Iran’s Online Crackdown Prompts Smuggling of Starlink Kits
Activists organize underground shipments of satellite internet terminals
Iranian border guards discovered the gray box in a van crossing from Iraq in late October. Inside was a sleek machine resembling a monitor. But after questioning the driver, the guards waved the vehicle through, people involved said.
The guards had just allowed a Starlink satellite dish sold by a division of Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, into the country. Around 200 of the devices, which enable users to access the internet through satellite links, have been smuggled into Iran by supporters of a monthslong rights movement to help protesters circumvent a government crackdown on online communications, according to the people involved in some of the shipments.
Iran’s government has throttled down bandwidths, stepped up filtering of social-media sites and taken down virtual private networks, according to analysts and reports by nongovernment organizations. It has also sought to intercept Starlink and other satellite internet devices, which are illegal in Iran, according to the people involved.
The number of Iranians with access to Starlink is a tiny fraction of the millions who use virtual private networks and other platforms to evade government restrictions, users say. But the terminals provide internet access free from the government’s controls, making them especially useful for protesters seeking to send video files and communicate securely. Social-media apps have been widely used to organize and share footage of the protests.
One of the main efforts to get Starlink gear into Iran is by a group of Iranian-American activists and tech entrepreneurs in California, who began making plans to buy and ship the devices only days after the protests broke out, members of the team said.
To elude the government, some kits were repacked in boxes for microwave ovens or other household items. Each was carried separately––on boats crossing the Persian Gulf to Iranian ports, in vehicles crossing at border checkpoints, or even hand-carried over Iran’s mountainous border with Iraq, members of the team said.
Smugglers charged as much or more than the roughly $600 price of the kits to transport such risky cargo, group members said. So far, only one shipment has been turned away at the Iranian border, the people said.
A spokesman for Iran’s government didn’t respond to questions about the smuggling of Starlink terminals.
Senior Iranian officials have defended their crackdown, claiming that the protests have been instigated by the U.S. and other adversaries, partly by flooding the country with social-media apps that are responsible for influencing young Iranians.
Yet deciding how far to go in clamping down on online access is proving difficult for Tehran. If it shuts down the internet completely it could deepen Iran’s already severe economic woes, worsening the protests. If it eases up on the clampdown, the unrest touched off by the death in police custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in mid-September could also spread.
“We shut down one VPN today and immediately it is replaced by another one supplied by foreign countries,” Mohammad-Jafar Montazeri, Iran’s attorney general, said in remarks on Dec. 3, according to Iran’s state media. “The only solution is shutting down the internet completely,” which he said most Iranian officials didn’t favor.
The regime is making daily adjustments to the clampdown. “This shift towards targeted censorship suggests that authorities may be attempting to minimize the cost of internet outages while maximizing the political impact by maintaining the pattern of blockages for long periods,” the Open Observatory of Network Interference, a nonprofit organization partly funded by the U.S. State Department, said in a report last month.
In the month after the protests began, Iran shut down access to its three major mobile networks in the evenings, when the protests were occurring, but eased the restrictions at other times, the report found.
After the protests broke out, the Biden administration eased Treasury Department restrictions on exporting internet services and equipment to heavily sanctioned Iran, enabling Starlink devices, virtual private networks and other network technology to flow legally to the country.
Mr. Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., has built a fleet of satellites in orbits relatively close to Earth, offering high-speed internet connections to users of its portable Starlink terminals.
Though designed for consumers, the system is being used heavily by the government and troops in Ukraine, where fighting with Russia has disrupted normal internet service. Mr. Musk has said around 25,000 Starlink terminals are in the country.
Critics of the U.S. government’s approach contend that Washington could be providing more help to private efforts to overcome Iran’s crackdown. “So far, the U.S. government’s posture has been reactive when it comes to Iranian internet outages,” said Jason Brodsky, policy director of United Against Nuclear Iran, a nonprofit group based in Washington, calling the easing of exports controls “necessary but not sufficient.”
A senior U.S. official said the Biden administration had taken multiple successful steps to aid protesters in maintaining internet access but didn’t want to be seen as meddling in Iran’s internal affairs.
Starlink connections were unavailable in Iran until Mr. Musk announced on Twitter that he was activating it on Sept. 23, minutes after the Biden administration said it was easing exports controls on providing internet gear and network services to Iran to aid the protests.
More than one million subscribers now use the system across the world, according to a Dec. 19 tweet from the company, which didn’t respond to a request for comment on its operations in Iran.
Unlike a fiber-optic connection, the Starlink dish communicates with a constellation of laser-linked satellites that beam internet data to and from ground stations. A router connects to the dish, allowing users to access the internet through Wi-Fi signals.
The California group’s plan required raising money from private donors and foundations to buy the Starlink RV model as well as to pay the $110 monthly fee per device for internet service so they would work in Iran.
Around 40 devices sent by the group have already arrived and another 40 are still in transit or being readied for shipment. With similar efforts under way from other activists, around 200 Starlink kits are believed to be in Iran, according to one member of the group.
The first of their Starlinks to make it to Iran was carried in the van stopped by the border guards, two members said. It was turned over to a protester in Tehran, who took it to the roof of his family’s apartment and attached it to a makeshift stand.
After five minutes, the dish connected to a satellite, the protester said in an interview. With his smartphone, he took a brief video, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, showing the system was working and sent it to other members of the group in California. He covered the dish with one of his mother’s chadors, a black cloak worn by Iranian women, he said.
Another recipient was an amateur photographer in Iran’s Kurdish region, who has been sending video and photos of the protests using one of the smuggled devices, according to Hossein Fatemi, the Iranian owner of a New York photography agency, who has received many of the photos and sold them to clients.
“We are sure that the government knows that there are Starlinks in Iran, but it doesn’t know who has them or in what cities,” Mr. Fatemi said.