Unplugging a Nation: Iranian Digital Workarounds in the Face of Total Blackout

The protests that swept Iran this winter were among the most significant — and brutal — crackdown in the Islamic Republic’s history. The scale of death was unprecedented. On January 22, the U.N. Special Rapporteur stated that the death toll surpassed 20,000. More than 42,000 have reportedly been arrested. Torture and executions of protestors and a militarized clampdown to hide massacres has since continued. Meanwhile, on the 40th day of mourning since the massacre, pockets of protests were again met with force, the tension amplified by ever-increasing drums of war coming from the United States and Israel.

Those on the streets epitomize courage. In the first days of the winter protests, people posted themselves kissing their families goodbye before leaving home — resilient farewells, reasons for marching — knowing they might not return. They were all too familiar with the state’s repertoire of violence, live fire, mass arrests, and forced confessions, with no accountability or fair trials. They also knew how little protection exists when the legal system itself is a weapon: human-rights lawyers are jailed, defense teams dismantled, journalists are forced into anonymity or incarceration. They knew the risks, and they went out anyway.

Violence on the streets was matched by a second campaign: a systematic tightening of the digital and communication space. It was the state’s attempt to erase the uprising while it was still unfolding. On January 8, the Islamic Republic imposed what would become an unprecedented communications blackout, surpassing previous records in length and totality. It was not only the public internet. Texts failed. Internal communications were disrupted. Even landlines went dark. 

To many of us familiar with the regime's tactics, we knew what the communication blackout meant: carnage in the darkness. And still, people took extraordinary risks to show the world what they witnessed.

Officials moved to isolate neighborhoods, sever families from one another, and choke off images before they could reach the world. And yet, today the digital battle is still being won through the generational heritage of stealth, despite the Islamic Republic’s best efforts. 

The state’s full monopoly on control of information and communications are not new, rather they are the fabric of how the regime functions — just as is their willingness to unleash violence on their own people. We learn about their methods, and the people’s workarounds, through our loved ones and our histories, until it becomes instinctual. 

My mother was imprisoned in Evin in the 1980s and was tortured daily to give up names, but she never did. She told me how activists avoided conversations or even eye contact with one another, fully aware that they were under constant physical surveillance from guards and snitches. Still, they had their communication methods. They would stand back to back in the shower, where they were forced to wash in small groups. The roar of the cold water muffled their words as they hid their lips from the guards. My brother was just about four months old in Evin with our mother at first, and when he was nearly six months, he was released to family. She was forbidden to give him anything, no keepsakes, nothing to remember her by. So she secretly etched his name into a stone and hid it in his diaper – in case she never saw him again. Authorities never found the stone’s hiding place. 

Today, we see those same decades-old tactics evolve into new ones. Hidden etched messages and "muffled talk" are now encoded into the digital front. 

By January 6-7, human-rights groups were working feverishly to document events on the ground and they reported an escalation of the use of unlawful force, including live ammunition. The next day the state imposed a total blackout of communication. The heaviest violence began on January 8 and 9, under cover of the blackout. Even with just a trickle of information coming out, the volume of abuse was overwhelming. 

Many Iranians outside of the country spoke with their families inside the country on January 7, assuming a blackout of sorts was likely, but not knowing the severity that was about to come. 

It was a full communication wall. Over two weeks of painful silence. 

The heavy curtain initially even affected the government-approved loyalists who essentially receive “white-list” access to an open internet without blocks, even during blackouts.

The only evidence that eked out came from the few who have satellite internet. Nevertheless, the scale of abuse was so high that it was difficult to keep up. While helping catalog documentation of state violence from evidence posted on  X, Telegram, and Instagram, I saw videos that were unbearable and undeniable: protestors lay on the ground with shots to heads, eyes, and chests; security forces and plainclothes groups fired into crowds at close range; women, children, the elderly. Doctors reported surges of pellet-related eye injuries, including mind-boggling numbers at Farabi Hospital. By January 16, Human Rights Watch’s forensic teams had verified cases of mass killings. The picture just continued to grow bleaker. 

Anything that surfaced did so in fragments and through a patchwork of stealthy workarounds. Starlink – which was only available to a few through smuggled dishes – became one of the only nodes of access to the outside world. Still,  it carries serious security risks and can be toggled at Elon Musk’s discretion — as seen in Ukraine, Sudan, and Myanmar. The lack of transparent governance and independent oversight leaves access dependent on a privately controlled chokepoint, exposing civilians to political pressure and interference, including by individuals involved in human rights violations. That said, human rights organizations have shown that it was undeniably vital in enabling documentation of the vastness of the massacres.

Security forces moved to take down satellite access, using mobile jammers to disrupt Starlink users in certain areas. They demanded the handover of satellite dishes as they scanned streets and rooftops, pairing the orders with threats of imprisonment or worse. Since then, organizations such as WITNESS and Access Now, with human rights experts like Mahsa Alimardani (one of De|Center’s Guardrail Advisors), have been leading the push to get Direct-to-Cell technologies opened in Iran. It would provide some avenues for further harm reduction to satellite internet needs and risks in contexts where no perfect solutions exist, and where communication is a lifeline. It can be an effort to bypass some of the clampdown by avoiding smuggled hardware and its risks. It also alleviates the need for technical expertise, and as a result can provide broader access to marginalized regions.

Throughout it all, people continued to navigate barriers and use various methods to get nodes of information to one other. For example, they used tools that assume disconnection as the default routed by Iranian technologists inside and out of Iran. Some used Bluetooth-mesh messaging such as Bitchat to pass short notes phone-to-phone until someone reached a connection and uploaded them. Activists in Iran’s free-software community prepared Delta Chat relay servers in advance because when even a sliver of email access survives, Delta Chat can route messages through it. Others have been using tools like Orbot to anonymize their traffic through the Tor network, allowing them to slip past firewalls undetected.

Beyond the use of various technologies, old methods emerged as well: the physical smuggling of videos and testimonies out of the country, hidden in luggage or clothes, at enormous personal risk. This method is how the world first came to view some of the most haunting evidence to date. Footage from a forensic morgue in Karaj showed endless rows of black body bags amongst the screams of relatives and parents calling out for their children. Screens displayed images of the dead identified only by numbers (e.g., 45/250 – meaning just on the screen there were 250 images of unclaimed slain loved ones). Many had visible bullet wounds to the head, including a victim who lay attached to an IV drip, likely taken directly from a hospital.

The level of violence and the clampdown to hide it was extraordinary. Every method of connection is met with a counter method to block it and silence truth. But people found ways to retain connection and support each other, evidence that the love for each other and their home surpassed any controls. 

Connectivity itself became a minefield. NetBlocks confirmed that authorities began sabotaging VPNs to fail silently so that they would appear to connect, but transmit nothing. People responded with the strategies they have always used to circumvent censorship: rotating tools, proxy hopping, sharing bandwidth. Many in the diaspora used tools like Psiphon’s Conduit to provide bandwidth and anchor these links, allowing those inside to slip through fleeting windows of access. Still today many are able to sporadically connect messaging apps or social media only based on these methods.

The regime also found different ways to treat digital connection as an extraction site. For example, Cloudflare’s threat-intelligence unit reported bulk scraping of follower lists and account activity on Instagram. This method allows the state to use social graphs for further surveillance and expand its arrest networks, a tactic we documented in 2024 with queer communities in Iran and across the Middle East and North Africa. After many of us continued to raise note of what Cloudflare had identified this time around, Meta hid the follower and following lists of those in Iran. Only a number was visible. We had set out exactly this recommendation in 2024, due to these risks. 

In addition, searches on the street became routine, especially at night, even as protests were temporarily stifled. Devices were seized at homes, including from those who were murdered.

A phone is not merely a personal item, it is a map. Photos, chat histories, contacts, and networks can all be converted into an arrest list. From social media like Instagram, to chat apps like WhatsApp, and Telegram, apps can become digital evidence and methods to locate others. Community-rapid-response support like those offered by ARTICLE 19 work tirelessly to triangulate and support families and loved ones of the detained in moments of arrest. They try to reduce the exposure of networks and communications, an act that can truly save lives because of what is on a device.

In Iran, activists (as well as average people) are accustomed to using aliases and ephemeral chats, passing documentation to intermediaries who could post it, and deleting evidence before it could be found in a pocket. They continue to find ways to document harms without raising suspicion through all the channels, hashtags, and anonymous testimonies. As a result, Iran is a hub for some of the most ingenious harm reduction methods in the world. Privacy awareness is in the DNA, as are circumvention methods, because people live it everyday. For every block, there are experts on the ground ready to build a workaround. 

During the blackout, I heard reports of how people still bypassed the government stranglehold even when state websites were the only functional ones. People used the comment sections of those government sites to organize protests in code. 

These are the near-instinctual tactics people use to move through total surveillance and authoritarianism. It is a resilience and refusal to be erased. 

When landlines opened after a week of darkness, friends with access nodes to someone inside would gather names and landline numbers for those without access. They would then get in touch inside the country, just to check if people were still alive. The message would be relayed back “They’re OK.” Even then, most know that internal networks are heavily monitored so messages were carefully crafted. 

When I left Iran as a child refugee, I thought everyone was as tech-savvy as Iranians, where everyone is a "computer scientist" by necessity. Our internet cafes had curtains so people could access banned sites, and the "internet guy" (or your cousin) would get the latest VPN or bootleg media. Even grandmothers use VPNs. It is a skill they build after decades of living in a police state, like many others around the world.

The regime cannot stop the drive for freedom or people’s love for each other. Every time I watch and document repression in Iran, or state oppression across the globe, I remember that people always find a way to navigate the biggest machines and systems that work against them. There is always a new technology being built, a new open-source tool or proxy server. People will always physically carry messages for each other, whether through smuggled videos or storage files, in luggage, food, or in clothes. A hidden message etched somewhere will always illustrate that while flowers can be pruned, the roots still run deep. 

Today, we still do not talk openly with our families, even on an encrypted app. Misinformation and external political interests have tried to distort and extort the grief of those fighting for freedom. But one thing is clear: these protests were powerful, and they were met with the most violent crackdown in the Islamic Republic's history, and potentially the modern history of protest crackdowns. People continue to navigate fear and survive, bereft of any meaningful state accountability for the atrocities inflicted upon them. They also face the compounded threat of war. No matter which side of the political bargain their loyalties lie, people deserve freedom, self-determination, and a future grounded in universal human rights – free from domestic tyrants or the spectre of external destruction. 

One thing is certain, the ingenuity and resilience people continue to show in the face of repression stands unabated. We will keep pushing for changes to systems so that they are able to support the digital workarounds communities have already developed. Our technologies should – and can – anchor years of generational wisdom, not aid those creating the oppressive structures people need to navigate in order to survive. 

Afsaneh Rigot is the Founder and Principal Researcher of the De|Center. She is also an advisor to the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School and ARTICLE 19, as well as an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. She is the author of the Design From the Margins methodology and a number of landmark research projects on tech, human rights, international policing, and state violence.