Free Starlink access for Iran seen as game changer for demonstrators getting their message out
By DAVID RISING
BANGKOK (AP) — Iranian protesters’ ability to broadcast details of bloody nationwide demonstrations to the world has been sharply boosted as SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service slashed its fees to allow more people to circumvent the Tehran government’s strongest-ever attempt to stop information from spreading beyond its borders, activists said Wednesday.
The move by the US aerospace company led by Elon Musk follows the complete shutdown of telecommunications and internet access for Iran’s 85 million people on January 8, as protests grew against the Islamic Republic’s faltering economy and the collapse of its currency.
SpaceX has not officially announced the decision and did not respond to a request for comment, but activists told The Associated Press that Starlink has been available free to anyone in Iran with the receivers since Tuesday and that the company went even further by offering a firmware update to help circumvent government efforts to jam satellite signals.
Starlink’s actions came two days after President Donald Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he was going to contact Musk to request Starlink’s help for protesters, a call later confirmed by his press secretary, although it is unclear whether that is what prompted Musk to act.
“Starlink was crucial,” said Mehdi Yahyanejad, an Iranian whose nonprofit Net Freedom Pioneers helped smuggle units into Iran, pointing to a video released Sunday showing rows of bodies at a forensic center near Tehran.
“It showed a few hundred bodies on the ground, which came out thanks to Starlink,” he said in an interview from Los Angeles. “I think these videos from the center have dramatically changed everyone’s understanding of what’s going on because they’ve seen it with their own eyes.”
Since the start of the demonstrations on December 28, the death toll has risen to more than 2,500 people, mainly demonstrators but also members of the security forces, according to the American press agency Human Rights Activists News Agency.
Starlink is banned in Iran by telecommunications regulations, as the country has never allowed the devices to be imported, sold or used. Activists fear being accused of helping the United States or Israel using Starlink and charged with espionage, which can carry the death penalty.
Cat and mouse as authorities search for Starlink devices
The first units were smuggled into Iran in 2022 during protests against the country’s mandatory headscarf law, after Musk got the Biden administration to exempt the Starlink service from Iranian sanctions.
Since then, more than 50,000 units are estimated to have been sneaked in, and people have gone to great lengths to conceal them, using virtual private networks while on the system to hide IP addresses and taking other precautions, said Ahmad Ahmadian, executive director of Holistic Resilience, a Los Angeles-based organization that was responsible for introducing some of the first Starlink units to Iran.
Starlink is a global Internet network that relies on some 10,000 satellites orbiting the Earth. Subscribers must have equipment, including an antenna, that requires a line of sight to the satellite, and must therefore be deployed in the open, where it could be spotted by authorities. Many Iranians disguise them as solar panels, Ahmadian said.
After efforts to cut communications during the 12-day war with Israel in June proved ineffective, Iran’s security services have now adopted “more extreme tactics” to jam Starlink’s radio signals and GPS systems, Ahmadian said in a telephone interview. After Holistic Resilience sent reports to SpaceX, Ahmadian said, the company pushed to update its firmware to avoid jamming.
Security services also rely on tipsters to tell them who might be using Starlink and search Internet traffic and social media for signs that they have been used. It was reported that they raided apartments equipped with satellite dishes.
“There has always been a game of cat and mouse,” said Ahmadian, who fled Iran in 2012 after serving a prison sentence for student activism. “The government is using all the tools at its disposal. »
Ahmadian nevertheless noted that the government’s jamming attempts had only been effective in certain urban areas, suggesting that security services did not have the resources to block Starlink more broadly.
A free Starlink could increase the flow of information out of Iran
Iran began allowing international calls via cellphones on Tuesday, but calls from outside the country to Iran remain blocked.
Compared to the 2019 protests, when lesser government measures managed to effectively stifle information reaching the rest of the world for more than a week, Ahmadian said the proliferation of Starlink made it impossible to prevent communications. He added that the flow could increase now that the service has become free.
“This time they really shut it down, even the landlines weren’t working,” he said. “But despite that, the information was getting out, and it also shows how spread out this community of Starlink users is across the country.”
Musk made Starlink free for use during several natural disasters, and Ukraine has relied heavily on the service since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. It was initially funded by SpaceX and later through a contract with the U.S. government.
Musk’s involvement had raised concerns about how powerful such a system could be in the hands of a single person, after he refused to expand Starlink coverage of Ukraine to support a planned Ukrainian counterattack in Russian-occupied Crimea.
As a supporter of Starlink for Iran, Ahmadian said the decision in Crimea was a wake-up call for him, but he saw no reason why Musk might be inclined to act similarly in Iran.
“Looking at Elon politically, I think he would be more interested … in a free Iran as a new market,” he said.
Starlink’s moves to circumvent Tehran’s efforts to cut communications are being closely watched around the world. The satellite service has grown rapidly in recent years, gaining licenses in more than 120 countries, including some with authoritarian leaders who have persecuted journalists and protesters.
Julia Voo, who directs the Cyber Power and Future Conflict program at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore, said there is a risk that activists will become dependent on a single company as a lifeline, as this “creates a single point of failure”, even though there are currently no comparable alternatives.
China has explored ways to track and destroy Starlink satellites, and Voo said the more effective Starlink becomes at penetrating “government-mandated terrestrial blackouts, the more states will observe.”
“It’s just going to result in more efforts to expand controls on different means of communication, for those watching in Iran and everywhere else,” she said.
Associated Press writers Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Melanie Lidman in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Bernard Condon in New York contributed to this report.
