Former Senior Advisor to the US Special Representative for Iran
Washington and the tech industry have the means to help Iranians: expand the tools that bypass censorship and raise the price Tehran pays for shutting the internet down.
I grew up in the Soviet Union and learned early that the walls had ears, letters were opened, and you never knew who was listening to your phone calls. My parents and grandparents spoke in half‑sentences. We were what Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky called “doublethinkers,” saying what the state wanted to hear while thinking the opposite.
But at night, doublethinkers like my family would gather around a shortwave radio and twist the dial until the static gave way to the sounds of Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. The signal may have faded in and out, but the message was clear: the world was bigger than the one the regime allowed us to see.
That same hunger for an unfiltered signal is palpable today in Iran. Since Feb. 28, 2026, the Islamic Republic has flipped the kill switch, keeping 92 million Iranians at roughly 1% connectivity—the longest nationwide shutdown ever recorded.
The question for the West is whether we will help them hear the signal or let the regime kill it.
The Iran playbook
Circumvention today is a layered game. No single tool defeats a full shutdown. What works is redundancy and creativity.
Software that adapts under fire. Cheap VPNs are largely dead. The regime deploys military-grade jamming to hunt them down. But purpose-built tools persist. Psiphon and Conduit allow diaspora activists to share their laptop connections with users inside Iran—roughly 400,000 used Psiphon to pull people through. FreeGate, built on a peer-to-peer proxy network, leaves no trace.
Obfuscation protocols like V2Ray and Shadowsocks hide traffic by making it look like standard web browsing. Direct Tor connections are blocked, but bridges with pluggable transports open during the brief windows when international routes flicker back on.
Satellite with discipline. Starlink was a lifeline during Iran’s 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests. Now it faces 30% packet loss from sustained RF jamming. The operational fix is rigorous: hide dishes, camouflage them, power on only briefly, never reuse a location.
We should also utilize satellite data broadcasting, like Toosheh, which allows users to “record” news and software from standard satellite TV dishes, bypassing the internet entirely. The next frontier is Direct-to-Cell—satellites that connect to standard smartphones, requiring no visible terminal and leaving no dish to confiscate.
Low-tech resilience. When bandwidth is throttled, Iranians switch to text-only news, email digests, RSS feeds, and messaging apps running in “light” modes. Users are also distributing "offline Wikipedias" and content packages via high-capacity SD cards.
When the internet goes dark entirely, they build offline networks using Bluetooth mesh apps, Wi-Fi Direct file sharing, and USB drives passed hand to hand. Near the Azerbaijan border, some Iranians roam onto foreign towers. Private rooms inside multiplayer video games become covert chat channels.
The bread emoji (🍞) once organized food-price protests in Iran beneath the radar of automated filters. Code evolves faster than censors.
This cat-and-mouse dynamic has always defined information warfare under repression. In China, students held up blank white sheets of paper—a silent protest against a regime that had made even the simplest words illegal. In Hong Kong during the 2019 protests, AirDrop became a political tool, pushing messages directly to strangers in public spaces without relying on open networks.
Censors ban words, dissidents find symbols. They block a platform, activists find a workaround. During Romania’s Ceaușescu era, Irina Margareta Nistor secretly dubbed thousands of banned Western films. Her grainy VHS tapes, smuggled apartment to apartment, helped puncture a system built on lies. Today’s dissidents have different tools, but the same ingenuity.
What US and Silicon Valley should do
A growing ecosystem in the free world is building tools to keep information flowing under pressure. The Open Technology Fund and Tor Project support censorship-resistant networks and rapidly deployable bridges, while SpaceX pushes satellite connectivity toward direct-to-cell models. Jigsaw and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are advancing tools that make platforms harder to block and safer under surveillance.
Washington’s task is to scale, coordinate, and sustain this stack so the signal gets through even under a full blackout.
Fund the stack that works under fire. The US should maintain Psiphon, Conduit, FreeGate, and Tor bridges, rotating them rapidly during thaw windows. This means supporting mirror sites, secure hosting, and offline content packages—and requiring low-bandwidth, offline-first design as a condition for any platform operating in high-risk markets.
Accelerate Direct-to-Cell. Streamline spectrum allocation and licensing so D2C technology can scale quickly. The goal is connectivity without hardware the regime can seize or jam.
Sanction the enablers. Target firms selling RF jammers, deep packet inspection systems, and surveillance technology to Tehran. Make information control a balance-sheet risk, not just a diplomatic talking point
Empower diaspora networks. Iranian diaspora communities verify video footage, translate eyewitness accounts, and run independent media that is trusted inside the country. During Belarus’s 2020 protests, SMS chains, printed leaflets, and neighborhood word-of-mouth coordinated action when connectivity collapsed. Iran’s diaspora is running the same model now and deserves structured support.
Pre-bunk, don’t just debunk. Companies like Jigsaw have pioneered inoculation-style media literacy—teaching people to recognize manipulation before they encounter it. In a world of deepfakes and synthetic media, this preparation is essential. This “pre-bunking” content should be scaled through diaspora-run news channels to reach users before the regime's propaganda takes root.
The crack of light
Václav Havel famously wrote that the “power of the powerless” is the ability to live in truth. For those of us in the free world, that imposes more than a moral obligation; it creates a strategic necessity.
The Cold War was won, in part, because a static-filled shortwave radio delivered the sound of freedom to those behind the Iron Curtain. Today, the “signal” is digital, but the stakes are identical.
Washington and Silicon Valley must act now to scale the tools of circumvention, raise the economic cost of censorship through data-driven diplomacy, and strengthen the “mental immune system” of those under fire. We have the technology to puncture the digital Iron Curtain. Our job is to ensure the crack of light gets through.
The detainees include women swept up during the nationwide uprising and others arrested following the military conflict involving Iran, the US, and Israel that began in February.
According to the HRANA report, 23 women are being held in the Aramesh ward, described as a basement-like structure with low ceilings and minimal ventilation.
Former detainees told the group the cramped conditions, which one compared to an ant nest, frequently trigger breathing problems and panic attacks.
Seven other women are currently being held in a quarantine unit characterized by poor sanitation and sewage odors. HRANA said that prisoners face a shortage of beds, limited medical treatment, and are often denied phone calls and family visits during their interrogation.
Serious charges and legal limbo
The reports of poor conditions coincide with concerns over the legal status of those currently held in the facility. Iran International reported earlier that three female political prisoners – Mahboubeh Shabani, theatre actress Sima Anbaei Farimani, and Azar Yahou – remain in legal limbo at the prison.
These women face severe charges including enmity against God, conspiracy against national security, and alleged links to Israel. Despite weeks in detention, they have been denied access to lawyers and have not been informed of the status of their cases.
Escalation of executions
The crackdown in the northeast reflects a wider national trend of severe punishment for security-related detainees. Center for Human Rights in Iran reported that at least 28 prisoners accused in political and security cases have been executed across Iran in the past 50 days.
Of those executed, 13 were individuals detained during the recent winter protests.
“We do not know how we can go on with these prices. Yesterday I bought two sausages. It cost 1 million rials,” one viewer told Iran International, an amount equal to about 60 cents.
The strain is deepening as Iran’s minimum wage has fallen below $90 and the rial continues to lose value, hitting a new low this week.
Another message said workers at a glass factory had still not received their March wages and that supplementary insurance had been cut.
Several citizens linked the deterioration to factory closures after the ceasefire, shortages of raw materials and rising rents.
“Since the ceasefire, most factories have shut down, especially in industrial estates. Everyone has become unemployed because of shortages of raw materials. Daily goods have become more expensive, deposits and rents have gone up, and medical and drug costs have soared,” one message said.
Service platforms absorb jobseekers
Shargh daily reported that new registrations on the home-services platform Achareh rose sharply in late April compared with the same period last year, especially in lower-barrier work such as cleaning and catering.
Registrations for cleaning and catering rose 239 percent from April 21 to May 2, while electrical work rose 220 percent, plumbing 176 percent, cooling services 150 percent, and building maintenance 140 percent, according to figures provided to Shargh.
Bahman Emam, the platform’s chief executive and co-founder, told Shargh that overall job registrations had risen 30 percent.
“We witnessed widespread layoffs this year, and it seems a significant share of applicants are seeking a first job,” Emam said.
Shargh also reported that some workers who had left the platform for traditional markets were seeking to return, while others who could no longer afford life in Tehran asked to activate their profiles in other cities.
Experts warn shock may endure
Ashkan Nezamabadi, an economic journalist in Berlin, told Iran International that Iran’s labor market had entered a dangerous phase.
“Only one of the two main job platforms in Iran announced a few days ago that it had 318,000 new job applications in one day, which was a new record,” Nezamabadi said.
He said new job opportunities had fallen by about 80 percent, while economic losses and internet disruptions added to the strain.
“These changes clearly show something is breaking in the labor market,” he said.
Government plans to issue loans worth 220 million rials (around $120) per worker were unlikely to prevent layoffs or create durable jobs, according to Nezamabadi.
He said assistance would be more effective if directed toward consumers to preserve demand, contrasting it with pandemic-era support programs in Europe and the United States.
Wages fall below subsistence costs
Iran’s Labor News Agency (ILNA) reported that the cost of a basic household livelihood basket had reached 713 million rials (about $385), up from 450 million rials (about $240) used in wage talks earlier this year.
Faramarz Tofighi, a labor activist who calculates livelihood costs, told ILNA that even the earlier estimate was not realistic and that wages did not reach 60 percent of it.
“That same unrealistic 450 million rial basket has today reached 713 million rials,” Tofighi said.
ILNA said the minimum wage including benefits had fallen to about $88 after the rial’s decline, leaving workers unable to cover rent and food.
Workers cited in the report said they were struggling to buy even bread and eggs, with meat and rice removed from many household shopping lists.
Political fallout grows
Milad Rasaei-Manesh, a political activist based in Stockholm, linked the downturn to broader structural issues.
“Today the economy is effectively destroyed, and the war and policies pursued have led to widespread unemployment and deeper poverty,” Rasaei-Manesh told Iran International.
He said internet restrictions had compounded the crisis by cutting off income sources.
“Internet shutdowns have directly caused job losses and pushed more people into poverty,” he said.
He said economic pressures could drive coordinated protest action. "If workers organize through strikes and collective action, they can accelerate change,” he added.
The mounting evidence points to a labor market squeezed from both ends: more people seeking work, and fewer households able to pay for services.
