Free Starlink access for Iran seen as game changer for demonstrators getting their message out

BANGKOK — Iranian demonstrators' ability to get details of bloody nationwide protests out to the world has been given a strong boost, with SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service dropping its fees to allow more people to circumvent the Tehran government's strongest attempt ever to prevent information from spilling outside its borders, activists said Wednesday.

The move by the American aerospace company run by Elon Musk follows the complete shutdown of telecommunications and internet access to Iran's 85 million people on Jan. 8, as protests expanded over the Islamic Republic's faltering economy and the collapse of its currency.

SpaceX has not officially announced the decision and did not respond to request for comment, but activists told The Associated Press that Starlink has been available for free to anyone in Iran with the receivers since Tuesday.

''Starlink has been crucial,'' said Mehdi Yahyanejad, an Iranian whose nonprofit Net Freedom Pioneers has helped smuggle units into Iran, pointing to video that emerged Sunday showing rows of bodies at a forensic medical center near Tehran.

''That showed a few hundred bodies on the ground, that came out because of Starlink," he said in an interview from Los Angeles. "I think that those videos from the center pretty much changed everyone's understanding of what's happening because they saw it with their own eyes.''

Since the outbreak of demonstrations Dec. 28, the death toll has risen to more than 2,500 people, primarily protesters but also security personnel, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency.

Starlink is banned in Iran by telecommunication regulations, as the country never authorized the importation, sale or use of the devices. Activists fear they could be accused of helping the U.S. or Israel by using Starlink and charged with espionage, which can carry the death penalty.

The first units were smuggled into Iran in 2022 during protests over the country's mandatory headscarf law, after Musk got the Biden administration to exempt the Starlink service from Iran sanctions.

Since then, more than 50,000 units are estimated to have been sneaked in, with people going through great lengths to conceal them, using virtual private networks while on the system to hide IP addresses and taking other precautions, said Ahmad Ahmadian, the executive director of Holistic Resilience, a Los Angeles-based organization that was responsible for getting some of the first Starlink units into Iran.

Starlink is a global internet network that relies on some 10,000 satellites orbiting Earth. Subscribers need to have equipment, including an antenna requires a line of site to the satellite, so must be deployed in the open, where it could be spotted by authorities. Many Iranians disguise them as solar panels, Ahmadian said.

After efforts to shut down communications during the 12-day war with Israel in June proved to be not terribly effective, Iranian security services have taken more ''extreme tactics'' now to both jam Starlink's radio signals and GPS systems, Ahmadian said in a phone interview. After Holistic Resilience passed on reports to SpaceX, Ahmadian said, the company pushed a firmware update that helped circumvent the new countermeasures.

Security services also rely on informers to tell them who might be using Starlink, search internet and social media traffic for signs it has been used, and there have been reports they have raided apartments with satellite dishes.

Still, Ahmadian noted that the government jamming attempts had only been effective in certain urban areas, suggesting that security services lack the resources to block Starlink more broadly.

A free Starlink could increase the flow of information out of Iran

Iran did begin to allow people to call out internationally on Tuesday via their mobile phones, but calls from outside the country into Iran remain blocked.

Compared to protests in 2019, when lesser measures by the government were able to effectively stifle information reaching the rest of the world for more than a week, Ahmadian said the proliferation of Starlink has made it impossible to prevent communications He said the flow could increase now that the service has been made free.

''This time around they really shut it down, even fixed landlines were not working,'' he said. ''But despite this, the information was coming out and it also shows how distributed this community of Starlink users is in the country.''

Musk raised concerns over the power of such a system being in the hands of one person, after he refused to extend Ukraine's Starlink coverage to support a planned Ukrainian counterattack in Russian-occupied Crimea.

As a proponent of Starlink for Iran, Ahmadian said the Crimea decision was a wake-up call for him, but that he couldn't see any reason why Musk might be inclined to act similarly in Iran.

''Looking at the political Elon, I think he would have more interest ... in a free Iran as a new market,'' he said.

Julia Voo, who heads the International Institute for Strategic Studies' Cyber Power and Future Conflict Program in Singapore, said there is a risk in becoming reliant on one company as a lifeline, as it ''creates a single point of failure,'' though currently there are no comparable alternatives.

China has already been exploring ways to hunt and destroy Starlink satellites, and Voo said the more effective Starlink proves itself at penetrating ''government-mandated terrestrial blackouts, the more states will be observing.''

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