34 days without internet in Iran

The longest internet blackout in Iran's history. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech, I'm Megan McCarty-Corino. As U.S. and Israeli airstrikes against Iran continue into their fifth week, the civilian population is living kind of in the dark. The regime has cut off access to the internet since the war began, according to international monitors. It's not a total blackout, according to Amir Rashidi. He's the director for digital rights and security at the non-profit human rights organization Mian Group. He says Iranians still have access to the National Information Network, or NIN, which is fully controlled by the regime. Internet shutdown or disruption or censorship is not something new for us. It's happened ever since internet became available in Iran. And shut down, you know, we have like every time that people go to the street doing protests, we have internet shutdown sometimes on a neighborhood base, sometimes on a city base, and sometimes a national wide. For example, if you want to order a coffee, we have equivalent to Uber Eats, something called, we call it a Snap Food. So you can order the coffee online. You don't need internet necessarily. But if you want to go on Google, you want to go on social media, you want to read the news on BBC, CNN, whatever, you don't have any access, absolutely zero, nothing. What else is allowed and not allowed on the NIN? So this NIN has a physical infrastructure. But as exactly like internet, there is there is an application layer on top of all these infrastructure, right? We have almost equivalent to every single international services in Iran. We have national email service, or even national search engine, right? Which is interesting, because if you go on national search engine, and for example, search one simple word, war, the result would be nothing, absolutely nothing. So you can see how even on an application layer, they are censoring information. We'll be right back. Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for the moments you plan, and the ones you don't. There for those all night study sessions, the moment you're working from a cafe and realize every outlet's taken, the time you're deep in your flow and can't be interrupted by an auto update. That's why Dell builds tech that adapts to you. Build with long lasting battery so you're not scrambling for an outlet, and built in intelligence that makes updates around your schedule, not in the middle of it. Find technology built for the way you work at dell.com slash dellpcs, built for you. You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Corino. We're back with Amir Rashidi of the Mian Group. One thing we've talked a lot about in Ukraine is how people are using apps to basically report bomb strikes and that kind of thing and send out alerts. Is that possible on the NIN? Obviously, no, because not from the technical side, because the Iranian government is super sensitive about sharing information about bombing, explosion, and war. Outside the country, the Internet Freedom community, they have actually developed an application. They call it Mass Alert. But again, if you want to use the Mass Alert, you need to have access to the Internet, which basically takes us back to the big question of Internet Shattah. Yeah. And what about the safety issues that might be raised by not having that information in a conflict zone? I heard from people that they wanted to go to the doctor. They couldn't get access to it. I mean, a family member of mine, she told me there was a suspicious car parking in front of their house. And they called something equivalent to 911 in Iraq. They called police 911 and they literally told them over phone that we cannot check the plate number because we don't have access to the Internet. So you can see a simple safety of police operation is being disrupted. And again, escalated, expanded to the war zone, to the war situation. Then you can see it's a kind of hopeless situation. Are there any workarounds like virtual private networks or satellite Internet Starlink? Yes. There are tools and technologies in place. There are tools that have been developed for this situation and they are being very useful, at least for make people enable to communicate locally if they cannot communicate with outside war. But having said that, we're talking about a country of 90 million population, right? You need a lot more than that. You need a lot of resources to be able to support a country of 90 million population. You mentioned that this is an occurrence that happens quite frequently as during the protests in the winter. What is the stated rationale during this event for cutting off the Internet? So if you ask the space, they would say we want to protect people, right? But in reality, I do believe right now in the war situation, they're trying to have absolute control over any kind of narrative about the war. So their first goal is controlling narrative, which is the same goal when protests is going on and they shut down the Internet. So they're trying to control the communication. They're trying to also blocking people on mobilizing against the government. These are the main motivation of the government for shutting down the Internet.