Starlink vs. the Islamic Republic

Inside the shadow operation keeping Iranians online after Mahsa Amini’s death, Starlink keeps protesters connected to each other—and the outside world.

On a cool October night in east Tehran, a young software engineer took the lead of a burgeoning protest without meaning to. The crowd had swelled from five to fifty in minutes, voices ricocheting off the apartment blocks: zan, zendegi, azadi—woman, life, freedom. From a balcony above, his mother, devout and veiled, scanned the street.

“Cyrus, first of all, what the hell are you doing?” she called on the phone. “And second of all, there’s a guy hiding behind the tree. He’s just constantly on his phone.”

Moments later, security forces came with rubber bullets and batons. An undercover officer grabbed Cyrus from behind, pinning his arms. “I got him! I got the leader!” the man shouted. Cyrus’s mind raced—not about the beating that might come, but about the phone in his pocket: messages, technical notes, contacts, the details of the beginnings of an experiment to keep Iranians online even when the state turned the internet off.

“So I was like, okay, the first thing I can do is to get rid of my phone,” he recalled. “I tossed my phone away, took my hoodie off, and ran.” His rotator cuff tore with the twist. Before the ambush closed, his mother swept down in her black chador, shielded him with her body, and spirited him into a neighbor’s apartment.

“My mom loves me crazy,” he said, smiling. “She’s religious, but totally against the regime.”

That was autumn 2022, in the opening months of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising sparked by the death of Mahsa Jina Amini. In those weeks, entire provinces went dark—mobile data throttled, home connections crippled, VPNs blocked. The regime had experience cutting its citizens off from the rest of the world; the blackouts had been practiced during the deadly 2019 protests. But this time, a handful of technologists were testing something different: whether SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet could punch through the government’s chokehold.

Cyrus was one of the first inside Iran to try.

Cyrus grew up in a traditional, pious family. As a teenager he went to mosque regularly and even joined the Basij youth network. “We were born as Muslims,” he said, “but nobody had really researched or questioned these beliefs.”

At university, he began to see corruption and hypocrisy and started asking questions. He studied software engineering, co-founded startups, and by 2020 drifted between Tehran and Yerevan, Armenia, working remotely for U.S.-based internet freedom projects.

His moral compass, he insists, still points back to his mother. “She always said, if someone even pokes you once, you shouldn’t be quiet—you should stand up,” he said. “Once a neighborhood kid bullied me, and I ran home crying. My mom said, ‘Hell no, I’m not helping you. Go kick his ass.’” He laughs. “I did, and she gave me a few bucks to buy something for myself.”

The night after the botched arrest, mother and son went back out together. “She knew she couldn’t keep me at home,” Cyrus said, “so she said, ‘Wherever you go, I’m tagging along.’”

In the hours after Iran’s national soccer team lost badly at the World Cup, the boulevard filled again. Lines of riot police stood ready. “I was kind of cursing them,” Cyrus said. “I told one, that thing that’s in your hand, the baton, is not a toy.” The guards hesitated; the sight of a hijab-clad woman at his side scrambled the regime’s social code just long enough for the crowd to hold the street.

Weeks earlier, as the first protests were building, a colleague had called Cyrus with a gamble. Could Starlink work in Iran?

It was an audacious question. Starlink’s dish—the “Dishy”—needs an unobstructed view of the sky and equipment that can be tracked. Import is heavily controlled. Activation is geofenced. Even if a kit enters Iran, using it can draw attention, especially if the government suspects satellite links are helping dissenters.

Still, Cyrus said yes. The first kit arrived in Armenia. Moving it across the border became a cat-and-mouse caper improvised on WhatsApp. “I told a bus driver it was server hardware,” he said. He now wishes he’d stripped the packaging, because the driver handed over a pristine SpaceX box to customs on the Iranian side.

“They hold us ten hours at the border because of this device,” the driver later yelled at him. “Everyone was around it, guessing what it was.” In the end, border agents seized only the tripod, convinced it looked like part of a weapon. The rest went through.

When the bus finally pulled into a dark Tehran terminal, Cyrus and a friend watched from a distance. “I thought, this is it—they’re going to catch me,” he said. In the rear seats sat two men—drivers, he realized after tense minutes of performative scolding. He paid double, installed a VPN on one man’s phone as an apology, and left with the kit.

On October 29, 2022, he carried the dish up to his family’s roof, snaked the cable down five floors to the living room, and aimed for open sky. “We got the signal,” he said. “I ran a speed test and sent it to Abbas—it was working.”

They tested it again on a family trip to the north, in the mountains and rain. “I covered it with my mom’s chador to see if it still worked,” he said, laughing. “It did.”

Getting more kits in grew harder. Once officials knew what to look for, bus routes dried up and packages were rejected at the border. “For the next devices, they knew at the border what Starlink was,” he said. “It got really tough.” Over time, the network found alternate paths. “In a month I helped maybe three or four devices,” he said. “But later it became hundreds.”

“When there is no internet, when there is no news,” Cyrus explained, “the pressure is less and less on the regime. That’s the basic level of why we need it—so people know what’s happening inside the country.”

A dish on a rooftop won’t liberate a nation. But it can get video out of a besieged neighborhood, keeping the world informed of the regime’s human rights abuses. It can keep an encrypted chat group alive when mobile data dies. It can host a remote “internet room” on the edge of town: a dish hidden on a farm or factory roof, tunneled into by VPN from inside Iran’s national network. It can sustain the kind of solidarity that prevents the state from erasing a story.

As word of Starlink spread, paranoia spread with it. During a brief flare-up between Iran and Israel, state media pushed a rumor that Starlink kits were “internet hubs” for Israeli drones. “People were buying it,” Cyrus said. “They were reporting neighbors when they saw a dish.”

A close friend who had installed a kit for his software company was raided one early morning. The reseller who set it up inadvertently filmed an advertisement that showed a well known landmark—an easy giveaway. “Twenty people with guns came in,” Cyrus said. “They took phones and computers.”

The friend spent twelve days in detention. “They printed every page of his Telegram messages—maybe a hundred pages,” Cyrus said. “The prosecutor asked about each one.” Fortunately, Cyrus had deleted their chat remotely; once the phone reconnected, the messages vanished. “They didn’t catch anything,” he said. “But they arrested multiple people. One just had protest footage on his phone.”

At home, his mother remained vigilant. “Sometimes she said, ‘Hide the cable, maybe the neighbors see it,’” he recalled. “She knew everything.”

The man who once led chants now speaks of disappointment. “I had some friends who came on the streets with me,” he said. “But during the war, they were so against Israel hitting Iran—they were falling for the trap that the Islamic regime is the same as Iran.”

He is equally critical of the exiled opposition. “Reza Pahlavi—this guy is not capable of running his own family, let alone the country,” he said. “I don’t see people inside Iran for him. Maybe one or two thousand at most.” He had more respect for Hamed Esmaeilion: “People could sympathize with him,” he said. “He had charisma and was practical. But after that agreement between those five opposition figures fell apart, people lost hope.”

He sees little coherent network inside Iran. “We’ve been working around Starlink for two years,” he said. “Maybe our network is much more than the Pahlavi network.”

As for change: “Maybe if Khamenei dies, or if they see they’re losing people, they’ll start changing a little,” he said. “I don’t feel safe going back now. I hope for change, but I kind of lost hope.”

Still, he’s noticed something: “People don’t care about hijab anymore,” he said, referencing rumors that the regime has pulled back on enforcing mandatory hijab laws. “These days, some of my friends don’t even carry a scarf. Back then, they always had one ready. It’s different now—but it could change again tomorrow.” He attributes some of the indifference to the distraction of the 12 day Israel/Iran war. The regime seems to have bigger priorities at the moment. But videos online show a mixture of women walking unveiled and roving morality police cars still on the move, looking for women defying the regime.

The Starlink devices are crucial for empowering women to broadcast their stories, protesters documenting regime abuses, and networks of dissenters continuing to collaborate from miles apart.

Are the dishes still online? Are more coming?

“Yes,” Cyrus said. “We’re still sending more.” He described ongoing efforts to provide kits to students, advocacy hubs, and activists who can operate during shutdowns.

The goal now is redundancy, remote sites linked through VPNs, “autonomous connections,” ways to keep life online during isolation.

He knows one dish won’t change a regime. “But,” he said, “it means we can send a video. We can talk. We can show we exist.”

Even three years after Mahsa Amini’s death, the struggle over connection in Iran remains a proxy for the larger struggle over power. For the Islamic Republic, controlling information is central to controlling dissent; for Iranians, accessing the uncensored internet is both a practical tool and an act of organized noncompliance. The Starlink devices that Cyrus and others risked so much to deliver are still rare, expensive, and vulnerable, but their existence has changed the calculus. Every functioning dish on a rooftop is proof that the regime’s monopoly on truth can be breached.

The networks built in those blackout months—improvised, decentralized, and mostly invisible—have evolved into something more durable. Starlink has become a model for how dissidents can operate in closed societies where the line between online and offline freedom is vanishing. Iranian authorities continue to hunt for dishes, prosecute users, and refine their own surveillance tools. The government can arrest users and confiscate equipment, but it can’t fully contain the network that’s formed around it.

For Cyrus, that may be the ultimate legacy of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement: not a revolution completed, but an enduring framework for dissent. Even under renewed censorship, the digital networks forged in those months continue to shape how Iranians communicate, organize, and endure.

For all the setbacks, Iranians like Cyrus still look upward. The same will that built those networks speaks to a citizenry unwilling to stop imagining something better.

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