is a features editor who publishes award-winning stories about law, tech, and internet subcultures. A journalist trained as a lawyer, she has been writing about tech for 10 years.
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After protests broke out in early January, the Iranian regime shut down the internet, starting the longest blackout in Iranian history. Despite this attempt to stop the protests from spreading, they did not stop. Still, the internet shutdown slowed down the spread of information both inside and outside Iran.
Behind the heavily policed borders and the jammed signals, an unprecedented wave of state violence continues to add to a death toll somewhere between 3,000 and 30,000. Even at the lowest count, which has been acknowledged by the Iranian state and is likely a wild underestimate, these last few weeks have been one of the bloodiest uprisings in modern history.
The situation in Iran can be hard to grasp. The history is complicated; the state of the technology and internet infrastructure there is constantly in flux. To get a sense of what is happening right now, I turned to an expert. Mahsa Alimardani, the associate director of the Technology Threats & Opportunities program at WITNESS, has been a researcher and advocate in the digital rights space — particularly around Iran — since 2012. I spoke with her about what is happening in Iran, and how technology both props up and threatens repressive regimes.
The Verge: What is internet access in Iran like right now?
Mahsa Alimardani: Since the weekend [of January 24], there has been some resumption of connectivity. And I’m a little bit worried that this might convince people that things are back to normal. Last I saw, there was like 30 to 40 percent connectivity on some of the Cloudflare network data in Iran and there’s very inconsistent connectivity. Some circumvention tools have started to work.
Randomly, someone in Iran FaceTime called me yesterday. They were like, “My VPN stopped working, so I just tried to call with FaceTime, and for some reason, it didn’t even need a VPN.” But it was a momentary glitch. Various things are happening across the network, and it’s not really clear why there’s this opening, or what it means for long-term connectivity.
Since January 8th, when there was a surge in the uprising in the protest movement in Iran, there was an internet shutdown — the longest internet shutdown in Iran, they broke the record in length.
They also broke the record in number of protesters that have been massacred. It’s horrifying to think that technology helps enable such crimes.
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