WSJ Tech News Briefing
TNB Tech Minute: U.S. Smuggled Thousands of Starlink Terminals Into Iran
12 Feb 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Here's your afternoon TNB Tech Minute for Thursday, February 12th. I'm Danny Lewis for The Wall Street Journal. We exclusively report that the Trump administration covertly sent thousands of Elon Musk's Starlink terminals into Iran after the regime's brutal crackdown on demonstrations last month. U.S.
officials say about 6,000 of the satellite internet kits were smuggled into the country in an effort to keep dissidents online after Iranian authorities stifled internet access. It's the first time the U.S. has directly sent Starlink into Iran, where owning one of the terminals is illegal. The U.S.
Chapter 2: What did the U.S. covertly send to Iran and why?
has denied any connection to the uprising and the White House declined to comment. The Russian government is accelerating its campaign to shift Russians away from Western-based messaging platforms outside of its control, starting with blocking access to WhatsApp. The Kremlin confirmed that it is restricting access to Meta's messaging app and is also throttling Telegram.
It is said that companies that own platforms operating inside Russia are violating Russian law by refusing to comply with a range of restrictions. Tech experts say Moscow is hoping to push users to a state-controlled messenger app that offers no encryption. WhatsApp said it would do whatever it can to keep 100 million users inside Russia connected.
Telegram's founder said Russia was forcing its citizens to switch to an app, quote, built for surveillance and political censorship.
And SoftBank says it took on $27 billion in new debt at the end of 2025 in order to pay for its investment in OpenAI. The Japanese investment firm says it also sold billions of dollars in T-Mobile shares in order to pay for the $22.5 billion check it wrote to the chat GPT maker in December.
The disclosures came as SoftBank reported $1.6 billion in profit for the last three months of the year, largely thanks to the growing value of its earlier investment in OpenAI. SoftBank now owns 11% of the company, making it the second largest private shareholder after Microsoft. And that's a wrap on your TNP Tech Minutes.
For a deeper dive into what's happening in tech, check out our Tech News Briefing podcast tomorrow morning.
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