SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk announced he is activating his Starlink satellite internet in Iran after the state cut off access amid protests sweeping the nation.
Musk’s announcement came after the Treasury Department issued a general license for companies to bolster internet access to Iranians and circumvent state-sponsored efforts to quash dissent. Citizens of Iran have been subject to “severe internet restrictions” in recent days, the most stringent since authorities clashed with protesters in November 2019. The reason for the latest state-sponsored outages are massive protests sweeping Tehran, the nation’s capital, in response to the death of Iranian journalist Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iran’s morality police.
TREASURY DEPARTMENT MOVES TO EXPAND INTERNET ACCESS IN IRAN AMID MASS CENSORSHIP
Amini was a female Iranian journalist who apprehended and allegedly killed by local officials for violating a dress code, specifically for wearing her hijab incorrectly. Authorities said the 22-year-old died of a heart attack, while her family claimed she’d been beaten, noting that she had no heart condition that would explain her sudden death. International experts have backed the family’s position, saying her death was almost certainly at the hands of Iran’s morality police.
In defending their initial sanctions, which would’ve blocked Musk from launching satellite internet in Iran, the U.S. Treasury Department cited eyewitnesses who claimed that Amini sustained her fatal injuries while in the morality police’s custody.
Tehran cut off most global internet access to its 80 million citizens on Wednesday. Amini was killed the Friday before, and protests have shown no signs of slowing down. Musk said this week that he would seek an exception to the U.S. sanctions in order to provide his broadband service against the Iranian government’s wishes, which the Treasury approved with the new guidance on Friday.
Starlink may allow some Iranians to get back online, but a State Department official briefing reporters Friday cautioned that Tehran still has “repressive tools for communication.”
The new license that Musk will use makes it “easier for the Iranian people to confront some of those oppressive tools,” the official said. “It doesn’t mean that they don’t exist anymore.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken tweeted Friday about the matter, writing: “We took action today to advance Internet freedom and the free flow of information for the Iranian people, issuing a General License to provide them greater access to digital communications to counter the Iranian government’s censorship.”
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“Activating Starlink,” Musk replied.
“Starlink is a constellation of thousands of satellites that orbit the planet much closer to Earth, at about 550km, and cover the entire globe,” the company’s website reads. “Because Starlink satellites are in a low orbit, latency [the round trip data time between the user and satellite] is significantly lower [than most satellite internet services]—around 20 ms vs 600+ ms.”
