Iranians are left without internet access amid Middle East conflict
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Iran's government knocked down internet and mobile networks after Israel began bombing the country, and that left the population with little to no access to critical information. One person who watched this play out is Ahmad Ahmadian. He's with Holistic Resilience, an organization that helps Iranians circumvent government censorship.

He told us that Iran's government often restricts internet during critical times. Telegram doesn't work. Your WhatsApp doesn't work. You cannot go on Instagram. You cannot go to reliable sources of news. So Iran has its own intranet network. It's domestic national internet where all of their services, banking services, financial services, postal services,

they are served on those domestic hostings. And even in the past week, there were some days that even the domestic internet was down. So people could not even connect to each other inside the country. And what does that mean in terms of basic things like survival for people inside the country? So for example, right now,

There are some open source maps, there are some announcements about evacuation of the areas that are published on the internet from the IDF or other sources. But people cannot go on eggs if they are censored and blacked out to get those information. And some of the areas that are hit

Basically, government is the first to show up in those places and they arrest people who are recording or trying to record those scenes or report on those scenes to other people around them or even outside of the country.

Why would Iran's government want to restrict images of damage, images of the aftermath of strikes? You would think that would be useful information to show the world, but they've instead chosen to shut down the internet, shut down communications. Why? Because Iranian people are taking a different position in this conflict. They do not see this conflict as their conflict. So they are trying to crack down

by restricting access to the internet, crack down on them and stop any potential of mobilization of the people similar to what we have seen in the past few years.

I understand your organization has been trying to counteract some of this lack of information. What is it that you've been doing to get Iranians connected? Well, during just restricted internet access situation, we have been supporting and developing tools, circumvention tools and VPNs.

that was helping more than 2 million people all around Iran to get connected to the internet. So it's a constant cat and mouse game. We have to find the way that the government is restricting the internet and find solutions to bypass it. But we have been also working on some other shutdown resilience solutions for these times. So we developed...

some technologies to build government independent infrastructure using Starlink. And we are building these technologies and awareness campaigns actually to how to safely use these Starlink devices and how to share this internet bandwidth that you have with other people around you, with your neighbors, to be able to connect to them

on the domestic internet and tunnel your block traffic through the Starlink devices to outside of the world. And in the meantime, since the government of Iran, they haven't been doing much about early warning alerts, we also helped and worked with grassroots teams all around the world to build this early warning system application, which is called Mahsa Alert.

that helps people to get the life-saving updates, including the strike maps, evacuation guidance, information about the safe zones and areas to avoid because they might be the potential targets. We'll be right back.

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From there, you connect with freelancers that get you and can easily hire them and take your business to the next level. Visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That's Upwork.com to post your job for free and connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com. Upwork.com. You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Novosafo.

We're back with Ahmad Ahmadian, executive director at the nonprofit Holistic Resilience, which tries to circumvent internet censorship in Iran. So you have an early warning map, basically, that you've created. How are people in Iran accessing that? It's the people who can get connected to the internet by VPNs.

And there are other ways, one-way file casting technologies through satellite TV that we are able to send this early warning maps and send updates to Iranians. And as well as people just sharing it peer to peer. One person gets it and they can share it with other people around themselves.

So a lot of informal information sharing going on inside the country. And how dangerous is that for the folks inside the country who are participating in this kind of circumvention of government censorship and internet shutdown? Well, the situation has been like this for years. There is a strong spirit of cooperation right now among many digital freedom activists around the world.

that are rallying to meet this crisis and share resources and support Iranians however they can. So it's very important for the government of the U.S. and European governments and international community to pay special attention to this and support in many ways, in any ways that they can. That was Ahmad Ahmadian at the nonprofit Holistic Resilience, which helps Iranians circumvent internet censorship.

Amadian told us he himself has family in the country and had managed only brief conversations with them over the last several days. Jesus Alvarado produced this episode. I'm Novosafo, and that's Marketplace Tech. This is APM.

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