A minister announces that the government will ban VPNs and are the very last ounces of internet freedom about to disappear in Iran? While the country is experiencing an unprecedented uprising since the death on September 16 of Mahsa Amini, following her detention for an “ill-fitting” veil, access to the Internet has become very complicated, if not impossible. VPNs, these virtual private networks where two computers can communicate with each other, outside the rest of the Internet, are the best way to counter imposed censorship.
“Basically, installing a VPN is doing civil disobedience,” says Sara Saidi, a journalist specializing in Iran. This tool, comparable to a “tunnel on a mountain road” where the information exchanged is encrypted, is essential in the country to connect to the global network.
According to Top10VPN, an independent VPN comparator, which tracks and tests these digital tools, “VPN demand in Iran peaked on September 26th at 3.082% above average as people struggled to circumvent restrictions. Internet. Since then, it has remained 2.012% higher than the pre-protest baseline,” the site’s statistics show.
However, Kavé Salamatian, professor of computer science at the University of Savoie and specialist in digital infrastructures in Iran, affirms that the phenomenon is not new. “The situation is the result of a decade of work by the Iranian regime to re-architect the network, in order to monitor it.” This is what he calls “bringing the djinn back into the bottle”. That is to say, to exercise control over a world which had hitherto enjoyed great freedom.
Filtering similar to 2019
In 2009, at the time of the green revolution, “following the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad”, specifies Sara Saidi, the authorities began their work. Reporters Without Borders then made Iran one of the “twelve enemies of the Internet”. In ten years, the government has extended censorship, managing to insert itself at different levels of the digital life of Iranians. “The level of censorship there is so high that the nickname ‘Filternet’ is sometimes used to talk about freedom of access to the Internet in Iran,” says Rayna Stamboliyska, cybersecurity and digital diplomacy specialist.
“Three days into the current protests, the government cut internet access and temporarily blocked Instagram and WhatsApp in parts of the country; the objective being to stifle the dissemination of photos, videos and discussions related to the uprisings, at that time regionalized”, she adds. For Sara Saidi, who lived in Iran between 2016 and 2019, “the government achieved its goal in 2019, during the protests against high prices and during which the Internet was cut for more than a week”. At the time, some 1,500 demonstrators lost their lives.
“The Iranian government now has the ability to decide which block of houses has access to the network, in which city it can cut off access to the Internet. The level of control and adjustment is getting finer and finer, says Kavé Salamatian. It is a chosen and targeted censorship that allows the authorities to have the most precise control. »
“In Iran, the infrastructure is directly dependent and subject to governance,” agrees the cybersecurity expert. Thus, a public company that belongs to the Revolutionary Guards, has full powers to grant licenses to Internet service providers and manage digital infrastructure. “There is a central ‘tap’,” she explains. An ISP [fournisseur d’accès à Internet] has no choice but to offer technical tools to monitor, filter and block the digital services of its customers, if it wants to obtain a license. »
Total control, closed network and economic interests
In reaction to this censorship, the Iranians therefore normalized the use of VPNs. “I first downloaded free VPNs, available online, testifies Sara Saidi. But they had a fairly close expiration date. Then I switched to paid versions to be able to connect to Twitter or Facebook. In 2019, Instagram and WhatsApp were not yet censored, Telegram only partially. »
For Kavé Salamatian, applications and social networks do not all operate in the same way, which makes some more difficult to block: “For example, WhatsApp uses a series of well-defined servers, while FaceTime has a range of servers all over the world, much more complex to control. Similarly, Signal and its very flexible architecture, with demands for crowdsourcing to the community, make it possible to set up means of communication via proxies, which more easily escape government control. »
But if the Iranian authorities decide at some point to completely cut Internet connections, to shut down the infrastructure? “Inconceivable”, answer the experts, because the Internet is essential to the economic life of the country. “The Iranian government has the capacity to disconnect the routers but it is a risk for the economy and for government services that it is not ready to take”, assures Kavé Salamatian. “Many start-ups have emerged in Iran, explains Sara Saidi. Internet is vital for their survival, this is the reason why currently, in full mobilization everywhere in the country, the government lets pass a flow, weak certainly, but existing. »
reasons to hope
The Iranian government therefore seems to have reached a kind of pinnacle of internet censorship, although it wants to impose even more effective control by cracking down on circumvention tools. “Currently, Tor (a network browser that avoids censorship and blocking) and VPNs are in the same boat,” comments Kavé Salamatian.
“Iran’s cyberspace bill, which is supposed to protect it from foreign interference and influence, including a strict ban on VPNs, tools no free, is in the process of being applied”, notes Rayna Stamboliyska, who specifies that the authorities succeeded, during periods of intense protests, in reducing the functionalities of VPNs to nothing. “But tech does not make democracy,” she comments.
An opinion shared by Sara Saidi, who ensures that the Iranian people are one step ahead of the government. “When the protests started a few weeks ago, Iranians all posted a message online saying ‘Be our voice, they’re going to shut down the internet.’ They planned the coup, they know the censorship, they know what the regime is capable of and therefore they anticipate. »
And then, how to imagine that while all the high dignitaries have accounts on social networks, gagging Millennials and GenZ, who were born and raised with the Internet? “There are technological solutions that exist, similar to those put in place in Hong Kong, which make it possible to build spontaneous networks that do not need infrastructure”, rejoices Kavé Salamatian.
And then, concludes Rayna Stamboliyska, “technological tools do not bring down governments; it’s the people who demonstrate who succeed. After seven weeks of mobilization, at least 176 people have died, according to the Norway-based NGO Iran Human Rights (IHR), and thousands of people have been arrested, including journalists, lawyers, activists and celebrities. Anger is still brewing in the country where now the protests no longer only concern women’s freedom but challenge the power in place in a more global way.