Smuggled Starlink Terminals are Beating Iran's Internet Blackout
- Reference: 0183109170
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/05/03/0558226/smuggled-starlink-terminals-are-beating-irans-internet-blackout
- Source link:
> "If even one extra person is able to access the internet, I think it's successful and it's worth it," says Sahand. The Iranian man is visibly anxious, speaking to the BBC outside Iran, as he carefully explains how he is part of a clandestine network smuggling satellite internet technology — which is illegal in Iran — into the country. Sahand, whose name we have changed, fears for family members and other contacts inside the country. "If I was identified by the Iranian regime, they might make those I'm in touch with in Iran pay the price," he says.
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> For more than two months, Iran has been in digital darkness as the government maintains one of the longest-running national internet shutdowns ever recorded worldwide... Sahand says he has sent a dozen [Starlink terminals] to Iran since January and "we are actively looking for other ways to smuggle in more". The human rights organisation Witness estimated in January that there are at least 50,000 Starlink terminals in Iran. Activists say the number is likely to have risen...
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> Last year, the Iranian government passed legislation that made using, buying or selling Starlink devices punishable by up to two years in prison. The jail term for distributing or importing more than 10 devices can be up to 10 years. State-affiliated media has reported multiple cases of people being arrested for selling and buying Starlink terminals, including four people — two of them foreign nationals — arrested last month for "importing satellite internet equipment".
"The BBC contacted SpaceX for more details about the use of Starlink in the country but did not receive a response."
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgzk91leweo
also getting a beating (Score:2)
anyone found to be using Starlink
(anyone that isn't "elite")
Re: (Score:2)
Imagine huge numbers of Iranian Starlink owners ... each family armed with both a scoped Swedish Mauser and well-tuned M-14. A howling fanatic mob or political thugs appear at a doorstep .. and in every case are immediately butchered out. Good result .. a long-overdue civil war won by a "liberty" alliance. Now ... can you grok the parallels in American culture, seeing why personal gun ownership is so important ? All that's lacking is a requirement that each family maintains a m
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> an you grok the parallels in American culture, seeing why personal gun ownership is so important ?
Tell me, how successful are armed Americans at beating SWAT units sent to get them? You probably share the typical American view that "the government should be afraid of the people". It might have worked a century or two in the past, when outlaws were playing level with the Sheriff. Right now, personal gun ownership in the context of a rebellion equates to suicide by police.
Getting caught with one can mean death (Score:1)
> The UNâ(TM)s top human rights official warned on Wednesday that Iraniansâ(TM) rights are being eroded in âoeharsh and brutal ways,â citing a surge in executions, mass arrests and alleged abuses amid a widening crackdown on dissent
[1]https://news.un.org/en/story/2... [un.org]
Iran is not the innocent place the media portrays it as.
[1] https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/04/1167403
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> Iran is not the innocent place the media portrays it as.
I'm not aware of anyone portraying Iran as an innocent place. The claims I'm seeing are about having Israel invade other countries with American support not being beneficial in the short or long term.
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> The claims I'm seeing are about having Israel invade other countries with American support not being beneficial in the short or long term.
This is an extremely worrisome point. Trump is walking a narrow line, and he is not known for competence.
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It is the whole the ends justifies the means argument. Not very persuasive. The reputational damage this has caused the US is incalculable. The world will be unrecognizable by trump's end. I expect China will be the big winner.
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Wait can someone remind we, are we pro-World Police now or anti-World Police now?
Or does this opinion for conservatives literally depend on what mood Trump is in today?
"No New Wars! (unless my polling dips below a threshold)"
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Nowhere in my comment did I mention America or Trump or any "conservative" view. It's a quote from the UN regarding the Iranian theocracy arresting, torturing, and murdering their own people for the crime of talking about what's happening there.
Iran was murdering their own people by the tens of thousands long before this conflict with America started. Perhaps your focus should be on the atrocities being committed there rather than trying to blame them on the US?
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Notice you're not denying it either so I think I was spot on, you do know as human beings we can use our brains to infer things even if they are not said. You're just doing justification so it's a fair guess. Notice how you infer that I am blaming the US even though I didn't say it so you do understand the concept.
Here I will do my part and deny that I am blaming the US for those crimes of the regime. I do however blame the US historically for the regime being in place and moreso this war being particula
False Dichotomy [Re:Getting caught with one ca...] (Score:2)
At the risk of getting a "redundant" mod...
Your fallacy is [1]False Dichotomy [dictionary.com]. Pointing out the stupidity in an ill-thought-out war does not imply agreeing with the Iranian regime or denying that it is bad or claiming that it is "an innocent place". If anything, the ill-though-out war has strengthened the control that the Iranian regime has over the Iran.
...and, for reference, I don't think I've ever seen the media portray Iran as "an innocent place." (They possibly could portray the Iranian people as innoce
[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/false-dichotomy
This is an astonishingly bad idea (Score:3)
All it would take is one phone call from Diaper Donnie to his pet fascist Elmo and every bit of data/metadata available on those terminals would be furnished to the Russians and thus would shortly be in the hands of the IRGC. (And if you're about to ask why in the world he would do that: keep in mind that we're talking about a moron with accelerating dementia who is incapable of understanding ANY concept, who cannot formulate a coherent plan for anything, and whose only values are his ego and his money.)
Less dramatically: if you're an insurgent force in a modern country, the last thing in the world that you want to do is communicate by any form of electronic network. Surveillance and detection methods for these are well-known and readily available. And even if the communications themselves are encrypted, the metadata available enables traffic analysis, correlation with external events (including those arranged for the purpose), and endpoint identification.
In such an environment, it's much better to use encrypted memory cards distributed by couriers and dead drops. The cost of attempting to disrupt such an effort is many orders of magnitude higher, both in terms of money and personnel, than the cost of disrupting electronic distribution.
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Your TDS is off the charts(IMO, people who both despise Trump and love Trump have TDS). The US is still fighting with Russia, under the Trump administration. The only contradiction within the US is how to divide and conquer China-Russia-North Korea-Iran. Trump wants to do it by being slightly less antagonistic towards Russia, but maximum antagonistic to China. The Democrats want to do it by being maximum antagonistic to Russia and less antagonistic to China. Iran is the weakest link, so they both can get do
That's all she wrote... (Score:2)
> The end state probably isn't any single technology defeating state censorship. It's the cumulative weight of microSDs, Starlink terminals, VPNs, mesh radios, and eventual low-cost cubesats making comprehensive control economically and logistically unsustainable. The cost of enforcement keeps rising; the cost of circumvention keeps falling. That's a losing trajectory for the censors.
Doesn't matter (Score:2)
Any hope for the opposition in Iran to come to power went to shit when Trump first bombed a girls school and then has continuously said he plans on killing everyone in the country.
The whole country is going to rally behind the existing government because that's how that works. When you are under attack like that and a very large and powerful opponent is threatening to kill everyone nobody cares who's in charge as long as somebody is.
I'm sure someone who has already resigned told Trump and drunkie Mc
Re:Should be easy to find the users (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, this article is too cute by half.
Per reports SpaceX has been arming Ukraine with terminals for several years so Russia has put a lot of engineering into detecting, characterizing, and targeting the signals. They've provided this technology to Iran.
Trump recently bragged about CIA providing automatic weapons to the "protesters" ahead of the "protests" (over Bessent's currency war) which Iran shut down using the SL detectors.
Allegedly large shipments of terminals by Mossad were interdicted and those agents were hanged.
These spooks are willing to "fight to the last Iranian". Glorifying this is complicity in their entrapment.
There are much better ways to freedomtech than broadcasting a beacon unless a rapid color revolution is the goal.
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How condescending of you.
Can you maybe imagine that people in Iran are aware of the risks?
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The other risk is that both Russia and Iran have the ability to get stuff to orbit, and Russia has demonstrated the ability to hit satellites. If the terminals were not giving them useful into on the enemy, they might decide that Starlink is a threat and start shooting those birds down. The debris will quickly make LEO a dangerous place for at least a few years, probably longer.
Re:Should be easy to find the users (Score:5, Informative)
> Per reports SpaceX has been arming Ukraine with terminals for several years so Russia has put a lot of engineering into detecting, characterizing, and targeting the signals. They've provided this technology to Iran.
There was a guide for authorities circulating in Persian with details of using WiFi broadcasts to detect Starlink terminals. There is probably a lot of low hanging fruit finding people by not using Ethernet /w bypass mode in the starlink terminals.
Until recently (Thanks to SpaceX IPO) 3/4 of Starlink use in Ukraine was by Russians.
As /w Ukraine when used competently the terminals are not so easy to find.
[1]https://www.skylinker.io/p/can... [skylinker.io]
> Trump recently bragged about CIA providing automatic weapons to the "protesters" ahead of the "protests" (over Bessent's currency war) which Iran shut down using the SL detectors.
The comments I remember were related to Kurds in Iraq not sharing their US supplied stashes with Iranians.
> Allegedly large shipments of terminals by Mossad were interdicted and those agents were hanged.
Yea everything is CIA and Mossad.
> These spooks are willing to "fight to the last Iranian". Glorifying this is complicity in their entrapment.
Gotta love the rhetorical framing. Giving people something they want is now entrapment.
> There are much better ways to freedomtech than broadcasting a beacon unless a rapid color revolution is the goal.
Satellite TV has the receive side broadcast mostly covered. For transmit you either need to send RF or operate some form of network internally. There are no risk free options and Starlink is not an unreasonable solution when used competently.
[1] https://www.skylinker.io/p/can-enemies-detect-starlink-eng
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, these shouldn't be hard for the IRGC to hunt down. Starlink is basically just a fancy Ku band radio transmitter.
Detector Drones (Score:2)
If the Ku band transmissions from Starlink terminals are frequent enough, the IRGC could put a small Ku band receiver on a few drones and fly them over a large city in a grid pattern repeatedly to find the terminals.
The only way to combat this is to have a spread spectrum emission designed to communicate over a wide bandwidth which appears to be below the noise floor at narrower bandwidths.
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Have you been to Iran? Nearly every middle class and above home in Iran has a satellite dish -- and that includes, and actually especially the elites. They're not transmitting .. but all of them are literally illegal (punishable by jail time). My point is that not just that you're giving Iran too much credit on their ability to crack down on shit, you're giving its elites too much credit on their ability to be without internet. Iran's leadership rules by fear, bravado, and random arrests -- their actual tec
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I don't understand why people think anyone but the revolutionary guards uses starlink over there, with maybe one or two exceptions in places not completely under Iranian control.
Look at the ruzzkie situation, it is very similar. In the putinland, the gubbermint has restricted internet access for the general public. Instead of people buying starlink terminals for there freedumz, nearly all starlink terminals over there ended up on the Ukrainian front, where they were helping the ruzzkies.
It is the same in Ir