoods that have recorded footage online. According to activists, all transmissions are a gamble with informant networks that the government uses and specific target searches.
The satellite network has transformed information flow dynamics unlike the previous crackdowns despite the dangers. In 2019, such demonstrations were successfully suppressed over the course of more than a week; today, even during the most brutal closing in the history of Iran, videos and eyewitness testimonies still seem to escape. This tenacity has not only targeted the protests per se, but also brought foreign eyes to the larger picture of the subversion of state power over communications by a private technology.
With the streets of Iran being patrolled and the airwaves of this country being disputed the results of this clash between the physical oppression and virtual resistance are by no means predictable. Temporarily, the blackout in the country is not complete, and in the holes that exist, voices still find an escape.
