Chapter 1: What is causing the internet blackout in Iran?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Amanda Meng was on vacation the day before New Year's Eve when the messages began.
I got a signal message. There had been some on-the-ground reports of network interference, and of course they wanted to know what we could see in our measurements.
Amanda is a part of a research project called IOTA, or Internet Outage Detection Analysis. Her research partners were telling her that something weird might be happening with the internet in Iran.
And it actually took several days before we could see something abnormal in the data. And then on January 8th, we all started to see our measurements just kind of start to fall off. So a near complete shutdown where Iranians were no longer connected to the global internet.
This is not the first time the Iranian regime has shut down the internet.
The regime during times of mobilization will shut down the internet to try and suppress that mobilization as well as to control information. Also creating that chaos of not being able to connect with people, connect to emergency services, might drive people back home out of the streets.
And of course the government has said it's shutting down the internet for national security.
Yes, right. They always offer some sort of reason or motivation and it often has to do with national security.
The current Internet shutdown came as a response to protests across Iran, with crowds calling for political change amid rising inflation and a devastating drop in the value of Iranian currency, the rial. Since protests began, more than 5,000 people have been killed, according to the U.S.-based human rights activist news agency.
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Chapter 2: How has the Iranian government historically responded to protests?
We see traffic from many endpoints, and then they route it around. But the way endpoints and routers are connected with each other is really through links, which can mean actual cables, like fiber cables, or the cable that reaches our home, or Ethernet cables, but it can be even Wi-Fi links that are in the air, basically, like radio signals, cell phone signals, satellite signals.
Those are links that interconnect these nodes.
It seems like magic, but it's all by design. But given that the Internet, just as you're describing it, the infrastructure seems seemingly everywhere, and then with the wireless component and satellites involved, how do you even shut down something like that?
It really depends. The way connectivity and infrastructure is organized in various country by country And so the keyword here really is centralization. How much the connectivity infrastructure is centralized. So you might find some countries mainly a big state telecom as a network operator or a handful of operators.
In other countries, you will find dozens who are densely connected and can leverage many different entry and exit points of traffic in the country or from the country to the rest of the world.
And in Iran, is the internet infrastructure fairly centralized?
It is, yes. And the government for years has worked also on making sure that they could have a certain degree of control on how the traffic flows and through which systems, which intermediate nodes, which links.
Yeah. And going back to you, Amanda, you and Alberto learned about the internet outages through your work together on IOTA, this research project. Why is it important that something like IOTA exists?
Yeah. So IOTA, it provides a public service for people to look at internet connectivity measurements anywhere in the world and see if their internet is connected, what's down, where is it down, how long has it been down. So it provides data that's Hopefully, people can get insights from. Hopefully, it's actionable data on internet connectivity globally.
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