The “Women, Life, Freedom” protest movement in Iran, catalyzed by the tragic death of Mahsa Jina Amini, a young Kurdish-Iranian woman, in the custody of Iran’s morality police on September 16, 2022, marked a significant shift in the country’s socio-political landscape. Anti-government social mobilization reached historic levels, with months of sizable protests taking place in over 100 cities and all 32 provinces in the country. The movement was organized through various online forums and galvanized through sharing videos of police violence against protestors on platforms such as Instagram and Telegram.
As Amini’s arrest came after she allegedly failed to comply with the Islamic Republic’s hijab mandate, women and women’s bodies played a central role in the protests, particularly in their early days. Women began openly resisting hijab laws in public and posting videos of themselves doing so.
The Iranian government responded to the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement with an aggressive crackdown, which extended to online spaces. Initially, authorities aimed to quell the protests and social mobilization through a range of censorship tactics, such as localized and mobile-only internet blackouts, digital curfews, and aggressive attacks against VPN services. But soon after, policymakers looked for ways to intensify their information controls. In particular, the Islamic Republic began developing a more sophisticated surveillance framework, hoping to consolidate its control over the population further, maintain social order, and enforce its religious and ideological mandates.
The evolution of Iran’s internet policies and information control can generally be divided into three eras. Each era emerged in response to a significant social uprising, shaping the government’s strategy for digital oversight and control.
The first era began after the 2009 contested presidential elections, which led to months of large-scale protests
known as the “Green Movement.” This wave of dissent marked the first instance in which Iranians heavily leveraged the internet as a tool for mobilization and communication, even giving rise to the term “Twitter revolution”3 among some commentators. Iranian leaders soon saw the need for a comprehensive approach to information controls, and by January 2011, Iran’s Fifth Development Plan had set the creation of the National Information Network (NIN) in motion. While online censorship initiatives had already started before 2009, it was after the “Green Movement” that such measures were formalized and intensified. This period also witnessed the enactment of cyber crime laws and increased efforts to provide clear cyber policies to manage information flows and curb dissent.
The NIN, an amalgamation of regulations, market incentives, infrastructure, and technologies, is a localization project aimed at isolating Iranian users from the global internet. By restricting user’s access to information and services based outside the country, the Islamic Republic gives itself maximum control over content, connectivity, and private user data. This localization effort, in part, has given rise to a vast expansion of public and private initiatives to develop Iran based digital infrastructure, tools, services, and content. Iran’s localization plan has also been inadvertently accelerated by US extra-territorial economic sanctions that have forced Iranian companies and users to pull their websites, services, and data off international cloud providers and move them onto Iran-based servers.
The second era catalyzing the NIN project started in November 2019, when a country-wide uprising against economic and political injustice occurred after a sudden fuel subsidy cut. The state’s response, marked by severe crackdowns, detentions, and violence, led to the death of at least 300 demonstrators, according to Amnesty International, and a weeklong internet blackout.4 The shutdown resulted in Iranians
losing access to all international content and services, such as BBC Persian, Twitter, and WhatsApp, essentially isolating Iranians from the world and each other. This was the first instance in the world where such an extensive and prolonged internet shutdown had occurred.
However, just as significantly, the shutdown demonstrated the functionality of the NIN, as Iran’s domestic content and services remained online and usable. In other words, while Iranians could not access international services, most could still go online to check their bank accounts, read the local news, order cars on ride-sharing apps, and so on.
What we are seeing in the NIN’s third era, born out of the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement,5 is an Islamic Republic leveraging this project to its full potential, employing a suite of regulations and digital instruments to build toward a hyper-surveillance regime that can detect and counter both online and offline forms of political and moral dissent and monitor the lifestyle choices of Iranians.
The “Bill to Support the Culture of Chastity and Hijab,”for example, introduced into the parliament in August 2023,would impose harsh penalties for non-adherence to com-pulsory hijab standards in physical and digital spaces and create a set of responsibilities for state agencies in enforcingthosestandards.6
Authorities are also developing various technologies, such as the Nazer application for reporting hijab violations and facial recognition systems designed to monitor compliance with modesty laws.8 Furthermore, the Islamic Republic’s most ambitious new effort is to use the NIN infrastructure and platforms to collect big data and create “lifestyle” pro- files of Iranians.9
In the face of these challenges, Iranian civil society and inter- net users have shown remarkable resilience and creativity in challenging the government’s digital repression. They have developed and used circumvention tools to bypass online censorship and campaigned against legislation that would increase the government’s authority over user data. When possible, Iranian users have largely resisted using NIN tools
and services, such as Iran-based messaging apps, social media, and other domestic alternatives for online services ranging from navigation apps to email and search engines, preferring instead to use international ones even after those international ones are blocked.
Against this backdrop, this report investigates how internet access and digital rights in Iran are shaped by various factors, such as technology, government policy, and sanctions, and offers policy recommendations for improving internet freedom and security. The report covers five main topics:
- The development and implementation of the domestic intranet, the NIN.
- The state of internet access and censorship in Iran and the challenges for internet users.
- The government’s increasing efforts to develop a hyper-surveillance regime to enforce its political, social, and moral rules, especially as they pertain to women in public and digital spaces.
- The effects of US and EU sanctions on internet access in Iran.
- Policy recommendations for improving internet access and freedom in Iran, addressing the needs and concerns of various stakeholders.
