“Women, life, freedom” became the protest chant of a revolution still raging in Iran months after a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, died while in custody of morality police. Amini was arrested last September for “improperly” wearing a hijab and violating the Islamic Republic's mandatory dress code laws. Since then, her name has become a viral hashtag invoked by millions of online activists protesting authoritarian regimes around the globe.
In response to Iran's ongoing protests—mostly led by women and young people—Iranian authorities have increasingly restricted Internet access. First, they temporarily blocked popular app stores and indefinitely blocked social media apps like WhatsApp and Instagram. They then implemented sporadic mobile shutdowns wherever protests flared up. Perhaps most extreme, authorities responded to protests in southeast Iran in February by blocking the Internet outright, Al Arabiya reported. Digital and human rights experts say motivations include controlling information, keeping protesters offline, and forcing protesters to use state services where their online activities can be more easily tracked—and sometimes trigger arrests.
As getting online has become increasingly challenging for everyone in Iran—not just protesters—millions have learned to rely on virtual private networks (VPNs) to hide Internet activity, circumvent blocks, and access accurate information beyond state propaganda. Simply put, VPNs work by masking a user's IP address so that governments have a much more difficult time monitoring activity or detecting a user's location. They do this by routing the user's data to the VPN provider's remote servers, making it much harder for an ISP (or a government) to correlate the Internet activity of the VPN provider's servers with the individual users actually engaging in that activity.
But as demand for VPNs has peaked, authorities have recently started moving more intently to block VPN access. That includes potentially taking drastic steps like criminalizing the sale of VPNs. Ars couldn’t reach the Iranian parliament to confirm what, if any, new restrictions may be coming. But experts told Ars that it’s likely censorship will intensify. Seeming to confirm the ongoing escalation, Ruhollah Momen-Nasab, a parliamentary special adviser who is overseeing an Internet restriction bill condemned by more than 50 human rights groups, has recently called for VPN sellers to be executed.