After having supported activists in egypt during the arab spring I've come to learn that it's all just coopted regime change nonsense sprinkled with "feel good activism" for Westerners. No one in Egypt is even remotely better off now. Just let Iranians deal with this on their own. From what I've researched, our impression of what their lives are supposedly like is totally shaped by intelligence services and cointelpro media anyways so why bother to get involved. We'll only make things worse for the average Iranian.
It's no longer a ban / blacklist. It's a whitelist with extremely strict rules and DPI inspection. You can connect to example.com ONLY if it is whitelisted, and only if you use this specific IP and Port, with this specific TLS handshake fingerprint and certificate, and the first N packets follow these timing / length patterns.
A few weeks ago a very clever way to bypass the SNI whitelist was introduced [1] (SNI spoofing for cloudflare!) but it was subsequently blocked. Some claim that at this moment all outbound TCP connections are terminated inside the firewall / ISPs and therefore methods like [1] based on injecting fake or problematic TCP packets no longer work. It seems like even SYN-free TCP connections (again, breaking protocol) are no longer accessible.
Are there other sources than a linkedin post? I try to be a bit more critical of information in times of war. God knows we've been lied to before, by all sides. I've seen janitorial schedules be presented as a terrorist sign in sheets.
Related story - in February 2026, the baggage of a Dutch diplomat was confiscated. It contained three Starlink satellite modems and seven satellite phones, concealed inside a suitcase.
I learned from a BSides presentation that Ukranian military are using Starlink trancievers placed in pits to beat ground-based signal detection. Do with that what you will.
The user has to be more careful. If he has installed any official Iranian apps (like banking or communication) or even visits such a website their IP address will be recorded and most certainly looked into. Even if they use split tunneling for domestic websites, some apps intentionally try to ping unreachable servers from Iran (For instance "Bale" might ping a sentry instance hosted outside of Iran, normally inaccessible from the domestic intranet) to catch the more careful users.
No, because the collimating effect on the beam would still require you to have line of sight to the emitter, and if a drone is able to get that close without being intercepted then something else has already gone wrong.
But this is also an example of weird absolutist thinking about military tactics: is it unbeatable? No. Does it complicate the surveillance and detection picture? Yes.
US military "tested" some of its new weapons during the last war on Iran, in one case killing more than 15 kids [1]. So US tech is famous for improving life quality in Iran.
15? There were more than a hundred girls killed in their school by an american missile, just in one of the strikes among many, many thousands. And I think it is just a small part which escaped the western information blockade on the war you started with Iran, most of what happened is not reported.
Excuse the pedantry but it's probably more accurate to describe Iran as a military dicatorship more than a theocracy. Yes, there's a Supreme Leader but the day-to-day government is really run by the IRGC. Not that one is necessarily better than the other, mind you. It's a bit like describing the UK as a monarchy (yes the British monarch is more of a figurehead than the Ayatollah is).
But look at all our self-proclaimed enemeies (eg Cuba, North Korea, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Iran) and all of that end of becoming a varying degree of autocratic. None of these countries ends up wanting to be a US puppet. I can't think of a single example where foreign inteference (or war) has had the citizenry welcome foreign powers as liberators or otherwise increased freedoms or conditions in a country for those citizens.
You might be tempted to say apartheid South Africa but there's a key difference. South Africa wasn't an enemy. It was an ally. Sanctions don't work on enemies. They only work on allies.
However unpoular the IRGC or the Supreme Leader are in Iran, the US and Israel are less popular. We should never forget that the Ayatollah is a direct product of US inteference as we couped their democratically elected government to install a brutal regime under the Shah. Look up the history of SAVAK some time.
The person takes the responsibility; you are excluding him from the society that you implicitly claim to represent. These two are very different intentions.
Wanting the ordinary Iranian civilian to have uncensored, properly functioning broadband Internet service (no better or no worse than what you have sitting in your house right now) is a good thing no matter where you stand on the topic of current military action by either side.
>Last year, the Iranian government passed legislation that made using, buying or selling Starlink devices punishable by up to two years in prison. The jail term for distributing or importing more than 10 devices can be up to 10 years.
In all fairness, that's true for a lot of things in Iran, and some of those are not actually enforced or only enforced some of the time (which is where the forcibly transitioning gay people thing came from).
Netblocks has been doing some very good work tracking the presence or absence of known IP blocks previously announced by Iranian ASNs. The charts really speak for themselves.
For those who don't keep track of backbone ISP topologies: Iran has 3 or 4 major entirely government controlled ASNs which all domestic ISPs are obligated to be downstream of.
The government controlled AS run all the international transit connections (at the BGP level) and also the physical fiber/longhaul DWDM systems into a few neighboring countries. It makes it very easy to cut off all the downstream domestic only ISPs.
Obviously Ayatollah as they are Iranian themselves. And Israel is already actively genociding another country so not sure if they wouldn't do it in Iran
I clicked through to the source for Amnesty International scrutinizing the claims and that likely 3000 people have died and it reads:
> On 17 January, in a public speech, Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, said “thousands of people” were killed. Since then, on 21January, Iran’s Supreme Council of National Security issued a statement that 3,117 people were killed during the uprising. However, on 16 January 2026, the UN Special Rapporteur on Iran, Mai Sato, said in a media interview that at least 5,000 people had been killed, noting that according to information she received from medical sources, the death toll might be as high as 20,000
The only way for someone to read that as “likely 3000 people have died” is if one takes the Iranian numbers as fact. For those whose experience is that authoritarian states crushing protests provide accurate numbers this might be somewhat convincing. To say nothing of the fact that this is a stupendous number of people.
I found it convincing of the opposite: that this is not a neutral summary of the context.
> The US simply can't operate there. Israel can. Israel is made up of many ethnic groups, including people who are ethnically Persian and speak perfect Farsi.
The US has hundreds of thousands of ethnic Iranian immigrants, not sure where you got the idea that it's not made up of many ethnic groups.
> It seems likely that at least 3000 died but were these protestors brutally crushed by the government or a the government quashing a foreign-backed uprising? We've established the foreign powers armed some of these groups;
I am myself someone who rabidly hates US imperialism but when you use US imperialism to justify slaughtering thousands of civilians you lose all credibility and will not be able to convince anyone who disagrees with you of anything, no matter how many sources you link. Even if the US instigated the protests, and even if it were "only" 3000 dead, killing 3000 protestors is Very Bad and you don't need to go out of your way to justify it. It is possible for both US imperialism to be bad and for an authoritarian religious regime killing innocent people to be bad. One's thinking should be more nuanced than a struct with a single bool.
I have little doubt the US armed Kurds to add to Iran's woes, however
> Trump openly admiited it [2].
isn't a credible source, as the linked article admits:
Iran analyst Neil Quilliam of the United Kingdom’s Chatham House think tank, told Al Jazeera that it’s hard to assign much weight to Trump’s statements because of the claims and counterclaims often coming from him and his administration.
The current POTUS contradicts himself from one day to the next and frequently waffles for hours spouting factually incorrect material.
So in court there's the concept of hearsay, which generally makes certain statements inadmissble as evidence. The classic example is me testifying "Alice said Bob told her he did it".
One of the exceptions to hearsay is called the admission against interest. That means that if you say something that hurts your case or hurts you in some other way (eg implicating you in a crime) then you will generally be allowed to testify to that.
So this isn't a court of law obviously but I still find this analogy useful. Yes, Trump says some crazy stuff and even openly lies. All of that's true. But that doesn't mean you should ignore everything he says. What he says can be corroborated (or contradicted) but it also carries weight if it's an admission against interest.
In this case, Trump claiming to have armed "protesters" is absolutely an admission against interest. It undercuts American propaganda that the Iranian regime brutally crushed an organic protest by ordinary citizens. As such, at least for me, the statement carries more weight. You can still look at the statement and see if other evidence contradicts or suports it of course.
None of your points changes anything: The Iranian government and the IRGC are still a despicable, oppressive, and brutal regime, holding both the People of Iran hostage in their own country, and also coordinating violence against Israel in the entire Middle East.
the logistics of killing 30000 people in 2 days is absurd. visit the killing fields in cambodia to understand what a butchering of this magnitude would entail.
their lies dont even pass the sniff test.
but still this comment gets downvoted because the whole internet is flooded with israeli bots to manufacture consent for this bs
in my view israel needs to be sanctioned until it gives up its nuclear weapons. it is a shame for humanity that this pariah apartheid state is allowed to exist, stoke conflicts everywhere and murder people in neighboring countries
"the logistics of killing 30000 people in 2 days is absurd. "
The Nazis managed to murder 35000 people within 2 days at Babiy Yar, in one single region of Ukraine, with no prepared specialized infrastructure, just bussing them to a ravine and shooting them.
Back then Kiev region had about 2 million people. The entire Iran has 90 million, 45 times more.
I suspect the Internet blackout in Iran is not actually related to its citizens - it isn't about silencing its citizens.
It is to prevent hacking and tracking by US and Israel of what is going on over there, it is defensive since it has been shown that Iran's connected infrastructure is thoroughly compromised.
There's multiple motives, not just counter-organization. A media blackout prevents OSINT damage analysis, much like how the IDF and CENTCOM both censor reporting of attacks on their in-theater installations.
I think the regime narrative is mostly made up by Americans what's the difference between any of the Arab countries from Iran. The only difference is they are not controlled by America. It the same bullshit narrative of promoting democracy but in reality it's just about pushing for a government no matter how bad as long as it supports US control.
Is Iran's domestic internet still fully operational (sans access to/from the outside world)? If so, I wouldn't think the cut-off would help much security-wise because a single Starlink terminal would allow the US/Israel domestic access.
Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted for pointing out the obvious: yes obviously the US and Israel will exploit the information system of their enemy if they can, and it’s absolutely rational to deny them the opportunity to do so.
After having supported activists in egypt during the arab spring I've come to learn that it's all just coopted regime change nonsense sprinkled with "feel good activism" for Westerners. No one in Egypt is even remotely better off now. Just let Iranians deal with this on their own. From what I've researched, our impression of what their lives are supposedly like is totally shaped by intelligence services and cointelpro media anyways so why bother to get involved. We'll only make things worse for the average Iranian.
On other news, Iran is banning IPv6, UDP, DNS, ICMP to tighten the blackout
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/permanent-ban-ipv6-forced-nat...
It's no longer a ban / blacklist. It's a whitelist with extremely strict rules and DPI inspection. You can connect to example.com ONLY if it is whitelisted, and only if you use this specific IP and Port, with this specific TLS handshake fingerprint and certificate, and the first N packets follow these timing / length patterns.
A few weeks ago a very clever way to bypass the SNI whitelist was introduced [1] (SNI spoofing for cloudflare!) but it was subsequently blocked. Some claim that at this moment all outbound TCP connections are terminated inside the firewall / ISPs and therefore methods like [1] based on injecting fake or problematic TCP packets no longer work. It seems like even SYN-free TCP connections (again, breaking protocol) are no longer accessible.
[1] https://github.com/therealaleph/sni-spoofing-rust
Archive - https://ghostarchive.org/archive/BjCwU
Are there other sources than a linkedin post? I try to be a bit more critical of information in times of war. God knows we've been lied to before, by all sides. I've seen janitorial schedules be presented as a terrorist sign in sheets.
The LinkedIn post has the original Persian text attached.
Also there is no point to lie about this
Related story - in February 2026, the baggage of a Dutch diplomat was confiscated. It contained three Starlink satellite modems and seven satellite phones, concealed inside a suitcase.
https://karat.substack.com/p/a-diplomatic-suitcase-at-imam-k...
I learned from a BSides presentation that Ukranian military are using Starlink trancievers placed in pits to beat ground-based signal detection. Do with that what you will.
I heard that Iran is just looking for Starlink SSIDs so if you turn off Wi-Fi they won't find it.
The user has to be more careful. If he has installed any official Iranian apps (like banking or communication) or even visits such a website their IP address will be recorded and most certainly looked into. Even if they use split tunneling for domestic websites, some apps intentionally try to ping unreachable servers from Iran (For instance "Bale" might ping a sentry instance hosted outside of Iran, normally inaccessible from the domestic intranet) to catch the more careful users.
Wouldn't they be easily detected from airborne drones?
No, because the collimating effect on the beam would still require you to have line of sight to the emitter, and if a drone is able to get that close without being intercepted then something else has already gone wrong.
But this is also an example of weird absolutist thinking about military tactics: is it unbeatable? No. Does it complicate the surveillance and detection picture? Yes.
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russia started a war to invade ukraine. hope this explanation helps
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US military "tested" some of its new weapons during the last war on Iran, in one case killing more than 15 kids [1]. So US tech is famous for improving life quality in Iran.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/world/middleeast/us-preci...
15? There were more than a hundred girls killed in their school by an american missile, just in one of the strikes among many, many thousands. And I think it is just a small part which escaped the western information blockade on the war you started with Iran, most of what happened is not reported.
Just because the US sucks doesn't mean the Shia Theocratic thugs ruling Iran don't ALSO suck.
Excuse the pedantry but it's probably more accurate to describe Iran as a military dicatorship more than a theocracy. Yes, there's a Supreme Leader but the day-to-day government is really run by the IRGC. Not that one is necessarily better than the other, mind you. It's a bit like describing the UK as a monarchy (yes the British monarch is more of a figurehead than the Ayatollah is).
But look at all our self-proclaimed enemeies (eg Cuba, North Korea, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Iran) and all of that end of becoming a varying degree of autocratic. None of these countries ends up wanting to be a US puppet. I can't think of a single example where foreign inteference (or war) has had the citizenry welcome foreign powers as liberators or otherwise increased freedoms or conditions in a country for those citizens.
You might be tempted to say apartheid South Africa but there's a key difference. South Africa wasn't an enemy. It was an ally. Sanctions don't work on enemies. They only work on allies.
However unpoular the IRGC or the Supreme Leader are in Iran, the US and Israel are less popular. We should never forget that the Ayatollah is a direct product of US inteference as we couped their democratically elected government to install a brutal regime under the Shah. Look up the history of SAVAK some time.
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We are not the good guys in iran
On the specific concerns of giving internet to civilians, yes you are.
I just don't know if those civilians will trust you. They have plenty of reasons not to.
You are not we
The person takes the responsibility; you are excluding him from the society that you implicitly claim to represent. These two are very different intentions.
Wanting the ordinary Iranian civilian to have uncensored, properly functioning broadband Internet service (no better or no worse than what you have sitting in your house right now) is a good thing no matter where you stand on the topic of current military action by either side.
I'm not sure either side in Trump vs the Ayatollahs is good. I feel for the ordinary people though who are the ones wanting Stalinks.
Maybe we need to start a GoFundMe to sponsor some of these Starlink terminals.... ?
It’s the death penalty for anyone caught with one.
Per the article, it's seemingly not?
>Last year, the Iranian government passed legislation that made using, buying or selling Starlink devices punishable by up to two years in prison. The jail term for distributing or importing more than 10 devices can be up to 10 years.
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In all fairness, that's true for a lot of things in Iran, and some of those are not actually enforced or only enforced some of the time (which is where the forcibly transitioning gay people thing came from).
Some things are worth the risk.
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I know how to smuggle starlink devices in a mass scale into Iran.
Starship?
The CIA and MI5 must be really disperate.
Netblocks has been doing some very good work tracking the presence or absence of known IP blocks previously announced by Iranian ASNs. The charts really speak for themselves.
For those who don't keep track of backbone ISP topologies: Iran has 3 or 4 major entirely government controlled ASNs which all domestic ISPs are obligated to be downstream of.
The government controlled AS run all the international transit connections (at the BGP level) and also the physical fiber/longhaul DWDM systems into a few neighboring countries. It makes it very easy to cut off all the downstream domestic only ISPs.
https://netblocks.org/
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If the options for Iran are to have illegitimate government controlled by Israel or the Ayatollahs, which would you pick?
Obviously Ayatollah as they are Iranian themselves. And Israel is already actively genociding another country so not sure if they wouldn't do it in Iran
Both are terrible options, why should I root for one of them? Look what Israel is doing in Gaza, are they gonna be good for Iran now?
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I clicked through to the source for Amnesty International scrutinizing the claims and that likely 3000 people have died and it reads:
> On 17 January, in a public speech, Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, said “thousands of people” were killed. Since then, on 21January, Iran’s Supreme Council of National Security issued a statement that 3,117 people were killed during the uprising. However, on 16 January 2026, the UN Special Rapporteur on Iran, Mai Sato, said in a media interview that at least 5,000 people had been killed, noting that according to information she received from medical sources, the death toll might be as high as 20,000
The only way for someone to read that as “likely 3000 people have died” is if one takes the Iranian numbers as fact. For those whose experience is that authoritarian states crushing protests provide accurate numbers this might be somewhat convincing. To say nothing of the fact that this is a stupendous number of people.
I found it convincing of the opposite: that this is not a neutral summary of the context.
> this is not a neutral summary of the context
Where do you prefer to get neutral summaries from?
> The US simply can't operate there. Israel can. Israel is made up of many ethnic groups, including people who are ethnically Persian and speak perfect Farsi.
The US has hundreds of thousands of ethnic Iranian immigrants, not sure where you got the idea that it's not made up of many ethnic groups.
> It seems likely that at least 3000 died but were these protestors brutally crushed by the government or a the government quashing a foreign-backed uprising? We've established the foreign powers armed some of these groups;
I am myself someone who rabidly hates US imperialism but when you use US imperialism to justify slaughtering thousands of civilians you lose all credibility and will not be able to convince anyone who disagrees with you of anything, no matter how many sources you link. Even if the US instigated the protests, and even if it were "only" 3000 dead, killing 3000 protestors is Very Bad and you don't need to go out of your way to justify it. It is possible for both US imperialism to be bad and for an authoritarian religious regime killing innocent people to be bad. One's thinking should be more nuanced than a struct with a single bool.
Also to point out that the U.S actively censors us too. It blocks Iranian government websites, and a whole list of sites that supports it.
I have little doubt the US armed Kurds to add to Iran's woes, however
> Trump openly admiited it [2].
isn't a credible source, as the linked article admits:
The current POTUS contradicts himself from one day to the next and frequently waffles for hours spouting factually incorrect material.
So in court there's the concept of hearsay, which generally makes certain statements inadmissble as evidence. The classic example is me testifying "Alice said Bob told her he did it".
One of the exceptions to hearsay is called the admission against interest. That means that if you say something that hurts your case or hurts you in some other way (eg implicating you in a crime) then you will generally be allowed to testify to that.
So this isn't a court of law obviously but I still find this analogy useful. Yes, Trump says some crazy stuff and even openly lies. All of that's true. But that doesn't mean you should ignore everything he says. What he says can be corroborated (or contradicted) but it also carries weight if it's an admission against interest.
In this case, Trump claiming to have armed "protesters" is absolutely an admission against interest. It undercuts American propaganda that the Iranian regime brutally crushed an organic protest by ordinary citizens. As such, at least for me, the statement carries more weight. You can still look at the statement and see if other evidence contradicts or suports it of course.
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None of your points changes anything: The Iranian government and the IRGC are still a despicable, oppressive, and brutal regime, holding both the People of Iran hostage in their own country, and also coordinating violence against Israel in the entire Middle East.
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the logistics of killing 30000 people in 2 days is absurd. visit the killing fields in cambodia to understand what a butchering of this magnitude would entail.
their lies dont even pass the sniff test.
but still this comment gets downvoted because the whole internet is flooded with israeli bots to manufacture consent for this bs
in my view israel needs to be sanctioned until it gives up its nuclear weapons. it is a shame for humanity that this pariah apartheid state is allowed to exist, stoke conflicts everywhere and murder people in neighboring countries
"the logistics of killing 30000 people in 2 days is absurd. "
The Nazis managed to murder 35000 people within 2 days at Babiy Yar, in one single region of Ukraine, with no prepared specialized infrastructure, just bussing them to a ravine and shooting them.
Back then Kiev region had about 2 million people. The entire Iran has 90 million, 45 times more.
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israel should be sanctioned until it gives up its nuclear weapons
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I thought that was exactly how the spies got made. As Iranians figured they could just narrow the signal.
I suspect the Internet blackout in Iran is not actually related to its citizens - it isn't about silencing its citizens.
It is to prevent hacking and tracking by US and Israel of what is going on over there, it is defensive since it has been shown that Iran's connected infrastructure is thoroughly compromised.
It’s 100% to prevent citizens from becoming organized. The regime is most fearful of this.
There's multiple motives, not just counter-organization. A media blackout prevents OSINT damage analysis, much like how the IDF and CENTCOM both censor reporting of attacks on their in-theater installations.
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How did people organize pre-Internet times though?
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which is the exact same reason China bans Starlink.
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There's something to be said if it connects (via ethernet or via hidden eSIM) Starlink to local Iranian internet - it is hard to access otherwise.
There is no doubt that CIA has access to Starlink, that's a massive amount of crucial intel right there in battlefront.
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this
well... so obvious
I think the regime narrative is mostly made up by Americans what's the difference between any of the Arab countries from Iran. The only difference is they are not controlled by America. It the same bullshit narrative of promoting democracy but in reality it's just about pushing for a government no matter how bad as long as it supports US control.
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The blackout started back in January before the US even got involved.
Due to widespread protests and an attempt to crack down on coordination. This chain of events was widely reported.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Internet_blackout_in_Iran
Before the US started an open war. US has been involved in a relentless anti-Iranian campaign since before I was born (I'm 55).
It definitely ramped up with the invasion. I watched the webcam streams go dark.
The internet is only off for those who don't have a special sim card, i.e. those who aren't associated with the IRGC.
Is Iran's domestic internet still fully operational (sans access to/from the outside world)? If so, I wouldn't think the cut-off would help much security-wise because a single Starlink terminal would allow the US/Israel domestic access.
I don't think it is. At least from Iranians I've heard from, domestic internet was online for a little while but was turned off in February or so.
How do people communicate now? And why wouldn’t that be compromised?
It’s defensive indeed! It’s defense against the people whom the regime is most afraid of!
Except that Iran has been doing it since 2019: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Iran
Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted for pointing out the obvious: yes obviously the US and Israel will exploit the information system of their enemy if they can, and it’s absolutely rational to deny them the opportunity to do so.
Should internet and outside access be cut for people of Gaza and Lebanon too? Aren’t they targeted by Israel as well?
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