Iran’s Internet Blackouts Are Part of a Global Menace

For the past five weeks, thousands of Iranians, led by courageous young women, have taken to the streets of dozens of cities around the country, driven to action by the case of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman who died while in the custody of the country’s Morality Police. At tremendous risk to their safety, these young people are demanding an end to years of oppression, burning their hijabs, shearing their hair, and marching in solidarity as the protest anthem Baraye , with its chorus “for women, life, freedom,” echoes through the streets. Authorities have responded with a brutal crackdown in which over 230 Iranians are believed to have died already .

The government has also instituted strict internet controls, blocking access to social media and messaging apps, as well as knocking the entire web offline for hours at a time in an effort to stymie organizing and conceal the extent of the protests and the police response. 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.

As we keep our eyes trained on the developing situation in Iran, it is critical to acknowledge that it is not an isolated event. Even since the protests in Iran began, Cuba has cut access to the internet twice in response to protests over the government’s handling of the response to Hurricane Ian . Around the world, a troubling number of nations have severely curtailed internet freedom, including full shutdowns, as their default response to popular protests.

The most repressive of these regimes learn from each other, sharing technology and in some cases even personnel to establish an ironclad grip on the web and their citizens. At least 225 internet shutdowns have taken place in response to popular protests since 2016. Access Now, a digital human rights advocacy group that tracks internet shutdowns, reports that protests and political instability were the cause of 128 of 182 confirmed internet shutdowns in 2021 .

And severe internet restrictions, including complete shutdowns, have followed popular protests in at least five countries in just the past 10 months. Internet shutdowns can have significant impacts on the economy, health care, and education even in the best of times, but when they are instituted during crises, they can cost lives. Curbing the use of internet shutdowns—and the severe second-order consequences that attend them—requires a united approach that recognizes the underlying impulses and technologies, as well as the struggle of those impacted.

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 idea has spread rapidly, however, and the number of shutdowns ballooned from just a handful in 2011 to a peak of 213 in 2019 before the Covid-19 pandemic forced the world into isolation, curtailing the popular demonstrations that have so often led to shutdowns in the first place. In 2021, when we at Jigsaw interviewed people who had been impacted by internet shutdowns , one individual from the Democratic Republic of Congo highlighted the particular risk faced by remote villagers who, without access to the internet during shutdowns, could find themselves in the middle of heated combat.

“Women are raped,” he told us. “Villages are burned down. ” Another activist, a Rohingya refugee in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, told us how he used WhatsApp to monitor the activities of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army in refugee camps in order to evade their attacks.

He underscored the risk internet shutdowns posed to his life. Several months after we last spoke, he was assassinated. Iranians, even those not participating in the demonstrations, now face similar risks due to the lack of situational awareness created by the ongoing internet restrictions.

Shutdowns can also be used to conceal grave human rights abuses, as they were in 2019 when Iranian security forces killed 323 individuals during five days of protest under the cover of a complete internet blackout , according to Amnesty International. Researchers studying the conflict in Syria similarly found that state violence peaked during periods in which the internet had been knocked offline . Already, far too many have paid the ultimate price while demanding respect for their fundamental rights.

Censorship is increasingly being built into the very structure of the internet. Iran’s ability to silence its citizens on the web so effectively is largely due to the shape of the internet within the country. Of the 750 networks that comprise the Iranian internet, only three can connect to the wider web beyond the country’s borders .

And as internet disruptions have become more commonplace, they’ve also become more sophisticated. While early shutdowns leveraged blunt tactics, the rough equivalent of ripping a plug out of the wall, repressive regimes today block access to specific services in targeted locations. In the case of a country like Cuba, authorities have gone so far as to block access to the internet for specific individuals .

While the triggers of internet shutdowns are most often exclusively domestic, it would be a mistake to view them as isolated incidents. Implementing restrictions on the web requires access to both technical know-how and sophisticated physical equipment that is traded worldwide, and tactics that emerge in one context are invariably reproduced in others. The fight for freedom of expression online is a global game of cat and mouse.

While China has long been a pioneer in leveraging its infrastructure to control its domestic internet, Russia has been learning quickly . Ukrainians have seen walls like those surrounding the Iranian web go up as Russia has rerouted internet traffic from seized Ukrainian countries, first in Crimea in 2014 and subsequently in Kherson and other areas of occupied Eastern Ukraine this year . These changes have granted Russia control over not only the physical territory but also the information environment of occupied Ukraine, subjecting Ukrainian citizens to the same system of strict censorship and surveillance that prevails throughout Russia.

Drawing inspiration—and in the case of Iran, equipment and technical expertise —from countries where the internet is most tightly controlled, Russia and Iran have further committed to building national intranets, similar to North Korea’s, which would continue to work even if access to the global web were cut, isolating their citizens from the world. But there is cause for hope. The Declaration for the Future of the Internet , signed last spring by the US, the European Union, and 60 other countries, is the strongest commitment governments have yet made to the future of a free, open, and global internet.

Among the declaration’s provisions is a commitment to “refrain from government-imposed internet shutdowns or degrading domestic Internet access, either entirely or partially. ” The signatories to the declaration could form the foundation of an alliance to counter creeping digital authoritarianism. Likewise, the landslide victory last month of Doreen Bogdan-Martin in the election for secretary general of the International Telecommunications Union offered a rebuke to an alternative vision of the internet —one built from the ground up on censorship, surveillance, and social control—forwarded by repressive regimes.

The threat to free access to information and the enjoyment of basic human rights is not an isolated one, but a global, networked menace. Countering it will likewise require a deeply interconnected global movement. Dedicated efforts to share learnings, tactics, tools, and technologies have already proven effective in advancing our understanding of repressive online tactics.

The Shadowsocks protocol, which underlies Jigsaw’s personal VPN service Outline , is now being used to provide access to the open web in Iran, Russia, and around the world, both directly and through vital civil society groups like nthlink and ASL19 . Transnational movements, including the Milk Tea Alliance, have further united protesters demanding democracy and respect for human rights from Myanmar to Belarus. To achieve meaningful and durable change, connections like these must be further supported, sustained, and deepened.

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