Over the past couple of weeks, Islamic Republic leaders have banned popular social media and messaging outlets like WhatsApp, making it difficult for protesters to organize or communicate what’s happening to those outside of the country. A man who runs a phone repair shop in Tehran, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid detection by the Iranian government, said that blackouts tend to happen between 4 p.m. and midnight.
Internet restrictions in Iran are nothing new; the government has often used them as a tool to quash resistance there. In 2019, protests that grew out of Iran’s gas rationing and price hikes prompted a total internet blackout for six days, during which some 1,500 protesters were killed. “That was the first time that people realized the government can do this,” said Mani Nilchiani, the other organizer of Disco Tehran, who has stepped down from that role since this interview. “They can literally turn it off, kill people and then turn it back on again.”
A VPN acts as a go-between. It can access restricted websites and services on the user’s behalf while protecting her anonymity. While Mr. Ghavamian has been using the Disco Tehran Instagram account to share posts from Iranians, Mr. Nilchiani had been using it to reach Iranians in need of VPNs, in order for the sharing of information to to continue. In the past few weeks, nearly 100 people have written to him, asking for help with VPNs.
Mr. Nilchiani had been paying for these VPN subscriptions using Disco Tehran’s funds and then donating them to those inside of Iran. A 35-year-old Iranian expat who works in artificial intelligence, who declined to be named, said that he had personally supported some 20 subscriptions, which cost about $100 each. He added that he hoped American VPN companies would relax their rules so that more Iranians could use the internet; he has spent hours speaking with customer support departments to make this happen, but he’s not making much progress, he said.
And in Iran, even with obfuscation tools like VPNs, accessing the internet can be difficult. Many VPN services require that you download an app first, and Iranians are banned from Apple’s App Store. Plus they must navigate sanctions, which prohibit financial interactions between Iran and certain countries. In some cases, the Iranian government has learned about certain commercial VPN services and blocked their I.P. addresses.
One workaround to that is an initiative called “Snowflake,” where volunteers in other countries like the United States install open-source software (meaning that it is free, licensed and designed for anyone to use) as a temporary bridge to the internet. The project’s goal is to continuously add new I.P. addresses faster than government censors can block them.
For Navid, 36, who works in finance in New York and who requested his last name be omitted for security reasons, downloading the extension to share with the protesters is the most impactful way that he and his friends can help from abroad, he said. Even feeling a small bit of success has been energizing for him, he added.
