SHADOW NETWORK

Inside the clandestine effort to smuggle a free internet into Iran, one dish at a time

- KARL VICK

SOMEHOW, THE SATELLITE DISH ARrived in its original packaging, a gray cardboard box clearly labeled STARLINK, handed over in broad daylight in the middle of Tehran. “As if Elon Musk himself is delivering to me,” Reza, the young Iranian who accepted the package, recalls with a laugh. He took the delivery not from Musk, who owns the satellite internet company, but from a visibly nervous and irate professional smuggler. The man wanted the $300 he’d been promised, and an explanation of why the device he’d just risked his life sneaking into the Islamic Republic was so important.

“They kept me like five hours at the border for that,” the smuggler told him.

What the Iranian border guards had finally, and foolishly, allowed into the country may well be the means to sustain the rebellion there. Now in its fifth month, the slow-motion uprising depends first on the zeal of protesters— but at least as much on being able to show the world what is happening. “The most important thing,” says Reza, who asked not to be further identified for fear of arrest, “is to have the protests on the internet. It’s crucial.”

Iran’s authoritarian government not only controls the internet in the country, it also uses that control as a weapon— slowing service to a crawl when protesters go into the streets, and shutting it down altogether when the decision is made to slaughter them. The last time spontaneous protests erupted across Iran—over a fuel-price hike in November 2019—the regime responded by cutting offall external web portals and opening fire. Reuters reported that, all told, some 1,500 people were killed.