Iranians are leaving the country to access internet : NPR

People at the Kapikoy border crossing between Turkey and Iran in eastern Van province, Turkey, March 2.

Pavel Nemeček/P.A.

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Pavel Nemeček/P.A.

VAN, Turkey — Sun-dizzy and tired from more than a dozen hours of bus travel, this woman from Tehran, the Iranian capital, crossed the border into eastern Turkey.

His first stop? Somewhere with Wi-Fi.

“I just want to make a video call and come back [to Iran.] That’s it,” she told NPR.

For the past month, she has been driving hours every three days to Iran’s border with Turkey to use the Internet for a few hours to contact her son, who is studying at a university in western Turkey.

Like most Iranians interviewed for this article, she requested complete anonymity because she fears arrest and her property seized in Iran for speaking to foreign media.

Since the start of the war more than a month ago, the Iranian government has blocked its citizens from accessing the global Internet, allowing only a few phone lines and some government-approved “white SIM” phone cards to operate. Today, nearly 90 million Iranians find themselves deprived of basic information about what is happening amid daily U.S. and Israeli strikes against the country.

NPR interviewed Iranians transiting through eastern Turkey along the border with Iran. Iranians crossing the Turkish land border — arriving by train and speaking from Van’s many discreet restaurants, hotels and teahouses hosting Iranian visitors — told NPR how they were trying to circumvent Iranian controls on the internet.

“The only voice now is the Iranian regime, because they shut down the Internet. They shot our voices and cut out our tongues,” a second Iranian woman told NPR while traveling in eastern Turkey.

Some can afford to buy valuable Wi-Fi minutes or phone time on the black market for Starlink bandwidth and phone SIM cards, but many Iranians say connections are faltering and unable to load most web pages and social media sites.

So, for Iranians with the means to travel, there is another option for the Internet: traveling to another country.

“When we can access the Internet, we can speak for ourselves,” the woman said.

Creating “choke points” on the Internet

Over the past fifteen years, the Iranian government has quietly restructured the country’s internet infrastructure to allow the regime to cut off the internet to all but a small number of people.

Preparations began after massive anti-government protests in 2009, cybersecurity researchers and human rights groups say, protests in which social media sites, including Twitter, helped demonstrators organize.

“It is indeed a highly centralized architecture,” explains Hesam Nourooz Pour, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen. “Unlike the global Internet, which is relatively decentralized, Iran routes international traffic through a small number of state-controlled gateways operated by the telecommunications infrastructure company. I view these gateways as choke points because almost all inbound and outbound international traffic passes through them.”

Iran also began creating an internal Internet, called the National Information Network, or NIN, on which government-approved sites and the country’s banking and financial services could operate, even when connectivity to the global Internet was cut. (Iranians still receive SMS from the government since SMS is based on a cellular network and does not depend on the Internet, of which NIN is a part).

Authorities have also issued phone SIM cards to government-affiliated Iranians who can still connect to the global Internet because they are exempt from a rigorous filtering system created by Iran, modeled on China’s Internet censorship technology.

Abbas Milani, a professor of Iranian history at Stanford University, says his Iranian friends are now paying exorbitant prices to buy a few minutes of Starlink connection and so-called “white SIMs” — elite, government-approved phone cards from which some Iranians illegally sell bandwidth bytes.

“It is extremely dangerous even to buy [Wi-Fi] because the regime declared it a counter-revolutionary activity,” Milani says.

Iranian authorities have arrested hundreds of people for using the Internet. A law enforcement official in central Iran’s Yazd province told Iranian media that six people were arrested in late March for using Starlink equipment. The same month, Iranian authorities said they had arrested 466 people for using the Internet to harm national security.

Some Iranians say they have alternate friends who travel abroad to send messages.

“22 days have passed since the war (and total internet blackout in Iran). This episode was recorded and edited in mid-February,” Ershad, a popular Iranian podcast host, wrote in the caption of a YouTube video he uploaded last month. “In order to publish [the episode]“I came to my hometown of Marivan, ground zero of the border,” he continued, citing a town on the Iranian border with Iraq. From there, he said he was able to access Iraqi telephone data networks to publish his episode.

The hosts of a second popular Persian-language podcast called Haagirvaagir, and hosted from Iran, released a long-delayed episode in late March, writing: “we send [the episode] outside the Iranian border on a memory card with difficulty and despair that it will be downloaded.”

A “war crime” to cut off the Internet

The internet blackout has been so complete that Iranians say they cannot receive warnings about where the next US and Israeli strikes will land. Many people were unable to contact family members outside the country to let them know they were alive.

“It was only after leaving Iran that I was connected and reading [the international news] and I find out which places were affected and what exactly happened [in Iran]” an Iranian woman on a long weekend vacation in Türkiye with her children told NPR.

Milani calls the internet shutdown a war crime because it leaves tens of millions of Iranians unable to avoid bombing from Israel or the United States. The internet shutdown also decimated Iran’s small businesses, which used WhatsApp and Instagram to reach customers. Milani says the regime is willing to bear this cost.

“Education has been disrupted. All our communications have been disrupted,” said an Iranian business owner, who said he had traveled to Turkey for just two days to check his WhatsApp messages and international news. His own business, which provided online training to other small businesses, had been frozen due to the internet outage. “Almost 80 percent of the companies we’ve worked with are going to go bankrupt, I think, in the next year… We can’t work if we’re not connected to the Internet.”

“They feel – and I think they’re right – that this is the most existential threat facing them. That’s why they’ve gone crazy,” says Milani of the Islamic Republic of Iran. “They are willing to pay any price, including putting the entire global economy into crisis, if that is the price the world must pay for their survival.”

Four Iranians told NPR that they regularly receive text messages from government authorities, reminding them that speaking to foreign media or disclosing information to foreign agents is punishable by arrest and confiscation of property.

“They cut off our Internet, but they have their own,” an Iranian living in Tehran wrote on NPR. “They cut off our money, water, electricity and everything else, but they have their own [internet] and SMS [text services]”.