Social Media Shutdowns: The Iranian Uprising Since Mahsa Amini (Mhina) Last Began in March 2003

While more people inside Iran now rely on the Tor browser, which has seen a spike in users since the start of the protests, a sense of defiance is spreading among Iranian digital natives.

Yahoo Mail and Mail.com are not allowed to be used, says Rashidi. (Perhaps counterintuitively) All of these email accounts are still accessible. Messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Instagram are also blocked, and the government is even cutting access to many video games because of their chat functions.

Last week, the United States Treasury Department issued a general license to create leeway within otherwise stringent sanctions for US tech companies to provide hardware, software, cloud services, and other technology to Iranians if they can find a way to do so.

Iranian people are pouring into streets across the country. The protests were first ignited by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini (also known as Zhina), who died nearly one month ago after being detained by the country’s morality police, but demonstrators have since coalesced around a range of grievances with the regime. Activist and experts are talking about the protests as a national uprising.

The main purpose of the shutdowns is to disrupt communication and stifle dissent in Iran, according to activists.

If you are going to create a group, you are going to be more effective if you communicate with your friends and family in a way that is peaceful.

Google Cloud Platform, Google App Engine, Google Play Store and Iran’s Virtual Private Networks are Unavailable in the Light of Updated U.S. Sanctions

A virtual private network, also called a Virtual Private Network, is a tool that can protect the data and activity of users.

Another user, 18-year-old Nima, whose name CNN changed because he fears for his safety, told CNN there were no messaging apps that work in Iran right now without using VPNs, “The government is blocking VPNs right now, one by one. Our accessibility is getting limited each day. He stated that they are not able to know about the victims in his country.

However, the challenges Iranians face come not just from their own regime but from the international community as well, including governments and tech companies.

It has been almost a decade since the Iranians had an update in their license. It has taken the US government more than a year to act. There has been a lot of harm done in the interim, according to an internet researcher.

These sanctions also pushed tech companies to over-comply or withdraw entirely from Iran, leaving Iranians with no alternative but to use government-controlled domestic servers at heightened personal risk in terms of safety, privacy and security, Rashidi added.

Activists in Iran say that they can’t get their own apps uploaded to the Apple Store as it is impossible for users to circumvent the Iranian government’s blocking of the Apple Store and Play store.

In a statement to CNN, Google said: “Google has allowed users in Iran to access free, publicly available services related to communications and/or sharing of informational materials. It includes products like search, free consumer Gmail, and maps. We cannot make sure that the services are accessible to Iranians because they can’t be made available by Google.

In light of the updated US sanctions, Google recently made more of its tools availability, including more VPNs and location sharing on its apps.

This is a “low-hanging fruit” that needs more work, according to digital activists Alimardani and Rashidi. “Google Cloud Platform, Google App Engine, they have been very important in terms of internet infrastructure, helping Iranian technologists right now. Alimardani said that that really needs to be made available.

Asked why other Google services, such as Google Classroom, Google Analytics, Google Developers, Google chat, remain inaccessible, including many services accessible via the Google Play Store, the company replied: “Ongoing legal or technical barriers may block the provision of certain services, but we are exploring whether additional products might be made available.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/04/world/iran-internet-blackout-intl-cmd/index.html

CNN Observations of Sanandaj, Iran: a Kurdish-majority city with an internet shutdown during the 2011 Iranian Protests

Alimardani and Rashidi point favorably to GitHub, a popular code hosting platform for IT developers, which last year secured a license from the US government to offer its services in Iran.

Signal, the encrypted messaging network, is also offering instructions to people in Iran and suggesting help for whoever is able to host a proxy server and direct download.

The Islamic Republic had a lot to do with it. We were hurt in different ways,” said 30-year-old Reza, whose name CNN changed because he fears for his safety.

The recent tragedy gave us a new type of sadness, anger and despair, which we have to think about and the future of our loved ones.

Parts of Iran have the characteristics of battle zones, with flares lighting up skies, gunfire ringing out and bloody scenes recorded in video footage, nearly a month after the beginning of nationwide protests.

“I am recording this video about the situation in Sanandaj,” said one demonstrator, his face covered with a black scarf and dark glasses, in a message to CNN from the Kurdish-majority city in western Iran, where some of the most dramatic images have emerged from the protests, despite a near total internet shutdown in the area.

The Syrian Revolutionary Guards and the Death of a 7-Year-Old Son in Sanandaj: In Iran, For Freedom and For Freedom

“Last night, the security forces were firing in the direction of houses. They were using military-grade bullets,” he said. “Until now, I hadn’t heard such bullets. People were really afraid.”

A video shot on rooftops shows what appears to be young protesters clashing with heavily armed security forces. Bullets and flares crossed the night sky and a cloud of dust and smoke covered the city blocks.

Large numbers of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards have been participating in the crackdown in addition to local police, say activists in Sanandaj, who accuse authorities of lashing back indiscriminately. According to Oslo-based Kurdish rights group Hengaw, a 7-year-old boy died in his mother’s arms on Sunday after security forces fired into a crowd of protesters.

While it is not possible to independently verify the death toll, gruesome images circulating online and testimony from rights groups point to the bloodshed. Video showed a driver in the city lying dead with a large gunshot wound in his face – activists said he was honking his horn in solidarity with protesters.

“In Sanandaj, they shoot the people honking their horns with bullets. And they shoot young and old alike,” said another protester in a video message to CNN. “The injured don’t go to hospitals because if they go there plain-clothes police will arrest them.

We are in Iran protesting for freedom. For the prisoners and the condemned, for the people of Iran calling for the regime to go. Everyone wants the regime to go.

Despite the government’s repeated claims of having restored calm, the scenes are being replicated throughout the country to varying degrees, with the Kurdish-majority west of the country appearing to bear the brunt of the crackdown.

An associate professor of History at the London School of Economics told CNN that it was not a protest for reform. This is an uprising for the end of the Islamic Republic. And that is something completely different to what we’ve seen before.”

Protests that are spreading rapidly in the country’s southwest have turned into sites of gas and oil refineries. The Council of Oil Contractor Workers says that it would call for a strike and a halt in oil production.

The petroleum industry is the lifeline of Iran’s economy, which has been buckling under the strain of US sanctions unleashed by the Trump administration in 2018 and sustained by the Biden administration. US officials have been in indirect negotiations with Iran for more than one year in a bid to restore a landmark 2015 nuclear deal that would see Iran curb its enrichment program in exchange for sanctions relief.

Video suggested that the demonstrations at the refineries began as protests over wages, but then transformed into anti-regime protests, with laborers chanting “death to the dictator” – a reference to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

In Iran, labor strikes have historic meaning. The popular movement that overthrew the pro- Western Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979 was helped by the oil and gas refining industry.

“If there is a nationwide general strike, what can the government do really,” said Alvandi. That would paralyze the state and it would show the powerlessness of the state.

Hengaw, the Kurdish rights group, believes that the violence against protesters being reported from the region “is just a drop in the ocean,” with only partial information emerging about the crackdown.

YASMIN GREEN is the CEO of Jigsaw, a unit within Google that addresses threats to open societies. She leads an interdisciplinary team that researches and develops technical solutions to a range of global security challenges, including violent extremism, repressive censorship, hate and harassment, and harmful misinformation.

The Iranian Digital Black Out of the Covid-19 Epidemic, and the “Structure of the Moral Police,” according to Reza Ghazinouri

Repressive governments have sought full control over the internet from the moment it was introduced, but shutdowns have emerged as a tactic in the past decade. The number of shutdowns went up from just a handful in 2011. to a peak of 213 in 2019, before the Covid-19 outbreak forced the world into isolation.

“This is another instance, an important one, in which the officials show how they consistently pick their own self-interest over the public interest,” says Reza Ghazinouri, a strategic adviser for the San Francisco–based human rights and civil liberties group United for Iran. Millions of Iranians are falling below the poverty line, thanks to the restriction on access to platforms likeInstagram, and further limiting access will only make it worse. This disproportionately affects women. Sixty-four percent of Iranian businesses on Instagram are women-owned.”

From communicating with customers to processing transactions, businesses rely on digital platforms in different ways, but digital disruptions have an impact on businesses of all sizes. Several Iranian trade associations say that their member companies are reporting losses. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses were affected by the recent outage according to reports.

Iran’s leaders fear if their people can communicate with one another and the world, it will be possible, according to a US special envoy for Iran.

It is difficult to know how the digital black out will affect the economy because of other factors, like international sanctions. The State Department believes that the recent protest movement in Iran is more likely to endanger the regime there than it has been in the past.

In order to appease protesters, the Iranian government shut down the “morality police”, the officers who enforced a strict Islamic dress code for women. The laws are still in place and it’s unclear how the move will affect enforcement in practice.