To Prevent Protests the Iranian Government "Tests" Internet Shutdown

This article is written by a citizen journalist going by the alias Mohsen Sepehri for security reasons.

Iranians are forever updating their knowledge and use of emojis and hashtags expressing frustration about internet blocks and censorship, and more so than usual over the last few days. Many of them went on to social media on the morning of Wednesday, May 27 to report that they had been unable to get online for several minutes, and that they suspected it wasn’t a normal glitch in their individual connections. 

Although the disruption did not last long and full access resumed after about 15 minutes, it prompted fears that Iranian authorities were once again stepping up measures to control the internet, and preparing for future mass protests  Some Iranian officials said the temporary down period was part of tests being carried out on Iran's "national" internet.

Prior to the recent block, special police unit commander Hassan Karami, had announced in an interview on May 13 that “riots” must be “contained at the lowest possible cost."

Industry professionals and experts, including the Abr-Aaravan Company, have confirmed that on May 27, internet communications were blocked in Iran from 2:37am Iran time for between 10 to 15 minutes. During that time, only websites hosted on Iran’s national internet were accessible. 

NetBlocks, an independent internet access monitoring agency, tweeted about the disruption and confirmed the outage.

What is ominous about the most recent shutdown is that it appears to have been done without any major incident, be it street protests or a flood of online criticism about government officials or the regime, prompting it. There had been protests in Khuzestan over water shortages a few days before, but this was a very localized incident. A day on from the incident, there was no official statement from Iran’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.

However, the disruption does not appear to have been isolated, and experts have reported that several proxy servers have been shut down in recent days, including servers Iranians use to access Telegram, one of the apps most frequently filtered and blocked in Iran. 

Islamic Republic officials have repeatedly censored sites in an attempt to shield Iranian citizens from accessing and sharing information, news and opinion from outlets, groups and individuals based outside the country. They have been doing so since the protests of 2009, when thousands voiced outrage over the results of the presidential election, which were widely disputed. During the November 2019 protests, the internet was completely shut down for at least a week, and for even as long as 22 days in various parts of the country.  At the time of the November shutdown, it was easy to draw comparisons between the Islamic Republic and North Korea. Like the most closed country in the world, and arguably the most authoritarian, Iran was doing what it could to prevent its human rights violations being reported to its people, and to the wider world.

The Ministry of Communications has said it is pursuing its plans for a national, “halal,” internet. Some officials have said that internet interruptions, including reports of the internet dropping out in summer 2019, are linked to the testing of this closed internet. In this regard, on May 26, 2020, Seyed Jamal Hadian, the Public Relations Manager of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, announced in a tweet: "The Supreme Leader's five-point order on the national information network issued in January 2020 is being consistently pursued."

A day after Hadian’s tweet, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the following, also on Twitter: “The US stands against, and will not tolerate, government-imposed Internet shutdowns and other forms of censorship during or after this pandemic,” and added that the US had joined the Freedom Online Coalition and supported “#InternetFreedom at all times.” 

Pompeo’s tweet was problematic in its own way, given that President Trump threatened Twitter the same day. But it illustrates the stance most Western leaders and politicians take in the current climate, and warns that government crackdowns on the internet are serious crimes in their eyes. All the while, the Islamic Republic is doing what it can to control access, and to force Iranians to use its locally-grown internet.