Not too surprising, given that Starlink operates in Iran without a permit, "space pirate radio" style, and has something of a habit of making the access free when major protests happen and the government imposes a network blackout. Iranian government and Starlink have no love for each other, clearly.
It's a pattern by now: whenever a government wants to do something awful, it shuts down internet access - so that no one can hear it, see it or coordinate a response. And Starlink becomes a lifeline that the regime would rather people didn't have.
This is why all of those "national great firewalls" shouldn't exist in the first place. If you give a government a capability to restrict access to whatever it wants and enact a network blackout whenever it wants, it's a matter of time until it gets abused.
They "operate" in Iran because of OFAC issues general licenses under the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations (31 CFR Part 560) permitting non-commercial personal communications, including satellite internet for free expression. Starlink activation in 2022 protests and recent events exploited these, as Musk sought formal exemptions for "internet freedom."
And no Tesla factories in Iran I suppose helps too :)
It has to be free in case of OFAC sanctions otherwise if you are generating revenue from commercial activity in sanctioned regions, you get huge fines.
The reason national great firewalls shouldn't exist, is that national great firewalls are bad. We don't have to blame potential future badness when we can blame definite present badness.
Starlink isn't perfect, but at least it doesn't go for "it's so not our problem, we'll just make sure that every single VPN exit point Iranians use is GeoIP'd as Iran in our systems" like Google tends to, or "let's lick every authoritarian boot, we control the app distribution and our users will suck it up" like Apple does.
Not even Starlink has the balls to oppose the likes of Russia and China directly - they aren't operating there without a permit, sadly. But at least they don't kneel before every two-bit dictatorship and cave to every single "we want you to do censorship on our behalf" demand. Way better than what most tech companies do now.
I'm unfortunately inclined to not look at their actions so favourably. They operate solely in jurisdictions where the US state supports open destabilization, and dont where the political ramifications would be too high for the US. Makes them little more than an extension of the US imperialist structure.
And this makes sense for an organization thats so highly reliant on federal support, vs Apple and Google who only have to just stay somewhat in the states good graces.
> They operate solely in jurisdictions where the US state supports open destabilization
Could you expand on that? Are you saying that the US state wants destabilization in every place that Starlink is accessible? Like the UK, Australia, and USA itself? Which group are you considering the "US state" for that?
I assumed the context of the conversation was given to be understood, my bad. In the context of Starlink operating in nations for the purpose of bypassing internet censorship, as is the context of the conversation, starlink only operates were the US sanctions it to (iran) to further its imperialist goals, and it does not operate where it would hurt the US politically (russia). So pretending that starlink is operating from some kind of moral high ground rather than just SpaceX and most of Musks companies are heavily reliant on federal support so are at their beck and call is weird idolising of a corporate entity.
As a private platform, SpaceX did try to draw a line with where their service could be used in Ukraine, but we're talking about Iranian protestors now, a different matter I think. If they were offering a firewall as a service, then what you're saying would be more true.
Apple and Google have done more than just stay in good graces of governments by getting rid of apps governments don't like, they haven't enforced their terms against X, and given tens of millions to Trump's ballroom.
> In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia.[18] This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.[19][20] SpaceX executives repeatedly stated that Starlink needed to remain a civilian network;[21][22][12] in late 2022, as Starlink was being used as a tool in combat in Ukraine, SpaceX announced Starshield, a Starlink-like program designed for government customers.[23][21] Musk is reported to have said that Ukraine was "going too far" in threatening to inflict a “strategic defeat” on the Kremlin.[24]
I will walk back the last half after the word “or” in my claim here
> Musk manipulates those connections for whatever he perceives as his own benefit or he wouldn’t be turning off the connections in Ukraine[1]
The first half is still him manipulating those connections for whatever he perceives as his own benefit
> This is why all of those "national great firewalls" shouldn't exist in the first place
This is a kind of colonialist thinking that is, IMO, a problem in the western society. There are indeed drawbacks in a lack of freedom, but assuming that a government should not be able to filter the content diffused to the population is wrong in principle. You don't get to choose what is right or wrong in every part of the world: that is a very USA-centric way to view the society and easily leads to "export freedom and democracy" acts. It's a very USA-friendly way to frame things. Not necessarily the right way to frame things.
But wouldn't the position of a strong government be to trust it's people, and allow them to see the whole spectrum of information available in the world, and give them essentially the right to decide what's "right or wrong"? I don't see how being free from any information filtering on behalf of some benevolent leader is USA-centric?
The USA centric view I was referring to is the one where lack of freedom is wrong, since it benefits the USA ideology of maximal freedom. Which is not in generally shared by all western countries (in Europe socialism and state ownership is much more present, for instance), and it's not necessary the most accurate view of real USA (there might be more "free" countries, like Switzerland), it's just that it benefits the perceived image of USA.
With this in mind, no, I don't share the view that a strong government should trust the people: people can easily be steered by foreign parties that want to gain soft power (example: Russia and recent anti-EU propaganda in Poland, Romania and Georgia). It's very hard to draw a line between what is "right" and what is "too much", but I don't think that excessive freedom is an obvious route to an healthy society (that is, a society that has peace and people are happy).
Nobody is arguing for maximal freedoms for Iranians. This is literally whether some Iranians are able to get their hands on Starlink terminals if they want to.
I don’t think it can be disputed that there is a lot of propaganda and misinformation in the internet.
One logical conclusion to this would be to protect people from that via censorship.
Many recent examples of the US doing this as well (Covid, Russia, etc.). Of course, the US delegates this to its cooperations, so it can publicly say its hands are clean.
People do remember the Twitter files though, and the US government has massive spying and monitoring capabilities, so its hands are not actually all that clean.
Obviously I and most westerners are on the side of the angels for this incident but we also hear lots of calls in the West to ban "Russian and Chinese bots", or "pro terrorist views" or whatever. Principled views shouldn't do a 180 based on the subjects involved.
Again, just for the sake of the discussion: Iran banned starlink, people are getting terminals (BTW, I'm happy they managed to). Starlink is still providing the service in the area although they are aware it's illegal and people can be behaded for owning a starlink terminal. But hey, Iran and USA are enemies. The fact that Iran is the only country where Starlink is active even if it's NOT approved is food for thought. There are other countries, where there are regimes that control communications, where Starlink is not active.
Yes, as an American I think that all forms of government that are not liberal democracy basically are illegitimate. We can have relationships of convenience with other governments, but it should be known by such governments somewhere in the back of their minds that we would prefer to see them replaced by a liberal democracy.
The Iranian state has not shown itself to be one that is very convenient for us to temporarily overlook its flaws, and the people it governs frequently show that they would prefer a different form of government (otherwise, why not let them vote in fair elections?). It should be a no brainer that Americans and their government should be on the side of the people, not the theocracy.
But USA can't even be on the side of their own people. I can see the recent ICE shooting, health care issues, clearly corrupt government officials. Why should anybody trust them with another country?
Also the US has massive protests aswell, would it be okay for china to liberate the USA, since china itself is lead by a "democratic party"? They could argue the USA isn't a real liberal democracy.
> why not let them vote in fair elections?
Elections can be faked, people can be mislead, oppositions and media can be bought.
USA has many different people and most try hard allow everyone to speak their mind. That is what is being preserved for others- the ability to escape oppression (that seems to just be a built-in human thing), no matter where you are.
There's a big gap between "national firewalls shouldn't exist" and "country should invade/"liberate" another country to prevent national firewall (or insert other disliked policy)".
So to respond directly:
> Why should anybody trust them with another country?
They should not and should not need to trust them with another country
> would it be okay for china to liberate the USA
no, it wouldn't. But if China felt that the USA gov't was like, not cool, they could impose sanctions or not trade with USA.
The US democracy is quite weird, though, because it's IMHO quite far from the people: billionaires can influence the outcomes of elections by steering the votes where the most paying candidate (or the most knowledgeable, or someone else with other skills) desires. This is not something that people can influence easily, so I find hard to believe that a government is legitimate just by the label on the packaging.
I won't go down the path of "fair elections", since I don't think it applies to USA.
There's a number of people who try and influence elections, money is not nearly as effective as you think it is. Or else a few people that have a few billion in their coffers would run and have won elections in places and other things far more than what they currently do/have done.
The wealthiest entity in the USA is the government itself. It's not even close.
Further, if currency was not able to influence things then that eliminates the main purpose of fiat currency, there is obviously a place for it in any case. Just because you don't like the direction it's being used doesn't mean you have a reasonable position either. Fiat is a benefit to the government in all ways and its in it's best interest to uphold the strength of their currency, not just for the locals to the land in the borders, but if they want to influence the rest of the world.
You should go down the path of "fair elections" because you otherwise lose all points for being vague and imprecise that no one can contest you on because you don't think we are worth the argument.
If tomorrow I owned 1 zillion dollar, that wouldn't make me able to change the course of next US (presidential) elections. It's not the only factor, ofc, but it is a very relevant one. Let's consider other factors that might be relevant: influence, visibility, arguments, fame, political weight, political knowledge, time, will. There are others. Someone with no influence on these factors and no money can hardly influence the outcomes of a nation election. If that someone was made a billionaire overnight, it can gain control over some factors, improving the likelihood of their impact over the next elections. Will they succeed? Not necessarily, but that their impact can become perceivable is undeniable.
Fair elections: in the US there are a bunch of practices related to vote that I don't consider fair. First and foremost, how votes are counted. Then, how money can be used to finance parties and campaigns. Gerrymandering is another one.
Billionaires there are subjects to the regime, and only remain billionaires while they are absolutely loyal to the regime. And threat of disagreement not only would cause them stop being billionaires, but also stop breathing altogether. I mean, running away could be an option, but then one stops being Russian or Chinese billionaire. And also this may not preclude "stop breathing" option, as some examples show.
You're right! Still they are billionaires in their countries with many benefits for being billionaires! Except, steering the government where they want - which typically means getting even richer. In the USA this happened, though.
My point is that, even in self-proclamed democracies, it's quite hard to actually give power to the people, precisely as in regimes. It's not a "it's all the same" position, of course: I mean to say that taking some values as absolute is not great if we don't clearly define what we are optimizing for. The USA model of democracy doesn't optimize for individual freedom nor for general population happiness.
> Russia and China come to mind: billionaires are there, but they are not allowed to subvert the regime
Putin and Xi are billionaires. So are their cronies. They get richer faster than the rest of their population because they’re literally billionaires in control of the regime with no peaceful path to removing them.
People can do whatever they think is right, of course (: so there is no "should". My point was that saying that a government should not impose communication restrictions is not necessary right. So, no, people should be happy: if they are happy without freedom, then let them be. If they are unhappy without freedom, let them make a revolution.
> There are indeed drawbacks in a lack of freedom, but assuming that a government should not be able to filter the content diffused to the population is wrong in principle.
It boils down to what one considers to be relevant for humans: I think that well being is more important than freedom. Historically, freedom was not a predominant part in human societies. On the contrary: slavery, kingdoms, empires, took part in human history more than freedom. Authoritarian government is not wrong per se, as long as people are well. In the same way, freedom of knowledge anything at any time is not necessary good. Actually, the ability to immediately access any content, beneficial or not, is something that humans acquired very recently in their history, and it's absolutely not clear that this is in fact something good in the long term. I think it is, but it's just speculation. Being conservative and NOT giving free communication is, I think, a more sensible default for a government. Also, there are cases where we already know that freedom doesn't help: CSAM, revenge porn, and other nasty stuff. ()
() edit: no, I was partly mistaken with these examples. I provided example of things that are known and widely accepted to be damaging of other liberties, while I meant to provide something more subtle, like fake news.
Seems like a big flaw that low-orbit constellations have a dependency on GPS, which are high-altitude satellites. They're 40x further away and so have 1,600x greater path loss. Why can't they use their own satellites for this?
> "But Starlink receivers use GPS to locate and connect to satellites. “Since its 12-day war with Israel last June," The Times says, “Iran has been disrupting GPS signals.”"
This isn’t even true; Starlink can use the local starlink constellation for positioning and the option is available in the customer facing configuration specifically for GPS denied areas (since about two years ago), where it’s been used for ages.
Something else is going on here - perhaps there’s an edge case where Starlink can be made to perform poorly without falling back away from GPS, but I wouldn’t expect this since it’s been “tested” in the most GPS hostile places for quite some time now.
It sounds like Starlink uses GPS to localize the receiver, rather than for any active step in the communication link. Since most receivers are static, I wonder if an effective workaround to this is for the receiver to just remember its last GPS fix for longer, or worst-case allow a manual location specification in lieu of a GPS fix.
A user provided location cannot be trusted for geofencing purposes. A GNSS (GPS or other) is needed sooner or later. This is a legal requirement for sanction and regulation enforcement (US, if not others).
The user-provided location would only be used for the initial bootstrapping. After it connects, the Starlink network itself will localize the receiver to within 1 km.
If the user inputs a bogus lat/lon, it would simply fail to connect. There's no way to 'spoof' your location on this type of global satellite comm network.
EDIT It will be interesting to see what anti-censorship and anti-DOS hardening features are coming in future software updates. Full GPS denial bootstrapping is the most obvious, and actually this should be possible without needing to input a location. Adding offline update packages, so signed anti-denial firmware updates can "sneakernet" across oppressive regimes to recover DOSed terminals, would be even better.
Assuming the jamming is coming from close to the horizon, I wonder if one could improvise a choke ring around the antenna with some sheet metal or foil.
Gps is free to use. Running your own gnss service requires an atomic clock and possibly separate transmission hardware, which is possible, but adds cost, volume, and weight.
According to [1], “[o]ne of the current generation of GPS satellites (Block III) weighs over 2,200 kg (4,850 lb), the weight of an average pickup truck. The body of these satellites are 1.8 m x 2.5 m x 3.4 m (5.9’ x 8.2’ x 11.2’) in size”. In comparison, “the current V2 Starlink satellite version weighs approximately 1,760 lbs (800 kilograms) at launch, almost three times heavier than the older generation satellites (weighing in at 573 lbs or 260 kg)” [2]
> Gps is free to use. Running your own gnss service requires an atomic clock and possibly separate transmission hardware, which is possible, but adds cost, volume, and weight.
Thanks you provide some great insights on why starlink didnt use gps but still if starlink wants to focus itself as the uncensorable internet in places like protests etc. I feel like they can probably do this after this recent incident
I just can't feel but sad right now because starlink was still providing activists ways to report outside and that helped protestors a lot and information. Now even starlink got removed because starlink tried to save money and I think might not have thought about what if gps itself gets blocked.
This is giving very bad signals for Iran. Is there any way now that Protestors are able to communicate to the outside world/ activists be able to report data outside?
Yes, ask their Mossad direct and local handlers (as per Mike Pompeo [1]) about how things are going, I’m sure that this being Mossad they have a ground-based way to get the information out.
Mike Pompeo is a private citizen; is there some reason to believe that he has direct knowledge of foreign involvement in these protests? It seems unlikely, and doubly so that he’d actually disclose it if he did.
“Former” is operative. I don’t see any reason to believe that Pompeo has special insider knowledge here, and sharing it makes zero sense even if he did. The more parsimonious explanation is that he’s a sidelined grifter whose only way to stay relevant is to speculate on social media.
After reading Walter Isaacson's biography of US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, I would be extremely surprised to find that a former Secretary of State was suddenly out of the loop on major events.
Henry Kissinger was a notorious power broker, and basically remained "in the loop" until the day he died. Pompeo is neither of these things.
But there's an even simpler way to reach this conclusion: given everything you and I know about Pompeo's politics, is there any reason to believe he'd want to introduce doubt about the legitimacy of popular protest in Iran?
In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia.[18] This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.[19][20] SpaceX executives repeatedly stated that Starlink needed to remain a civilian network;[21][22][12] in late 2022, as Starlink was being used as a tool in combat in Ukraine, SpaceX announced Starshield, a Starlink-like program designed for government customers.[23][21] Musk is reported to have said that Ukraine was "going too far" in threatening to inflict a “strategic defeat” on the Kremlin.[24]
Musk, like Trump, has an interesting relationship with Russia. The investigations into that have been quashed, so we don’t get to find out about the rumoured Kremlin calls he was making.
The allegation at the time was that he turned off Starlink. That was not true. He did not turn it on at Ukraine’s request because US law prohibited it.
Because Musk is a fickle, unethical individual with poor impulse control and too much money who only talks about high minded concepts like “free speech” and “battling censorship” when it serves his interests at that moment.
GPS comparison is moot in this case, as there's no need for Starlink constellations to provide full GNSS capability, just locating the satellites precisely enough to facilitate beamforming.
Chip scale atomic clocks are quite small[1], have been used in space, and could be part of the existing Starlink satellites. Finding reliable details about the orbital vehicles the internet eludes me.
This whole stalink for military use (Starshield) was a scam Elon sold the military from the beginning. Just like his dumb ass tunnels and his self driving cars. He is putting the military at risk.
GPS signals are extremely weak, and they're necessarily received from omnidirectional antennas that can't provide much antenna gain. In some sense it's a miracle of signal processing that GPS can ever be received.
There have been developments in receiving antennas that are harder to jam.
Most jamming is horizontal and limited to a few bands. So by having a directional antenna and listening to all services for now it seems to work. But this is a cat and mouse game.
For legal reasons I base this off of nothing but just turn your jammer to the sky. Could get fancy and point out directly at the satellites since my understanding is it's pretty easy to know where they are.
Edit to add: I do not mean the GPS satellites or the starlink ground terminals. That was not the question so that is not my answer. I mean the starlink satellites
That doesn't work. GPS is broadcast, not bidirectional communication, so preventing the satellites from seeing the GPS receiver does nothing: they're not looking to begin with.
What are you talking about? The jammers are on the ground. Just like receivers on the ground can be jammed with bad RF nearby, so can receivers in space. You just point the bad RF towards the receiver
The GPS satellites aren't receiving anything. The GPS satellites transmit signals, and the starlink terminals (and other users of GPS) receive those signals.
This is a great plot for a B movie or a trashy military action book. “The bad guys are jamming GPS uplink and we only have two weeks until the almanacs are out of date and the whole system breaks down. Millions of innocent Americans will drive into rivers by accident.”
More to the point, to do that to this number of satellites on this big an area you'd need nuclear power plant levels of power, and it would only degrade GPS a bit (their clocks slowly desync when uplink is blocked)
My understanding was that each satellite broadcasts a coarse ephemeris for the whole network, and that that “almanac” isn’t accurate for very long (on the order of weeks). Without uploads to the satellites, those almanacs will go stale.
I don’t think the almanacs are necessary for the system to work, in theory. But I believe they’re commonly used by receivers to narrow down the range of possibilities when trying to find a PRN match for a signal they’re getting.
(I’ve dealt with GPS and similar navigation signals for work but am not an expert, this is just the impression I’ve gotten over a few years)
Ok they said the GPS of the starlink satellites is being jammed, and the question was how. The comment I was replying to did not say the terminal, it said the satellite. Maybe that's the confusion
I am wondering if Starlink users can't compensate for it themselves by transmitting a GPS signal using some SDR device locally, just putting in correct coordinates from Google Maps into it? GPS signals are at 1.5GHz which is easily accessible for cheap SDRs.
But really, why doesn't Starlink device allow to simply enter coordinates manually? After all, if someone enters wrong coordinates (say to enable operation in a place where Starlink has no service), it won't work because it won't find satellites where it expects them to be.
I don't own a starlink dish, but I assume one can log in and configure some things. It would be a nobrainer to have a way to enter coordinates and system time. Also the manual could have sane advice like recommendation to use "peace time" to establish the locations GPS coordinates and write them down on some sticker or so.
If it can serve a basic web page with a world map, it may be justifiable to include it for the price of the dish (yes will require some flash storage).
Does anyone know how Iranians are _actually_ communicating right now? I remember seeing here on HN (admittedly a long time ago) some Bluetooth-mesh technologies that promised decentralized solutions to these very type of problems
At that time they created a bunch of spammy noise which caused the social media businesses significant expense.
They did that in order to run their foreign interference in US elections agenda, and their foreign agenda of late; and we don't like foreign interference in our elections either.
Note the fathers of the sarcastic TV show South Park, all bouncing around on their satellite internet access.
So like they are very heavily DPI censored though and maybe govts able to spy on any messages you send right now but I feel like there is a still possibility that for the average communication, they might still exist but although heavily heavily censored/bad and I feel like protestors might not be able to communicate (which I feel like is the question you meant to be asking)
So TLDR: protestors must have a hard time sadly and they may be using bluetooth mesh or other tech, only they can tell after we figure things out but also lets say some major services websites might still exist after all if they bypass the dpi censorship for IPv4 services.
In my opinion, I feel like Protestors must be using mesh based technologies as you mention. We'll see what really ends up happening after we get some reports from Iran.
It is said they pulled the plug for all peering on Thursday, although I would assume some kind of government-run ISP may be operational still (I haven't checked Cloudlfare radar)
Pardon me but can you please provide me more context regarding it. I am genuinely confused about the ground state of reality in Iran right now regarding Internet access at all
can you please take a look at cloudflare radar and see what the current ipv4 connectivity means? Even Ipv4 was blocked for sometime but then it got back to normal in the graph shown in cloudflare radar
Can you please tell me what you mean by plug for all peering? Like complete internet blackout?
In my experience 80% packet loss makes most common protocols basically unusable. Yes you can still get data out...but many apps will just fail due to timeouts and other things.
Matrix published a proof of concept a few years ago of an alternative transport layer designed to work over connections with a few hundred bits per second, and massive packet loss, while still providing E2EE:
Without knowing that much about this area, i think https://mosh.org/ is a traditional choice if you need encrypted communication in a high packet loss environment.
I imagine the people with illegal starlink terminals are fairly tech savy and can use custom protocols. Living in Iran they probably already have a lot of experience with vpns and lower level protocols to evade censorship.
Illegal just means there’s a black market. You pay some guy in cash and he gives you a smuggled Starlink terminal. Neither buyer or seller is likely to be anymore sophisticated here than someone trading in any other smuggled goods (cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, etc).
Satellite signals are just weak RF signals and can be disrupted easily. There is nothing 'hardened' about them. It's funny that people think Starlink or any of its many incipient competitors are any different.
Starlink uses beamforming with directional antenna arrays, so it should be rather difficult to jam compared to omnidirectional antennas. It's basically a dish pointed at the satellite, so the jammer should be in between to work.
Antenna arrays aren't perfect so it still picks up some energy omnidirectionally, but it should be possible to shield it with some metal plates in a way that only sky is visible.
> basically a dish pointed at the satellite, so the jammer should be in between to work.
Which isn't hard to do if you have the budget of a government. Directional antennae, GPS and a helicopter/Cessna flying patterns over a metro. Beams from the terminal are constantly scanning the sky chasing the constellations.
A higher hit rate option would be a fleet of low altitude drones taking high-res pictures of the ground, and running a fine-tuned classifier to identify Starlink Dishies which require a clear line of sight to the sky.
People who think Starlink is unblockable, or somehow anonymous IRL are unimaginative. Iran is well-versed enough with electronic warfare that it tricked a RQ-170 Sentinel land on it's territory - how hardened are Starlink terminals against responding to a spoofed signal and exposing their locations?
Doesn't Starlink use some sort wideband signal which is hard to jam? Combined with some sort of frequency hopping and a moving constellation should mean blocking a user or satellite signal should be pretty hard, like many times the cost of building and servicing a user terminal for use against protesters.
> Doesn't Starlink use some sort wideband signal which is hard to jam?
It probably is hard to jam, but you don't need to jam it if you can pinpoint terminal locations and send in on-the-ground enforcers to confiscate the equipment and make arrests. TV detector vans were introduced in 1952[1], the principles for finding sources of RF emissions isn't cutting edge technology.
You realize Iran is pretty big with lots of people and Iran can't run around with detector van across all those regions and people. Specially when they potentially lose control over certain areas. And those vans can be disabled pretty easily as well, specially in a proto-war zone.
That said, this would only be true if there were enough people with terminals.
TV emissions don't use beam forming. This is all a cat and mouse game, but Starlink being a distributed system should mean it is harder to completely block use of.
See my other comment upthread on how beamforming doesn't make terminals/emissions invisible, just harder to acquire, but well within reach of a determined adversary. Newer Starlink terminals have a 1.5° beam, and older ones are
3.4° wide . At 10,000 feet altitude, the tighter beam is 245 feet across. Starlink satellite orbits are public and predictable, and Iran has drones to spare.
This is just 1 passive RF-based approach, and there are others (e.g. drone-mounted FLIR surveys done at 3 am)
Like I said, this is a cat and mouse game, if you had terminals to spare or even just fake battery operated transmitting antennas, you could waste a lot of drone time. There are also masking techniques and it's not like the drones can't be tracked or misguided. It would take orders of magnitude more effort to stop Starlink than to keep using it minimally. Iran is a big country, it just depends on how determined and prepared the protestors are to evade censorship. Which by itself is hopefully just a start to other actions.
My starlink works fine under a ceramic tinted window that blocks 95% of UV and visible light, so you'd need a pretty fancy SAR camera for your fleet of drones.
I think, to beamform in the right direction you have to be able to locate yourself precisely, have an up-to-date almanach of the satellites, and a precise enough datation source. Jamming GNSS is a source of problems for 2 of those issues.
Also, the antennas on starlink dishes are still pretty small, likely to pick up some hard-to-remove sidelobes and the tech to cancel them properly might be export-controlled. You still need to be within electromagnetic visibility to jam them, though.
To add to my point, with multiple antennas it's also possible to spatially separate signals. Not sure if Starlink is doing that, but I think it should be possible to escape GPS jammers by using two antennas with some distance between them. Two antennas can pick up the direction of the signals and with some math they can be separated, at least in theory.
But it's in extremely difficult to disrupt the signals across the whole country? I person go go out with a battery and setup a starlink terminal in the middle of nowhere in 2 minutes (exactly how I'm writing this post right now from Boliva)
If your objective is to stop or at least slow coordination of protests and flow of information about things the regime is doing in the major cities of Tehran and Mashhad, you're a lot less worried that plenty of rural villages get completely unhindered signals, if anyone in them happens to have a Starlink terminal.
Agreed, the only way to get starlink terminal is via smuggling it into the country and it costs 1000's of $ or 500$ or more which is more than many months of average iranian income let alone rural villages
I hope though that perhaps rural villages can shelter activists but who knows what happens in the ground level, perhaps news development from tehran doesn't reach the villages in the first case, maybe they block anyone entering and leaving the city I am not sure
This seems to be a really bad development for protestors. There were reports that some protestors were killed by the govt and now I am genuinely worried about them even more. This tyranny needs to be stopped.
> Russia seems to have been ineffective at stopping the Ukranians using it.
Russia isn't in control of Ukrainian territory, where the starlink terminals are, which would be the prime targets of any disruption operation. The situations in Iran and Ukraine are materially different.
Under packetloss my assumption is text is king, but I wonder if forward error correcting audio and video is actually better in some ways?
Media is information rich. Maybe we're beyond a samzdat moment and the value in comms is contextual immediacy of live feeds, text can squeeze alongside.
Long ago, broadcast quality TV was shipped as slow feed. Maybe a tiktok generation goes back there: use a phone on the street (probably surreptitiously) do post production and upload asynchronously on 30% packetloss or worse for redistribution.
You are acting like people dont upload videos anymore.
The people filming protests in iran are probably not in range of their home starlink connected wifi. They are almost certainly filming stuff offline then uploading it later, not livestreaming.
Yes. thats broadly what I think people will be doing. My concern was, under 30% to 80% packetloss, how well this works. I think the answer is, if you want to get media out, it works well enough, given enough time.
I would be surprised if GPS blocking is enough to completely can starlink. It improves positioning but if you don't jog the antenna, given these things are in predictable orbit, you can probably get good-enough S/N without GPS info.
Some personal observations as I am in touch with a few folks inside Iran through Starlink.
1. The jamming/disruption is local to large cities most notably the capital, Tehran.
2. Even in Tehran it is not complete and my friends are able to send and receive messages. Uploading videos is harder.
3. The regime is now raiding homes that they suspect have Starlink terminals. I don't know how they identify them but I do wonder if they are using technology to locate them.
Pumping out a lot of noise is usually easier than locating a source of a weak signal. That said, Russians likely have the necessary technology. The question would be do they feel like selling it to Iran and are Iranians capable of using it properly?
> Pumping out a lot of noise is usually easier than locating a source of a weak signal.
Not at the frequencies in question - this isn't 2.4GHz where a magnetron ripped out of a microwave oven will wreak havoc, these are highly-directional, beamformed signals. Also, ostensibly, there should be zero unapproved energy whatsoever in those bands.
Wow this sucks! however if i were iranian brass i would do it too. IT/OT and IoT is not safe full stop. Pull the plug. It wouldnt be pretty over here either, also china already got us good (Volt Typhoon, OPM hack, why bother to list 30 or 40 more?)
These things must be big, stationary and likely very sparsely manned (if anything, they must emit a lot of energy which is not healthy). If there ever were some good targets for a surgical application of some B-2s...
The title is wrong, as usual. This is a re-hash of earlier reports. Starlink is getting 30-80% packet loss, depending on where they're using it. Likely local jammers. But it still gets through.
Any satellite signal is going to be relatively weak compared to what you can produce on the ground. Inverse square law, and power limitations of a mobile transmitter.
It's fairly trivial to set up a transmitter that saturates a slice of spectrum at an amount of power that is ridiculous compared to a satellite signal. There are still AM radio stations operating that go as high as 50kW. The satellite transmitters aren't going to exceed maybe a hundred Watts, at a great distance, and that falls off at 1/(distance)^2.
The Russians have developed rather efficient GPS jamming equip., as we know, Iranian Gov't is partners with Russians, providing drone technology, so no great mystery where likely the jammers originated from.
There's a difference between possible and plausible. In the most absurd case, it was always a given that a sufficiently large faraday cage or a literal iron dome would block starlink from reaching anybody in iran therefore it was never thought to be impossible to block starlink. At best it's implausible but that would refer specifically to the construction of the giant faraday cage and the literal iron dome, not the concept of blocking starlink.
Starlink has no ground stations on Iranian soil and is formally prohibited by its government, so there is nothing being "provided" to Iran, per se. Iranians smuggle Starlink dishes in, at great personal risk.
> Fortunately, the government cannot enforce complete blackout because thousands of startlink terminals are active inside the country. They have been complaining about it to no avail.
Seems they finally figured out a way. Seems like yet again, you shouldn't shout hello until you've crossed the stream.
I left the comment on starlink on that thread. I should note some personal observations as I am in touch with a few folks inside Iran through Starlink.
1. The jamming/disruption is local to large cities most notably the capital, Tehran
2. Even in Tehran it is not complete and my friends are able to send and receive messages. Uploading videos is harder.
3. The regime is now raiding homes that they suspect have Starlink terminals. I don't know how they identify them but I do wonder if they are using technology to locate them.
I wouldn't consider it funny though when you realize the gravitas of the situation though but yea.
I just wanted to point out that it felt rude to call it funny but I understand what you mean and what intention but please be more sincere about such issues.
> Seems they finally figured out a way. Seems like yet again, you shouldn't shout hello until you've crossed the stream.
Someone mentions that there is a huge packet loss but its still possible. Other mentions that its possible to do this in rural villages and there are many nuances. I genuinely dont know the technological reasons or know how of what it is or what the ground state of reality is and what's actually happening but I hope that starlink still works or can have a work-around for the activists. We will see in sometime what really happens in the ground state as I must admit I still don't know if its 100% censored or what the reality is.
The situation as a whole is in no way funny, sorry I gave you that impression. What is funny to me, is a confidently incorrect comment from a related story just two days ago that also ended up the highest upvoted one, which quickly seemed to have been proven wrong. This is still funny to me, yet the situation itself remains helplessly depressing.
Hypothecally speaking.
If I were to live in an authoritarian country that would shut off all means of communication like that. What off grid technology would be viable?
in a country that hostile to you I would be worried about radiating any kind of EM, honestly. It's too easy to track and could cause undue targetting & victimization.
my real answer : I think at that point in time effort is best spent trying to arrange escape.
my technical answer : depends on the scene. directed optical/laser or microwave is very hard to track if that can facilitate the links you need -- but realistically most war-time off-grid comms historically has been established via runners, dropboxes, or community radio systems ; all options with very real inherent risks.
I would imagine that communicating within urban areas might be possible via some kind of a mesh network where e.g. every phone would act as a node that can forward the packets further. Something like that should be possible over WiFi I assume although I am unfamiliar with the existing protocols that would allow that.
There are two main issues with such an application that I can think of:
1. Addressing. How would the nodes know where to send the packet? But I assume there are ways to deal with that which come from the P2P networks like Tor.
2. Edge connectivity. Even if it would be possible to communicate between the regular nodes of the network, those packets would not be able to reach the outside world. So, from abroad or even from the out of town, they would still appear offline. Some kind of edge bridges would probably be necessary to reach connectivity with the outside world.
Maybe more practically in Tibet I had a Thuraya sat phone which you weren't supposed to have but I don't think there's much they could do about those except maybe search you.
Link budget cuts both ways. If your user terminal sucks, you can compensate somewhat - by building a larger, beefier satellite that has better antenna directionality and pumps out more transmission juice, and throwing the data rate under the bus. This is how it's done now.
Having a terminal that doesn't suck puts less strain on the satellite side and, thus, scales better. But for emergencies and serving middle of nowhere, "direct to cell" makes sense.
Iran has a huge black market. Many things from refrigerator to small things are being smuggled to Iran, mostly from the mountains on Iraq border (also from Turkey border and from other Gulf countries. The government is not peaky about smuggling since Iran is under heavy sanctions and it's hard for the government to provide USD to legit traders on official channels.
My thoughts to the Iranian people, may they get what they need and deserve at a cost that is not too high.
As in all conflicts, there's always a "fog of blame" where there isn't absolute certainty about who is right and who is to blame. Though it's not that hard. Because their survival depends on it, dictators are very good at blaming others--anybody, really--for their own shortcomings, and they usually wield the kind of hard power that makes them extremely costly to topple in terms of suffering and human lives.
Life is too short to have to deal with despots. We need a better, perhaps less-crowded or less xenophobic world where every person can protect their right to exist by simply packing and leaving as a last resort.
Agreed, but right now, I'm getting Bay of Pigs vibes from the whole affair. Trump baits the protestors into action -- don't worry, we've got your backs! -- and then hangs them out to dry.
The hubris of US idealists. There's no packing up and leaving. If you leave your tribe you are dead. This was true 10k years ago and it is true again. If you weren't born under the US security umbrella you are nothing but an ant avoiding the boots of those above you. And the whole world is returning to mean once more. There's no packing bags, there's fighting for YOUR freedom or being a slave. Those above will always seek to oppress those below.
There are a lot of people not particularly under the US umbrella who are doing ok. India for example. It's debatable how under the umbrella Europe is these days with the current president.
What do you mean, Russia has been doing the same thing for most of the war? The success relies on you controlling the territory, or at least territory close enough, so the results vary.
In a war zone any large high power jammer will be like supernova in the darkness visible for detectors from tens of kilometers away. So its gonna be immediately destroyed.
Iran protesters cant find or destroy jammers though.
Isn't Iran doing this from the air? That would be far more effective. In a contested space with AA everywhere that wouldn't be feasible (i.e. large parts of Ukraine)
I am an RF ignoramus. It all seems like black magic to me. I have seen "80% packet loss" being thrown around in these discussions, and also that it is just GPS spoofing.
My main question is that is there anything novel happening here? What is the actual range of disruption?
I don't think it will have much implication. Jamming is a two way street. You can erase some spectrums, but you are also creating massive electromagnetic beacon for home-on-jam ammunition.
However if you are a protester without any advanced weapons, then you can't do anything against that.
Why are none of the people I saw posting non-stop about Palestine saying anything about Iranian freedom? Would honestly love to hear a genuine response from anyone who is against the movement in Iran. Or even conflicted about it.
1. Iran has frequent large protests that consistently get crushed. So while I assume the vast majority of Americans oppose the Iranian government, it’s hard to get worked up for the 5th, 6th time.
2. The US doesn’t support the Iranian government. We already sanction them. What additional support can US citizens lobby for? In the case of Israel, decreased US support would have a tangible effect. Unclear how increased US support for Iranian protestors would matter.
The US does support the Saudi government, though, and the collective response from the concerned citizens brigade about their relentless 10+ year pulverization of Yemen has been... nothing.
I’m not against the movement, but the last time Iran had protests this bad was in 1979. It didn’t get better afterwards. It’s a huge mess and I hope they figure something out to fix it, but I’m just pessimistic.
I've been curious myself about why the activist class seems weirdly quiet on this issue.
On a quick scan of media feeds I've seen a couple of things that stand out (I do not confirm or deny how true these claims are)
1) Current Iran is a enemy of the USA and thus activists can't support the destruction of the current regime. Iran is able to create nukes so can put pressure on the USA in Middle East Politics (esp. Palestine and Israel)
2) The uprising and the Shah are CIA/Western Backed and thus supporting the protestors is de-facto colonialism/imperialism.
3) Contrary to popular belief Iran is not actually a Muslim nation, only the leadership is. The population is significantly more varied and people do not want to be seen supporting the firebombing of Mosques because Islamphobia.
I don't know how widespread these opinions are, but it IS very strange how I don't see more outrage.
There's an alliance between the new left and islamism due to some ideological similarities.
Sure one side would march for pride and the other hangs gays on cranes.
However, in foreign policy both explain anything as some product of colonialism, a phenomena that essentially disappeared 60 years ago.
This is due to the effect Edward Said had on US humanities, which was in turn was influenced by Muslim Brotherhood thought in his home country of Egypt
I think the left-leaning activist people in the Americas are so against any position that could align with a Trump position, that they can’t think beyond those lines. If Trump supports the revolution it must be bad.
You are more right than you realize. Around the time the US and Israel bombed the Iranian nuclear sites, I personally witnessed our local pro-Hamas protesters add 'stop bombing Iran' signs to their repertoire.
Definitely part of it. But the Mexican leftists I know are equally silent. As they were on Ukraine too. It’s really only when then can root against the US or Jews, as far as I can tell.
There are a lot of signs that the leader being suggested would be a king, which is not something most citizens in democratic nations would feel natural fighting for.
I would say it's really about opposition to death and suffering.
The activists want the excessive death and suffering to end in Palestine, and they want to avoid death and suffering in Iran.
Many politicians want to use the protests as a pretext for military intervention in Iran, and my blunt opinion is that they don't actually have the interests of Iranians in mind. There are many reasons to believe it will end up worse for both America and the Iranians than our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A valid response would be to say that you think abuses in Iran are bad enough that a military intervention is justified and that it will lead to a better outcome for Iranians. My intuition would be to disagree with that, based on the results of past interventions, etc...
The problem is, I really do believe any kind of mass support for the Iranian protesters will in fact be co-opted to start a war with Iran--at least at this particular moment in time.
And the executed protesters are a bad thing. But I don't think military intervention will lead to a better outcome.
Supporters of Palestine had pretty specific requests, none of which apply to Iran (conditioning weapons sales, divestment, etc...)
> The activists want the excessive death and suffering to end in Palestine, and they want to avoid death and suffering in Iran.
And yet they are silent on the death and suffering in: Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Ethiopia, Congo, Myanmar, Libya. Just to name current active conflicts where people are dying, to say nothing of all the others that have flared up and subsided in my decades on this earth as I've watched "activists" ignore them all so they could hyper-focus on whatever Israel was doing at the time to protect its citizens and the Jewish diaspora. The word "exhausting" doesn't even scratch the surface of how it feels to deal with otherwise smart, educated people who roll around in this hypocrisy-laden dogpile.
In none of those conflicts you mentioned does the US act as the main benefactor to the side causing excessive suffering. And in none of those conflicts do they lobby aggressively for the support of US politicians.
Considering that reality, does it not make sense that Americans would be more vocal when it comes to this conflict, because we actually have agency to affect it?
I genuinely want to know what your response is to that argument, because it's not a new one, and seems very obvious to me.
> In none of those conflicts you mentioned does the US act as the main benefactor to the side causing excessive suffering.
The United States is far and away the Saudis' most important and pivotal ally. We almost single-handedly ensure their security and and diplomatic standing. Now, many believe the "side causing excessive suffering" in that conflict is actually the Houthis. I would be interested to know if you fall in that camp, while (it would seem) not feeling the same way about Hamas, as that would do a better job of making my point than I could ever do on my own.
I think the impression most people have is that the United States is no longer dependent on Saudi oil. The main reason we're their most pivotal ally is to encourage normalization with Israel, and to make sure they help counter Iran. So kind of the same root cause.
Beyond that, the Houthi / Saudi conflict is a lot less asymmetric, which I think plays a factor in people's response to it. The Houthis have more territorial control, weapons, agency. It's closer to a state-state war. Gaza is quite literally boxed in--air, sea and land.
Respectfully, you're making things up and adding the words "I think the impression most people have". That's motivated reasoning.
If you're actually interested in the geopolitics of this I suggest you just spend some time tonight reading about these relationships and their history.
To be fair, I'll admit there's somewhat of a double standard when it comes to silence in regard to US support for Saudi Arabia vs Israel. But realistically, for me, I don't think the answer is to offer full-throated support to Israel and to be quiet about issues Americans have with it. Especially if it risks spiraling into a broader conflict.
I do think there are particular aspects about US support for Israel, outside of humanitarian concerns, that lead to people being more critical about US involvement in the conflict.
I have a less charitable and more direct answer. Right now there is a notion in Left that Israeli are the oppressor. In Iran large majority of population is Persian but MINO (Muslim in name only due to dictatorship). They are struggling to get freedom from the Islamic regime and getting some help from Israel. This flips the narrative in Left's mind (if they accept it) that Muslims can be oppressors too and that is untenable for them. especially because Left in Western nations has basically aligned themselves with muslims so its easier for them to just ignore it.
BTW its not just left here, I originally hail from India and you can feel the pin-drop silence from left on Iran there too. They just hope the rebellion gets crushed by regime like other ones and they'll pretend status quo.
My TLDR takeaway: Muslims only care about when they are oppressed & Left is completely aligned with them right now.
In certain subreddits I have seen the idea that there is no revolution, it's all mossad/CIA propaganda. It's quite conspiratorial but it's the same subs that typically love China, NK etc so it's not surprising.
However, I have seen these thoughts spread to more seemingly mainstream geopolitical subs as well. I am not sure how much astroturfing is going on here. Probably quite a lot.
Which governments are referred to as "regimes" is usually propaganda about how you should feel about them. Consider: all articles written about US using the words "The US regime".
I don't think I've ever read an article using the term "US regime," as that usually refers to an undemocratic or authoritarian government. You might want to clean up your information diet if you're reading lots of articles over the years with that term...
Yes it is a value judgement, but Iran's government is nothing if not oppressive and authoritarian. Until recently the US had taken pride in being nothing like a regime, but that may change in the coming years.
> Until recently the US had taken pride in being nothing like a regime, but that may change in the coming years.
I tend to believe the US is already past that point. It's just people are not really realizing that yet. Might take the next election for them to realize. That will be to late however.
I hope so much that this is wrong and the US turns out to be more resilient than it looks like from the outside though.
This is my belief as well. My friend fled Syria after her mother was shot in the stomach by the police at the police station for asking to see her brother (I’m sure more was involved) and I have always kept in mind to look out for red lines being crossed at faster rates than before.
Am I under a rock because I haven't seen the articles, or because the government has become undemocratic and authoritarian?
Since you say "last couple years" I'm guessing you mean the articles, it's only in the past year that the government has become undemocratic and authoritarian through the destruction of its constitution, the abdication of checks and balances by Congress and the Supreme Court, and an authoritarian running unchecked and saying that the only thing controlling him is his own morality.
Or perhaps I'm being too pedantic, but if you're going to accuse me of living under a rock hell yes I'm going to be pedantic.
Regime refers to who holds power in a nation. It encompasses power holders in both formal and informal institutions which span beyond just the government. The major distinction is democratic versus autocratic regimes, with regime on its own referring specifically to the autocratic version. There are plenty of autocratic regimes which we (assuming everyone on the internet is American or at least from the West) are friendly with, like Jordan's.
> How likely is it that those "protestors" are US and Israel propped
It's almost sure that both US and Israel are meddling with the current situation. That doesn't mean the situation isn't also started by and wanted by the population.
For a comparison point in the past, the civil rights and antiwar movements in the US were grass-roots movements started by local people with legitimate claims. At the same time, opponents of the US like USSR were involved in stirring these movements, because of course they would.
There isn't much you can infer about the legitimacy of a movement by learning that the movement is helped by foreign intelligence agencies.
The best way you can avoid this kind of confusion is 1) make a society in which malicious actors don't have many latent issues to stir, and 2) make it so your country's intelligence agencies aren't malicious actors. There isn't much else to do.
Iran has a water crisis, and allegedly the economic situation is so bad that people are starting to wonder if it will soon affect their ability to buy food.
Even the Romans knew that if you wanted to stay in power you had to provide bread and circuses.
Very, but at the same time the Iranian leadership have been a really shitty government and ran the country into the gutter. People have genuine grievances.
The only way to believe this is if you're a Westerner being fed a purely US-centric media diet. Otherwise you'd know all the ways that the Iranian government has been failing their people recently and for a long time now, and how unhappy Iranians are with their government. You people act like people can't be upset at how they're being treated by their own government without being incited by an external actor. That's honestly quite the dehumanising and insulting way of looking at it.
Also, if the US wanted to do a regime change, they'd just move in militarily a la Venezuela and Trump would be talking about it non-stop. He's not the subtle type, I promise. We'd already know if they were involved.
I don't see any tweets about how the protesters are working for the US. Like, Trump would literally say how involved they are right now, and he isn't doing it. He's a child who's incapable of being subtle or not talking about how great his "accomplishments" are. Your link doesn't show anything relevant.
Starlink is primarily a military technology that is used both on a battlefield and to coordinate USA-backed "protests". Why, for instance, it just become free in Venezuela? Every country needs to be able to to defend itself from Starlink.
No, only US-backed puppets that US uses against Russia. For example, Russia has very good relations with Belorussia where the government wasn't lured into this role and did not let US to overthrow it.
Insane only for americans who refuse to accept the fact that their country, with some of their "allies", is the primary cause of wars and instability in today's world.
And who refuse to understand that providing means of communication to people of country X to organize military actions against the army and police of country X, is a military agression against country X.
Iranians are living under Islamic colonial dictatorship. Blaming this unrest on Israeli and US influence is absurd. And only exposes you as a sympathizer to the oppressive regime.
You're saying that the Brits should throw their colonizer and Christian king out of the island and return to their old Celtic traditions and deities, no? Or what exactly? Because the timeframes are very comparable, Saint Colombanus died in the early 600s, while the Arabs got all the way to Merv by the 670s-680s.
I think this is a major unforced error by the USG, of course we have seen plenty of those of late. There may be Israeli, American or other intelligence agencies present. But history has shown that spies can't just foment a revolution out of thin air. The Americans' first attempt at a coup in Chile, in 1970, failed. It was only after three years of US machinations and missteps by the Allende administration that Pinochet arose — Pinochet was given his fateful promotion by Allende himself! And that was in a "friendly" country where the US had many connections.
Iranians wouldn't be on the streets right now if the government had listened to its own water engineers over the years. But the new political culture in our government is more interested in braggadocio than achieving real change. I doubt that if the protesters succeed that Iran would become friendly to the West. At the same time there is probably a not too contrived worry among the Iranians that Netanyahu will seize the opportunity to attack if a political transition occurs. Bluster like this only hurts the cause.
I have to imagine the protests would stop immediately if Iran is attacked by Israel or the U.S. You can be angry at your government while not welcoming bombers.
Ordinarily I'd have faith the governments were smart enough to know better, but at this point I've lost hope.
I think that depends very much on targeting discipline. If the bombs are surgically striking key regime figures and sites, hampering C2, reducing the regime's total conspiratorial power, and increasing latency in the regime's OODA loop, I imagine protestors would welcome the help. The mullahs have taken the people of Iran hostage and their goons are out on the streets killing protestors. Israel or the US metaphorically sniping the guns out of their hands would be a judicious and IMO proper application of military force.
On the other hand, if the bombing is indiscriminate, or has an unacceptable error rate (oopsie, those weren't IRGC command posts, they were kindergartens), then I would expect a rally-round-the-flag effect. If the sniper misses and hits the hostage, well... people are going to be unhappy.
Not too surprising, given that Starlink operates in Iran without a permit, "space pirate radio" style, and has something of a habit of making the access free when major protests happen and the government imposes a network blackout. Iranian government and Starlink have no love for each other, clearly.
It's a pattern by now: whenever a government wants to do something awful, it shuts down internet access - so that no one can hear it, see it or coordinate a response. And Starlink becomes a lifeline that the regime would rather people didn't have.
This is why all of those "national great firewalls" shouldn't exist in the first place. If you give a government a capability to restrict access to whatever it wants and enact a network blackout whenever it wants, it's a matter of time until it gets abused.
They "operate" in Iran because of OFAC issues general licenses under the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations (31 CFR Part 560) permitting non-commercial personal communications, including satellite internet for free expression. Starlink activation in 2022 protests and recent events exploited these, as Musk sought formal exemptions for "internet freedom."
And no Tesla factories in Iran I suppose helps too :)
It has to be free in case of OFAC sanctions otherwise if you are generating revenue from commercial activity in sanctioned regions, you get huge fines.
The reason national great firewalls shouldn't exist, is that national great firewalls are bad. We don't have to blame potential future badness when we can blame definite present badness.
It's weird how Apple and Google don't get it, while SpaceX does.
Starlink isn't perfect, but at least it doesn't go for "it's so not our problem, we'll just make sure that every single VPN exit point Iranians use is GeoIP'd as Iran in our systems" like Google tends to, or "let's lick every authoritarian boot, we control the app distribution and our users will suck it up" like Apple does.
Not even Starlink has the balls to oppose the likes of Russia and China directly - they aren't operating there without a permit, sadly. But at least they don't kneel before every two-bit dictatorship and cave to every single "we want you to do censorship on our behalf" demand. Way better than what most tech companies do now.
I'm unfortunately inclined to not look at their actions so favourably. They operate solely in jurisdictions where the US state supports open destabilization, and dont where the political ramifications would be too high for the US. Makes them little more than an extension of the US imperialist structure.
And this makes sense for an organization thats so highly reliant on federal support, vs Apple and Google who only have to just stay somewhat in the states good graces.
> They operate solely in jurisdictions where the US state supports open destabilization
Could you expand on that? Are you saying that the US state wants destabilization in every place that Starlink is accessible? Like the UK, Australia, and USA itself? Which group are you considering the "US state" for that?
I assumed the context of the conversation was given to be understood, my bad. In the context of Starlink operating in nations for the purpose of bypassing internet censorship, as is the context of the conversation, starlink only operates were the US sanctions it to (iran) to further its imperialist goals, and it does not operate where it would hurt the US politically (russia). So pretending that starlink is operating from some kind of moral high ground rather than just SpaceX and most of Musks companies are heavily reliant on federal support so are at their beck and call is weird idolising of a corporate entity.
As a private platform, SpaceX did try to draw a line with where their service could be used in Ukraine, but we're talking about Iranian protestors now, a different matter I think. If they were offering a firewall as a service, then what you're saying would be more true.
Apple and Google have done more than just stay in good graces of governments by getting rid of apps governments don't like, they haven't enforced their terms against X, and given tens of millions to Trump's ballroom.
Imagine if Starlink came with special channel to X.com. UK would loose their minds.
You may wish to look what is happening closer to home before engaging in such low level trolling.
Is x.com blocked in the UK?
Not yet, but soon. Possibly even this year.
Curious: Will this be implemented on DNS level?
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The claim you're making has been thoroughly debunked countless times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain...
Assuming this section is accurate
> In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia.[18] This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.[19][20] SpaceX executives repeatedly stated that Starlink needed to remain a civilian network;[21][22][12] in late 2022, as Starlink was being used as a tool in combat in Ukraine, SpaceX announced Starshield, a Starlink-like program designed for government customers.[23][21] Musk is reported to have said that Ukraine was "going too far" in threatening to inflict a “strategic defeat” on the Kremlin.[24]
I will walk back the last half after the word “or” in my claim here
> Musk manipulates those connections for whatever he perceives as his own benefit or he wouldn’t be turning off the connections in Ukraine[1]
The first half is still him manipulating those connections for whatever he perceives as his own benefit
Playing a bit the devil's advocate here, but
> This is why all of those "national great firewalls" shouldn't exist in the first place
This is a kind of colonialist thinking that is, IMO, a problem in the western society. There are indeed drawbacks in a lack of freedom, but assuming that a government should not be able to filter the content diffused to the population is wrong in principle. You don't get to choose what is right or wrong in every part of the world: that is a very USA-centric way to view the society and easily leads to "export freedom and democracy" acts. It's a very USA-friendly way to frame things. Not necessarily the right way to frame things.
But wouldn't the position of a strong government be to trust it's people, and allow them to see the whole spectrum of information available in the world, and give them essentially the right to decide what's "right or wrong"? I don't see how being free from any information filtering on behalf of some benevolent leader is USA-centric?
Speaking as an American - clearly the general population is unable to determine what's right or wrong.
The USA centric view I was referring to is the one where lack of freedom is wrong, since it benefits the USA ideology of maximal freedom. Which is not in generally shared by all western countries (in Europe socialism and state ownership is much more present, for instance), and it's not necessary the most accurate view of real USA (there might be more "free" countries, like Switzerland), it's just that it benefits the perceived image of USA.
With this in mind, no, I don't share the view that a strong government should trust the people: people can easily be steered by foreign parties that want to gain soft power (example: Russia and recent anti-EU propaganda in Poland, Romania and Georgia). It's very hard to draw a line between what is "right" and what is "too much", but I don't think that excessive freedom is an obvious route to an healthy society (that is, a society that has peace and people are happy).
> where lack of freedom is wrong
Straw man.
Nobody is arguing for maximal freedoms for Iranians. This is literally whether some Iranians are able to get their hands on Starlink terminals if they want to.
I don’t think it can be disputed that there is a lot of propaganda and misinformation in the internet.
One logical conclusion to this would be to protect people from that via censorship.
Many recent examples of the US doing this as well (Covid, Russia, etc.). Of course, the US delegates this to its cooperations, so it can publicly say its hands are clean.
People do remember the Twitter files though, and the US government has massive spying and monitoring capabilities, so its hands are not actually all that clean.
> colonialist thinking that is, IMO, a problem in the western society
Iran has commanded empires for millennia. Longer than continental Europe.
Iranians getting their hands on Starlink terminals is as “colonial” as revolutionary France helping the American colonists usurp the British.
Obviously I and most westerners are on the side of the angels for this incident but we also hear lots of calls in the West to ban "Russian and Chinese bots", or "pro terrorist views" or whatever. Principled views shouldn't do a 180 based on the subjects involved.
Again, just for the sake of the discussion: Iran banned starlink, people are getting terminals (BTW, I'm happy they managed to). Starlink is still providing the service in the area although they are aware it's illegal and people can be behaded for owning a starlink terminal. But hey, Iran and USA are enemies. The fact that Iran is the only country where Starlink is active even if it's NOT approved is food for thought. There are other countries, where there are regimes that control communications, where Starlink is not active.
It takes an incredible stretch of the imagination to conflate colonialism with freedom, when the two couldn't be more at odds, definitionally.
I'm not conflating them.
Yes, as an American I think that all forms of government that are not liberal democracy basically are illegitimate. We can have relationships of convenience with other governments, but it should be known by such governments somewhere in the back of their minds that we would prefer to see them replaced by a liberal democracy.
The Iranian state has not shown itself to be one that is very convenient for us to temporarily overlook its flaws, and the people it governs frequently show that they would prefer a different form of government (otherwise, why not let them vote in fair elections?). It should be a no brainer that Americans and their government should be on the side of the people, not the theocracy.
But USA can't even be on the side of their own people. I can see the recent ICE shooting, health care issues, clearly corrupt government officials. Why should anybody trust them with another country?
Also the US has massive protests aswell, would it be okay for china to liberate the USA, since china itself is lead by a "democratic party"? They could argue the USA isn't a real liberal democracy.
> why not let them vote in fair elections? Elections can be faked, people can be mislead, oppositions and media can be bought.
USA has many different people and most try hard allow everyone to speak their mind. That is what is being preserved for others- the ability to escape oppression (that seems to just be a built-in human thing), no matter where you are.
There's a big gap between "national firewalls shouldn't exist" and "country should invade/"liberate" another country to prevent national firewall (or insert other disliked policy)".
So to respond directly:
> Why should anybody trust them with another country?
They should not and should not need to trust them with another country
> would it be okay for china to liberate the USA
no, it wouldn't. But if China felt that the USA gov't was like, not cool, they could impose sanctions or not trade with USA.
The US democracy is quite weird, though, because it's IMHO quite far from the people: billionaires can influence the outcomes of elections by steering the votes where the most paying candidate (or the most knowledgeable, or someone else with other skills) desires. This is not something that people can influence easily, so I find hard to believe that a government is legitimate just by the label on the packaging.
I won't go down the path of "fair elections", since I don't think it applies to USA.
There's a number of people who try and influence elections, money is not nearly as effective as you think it is. Or else a few people that have a few billion in their coffers would run and have won elections in places and other things far more than what they currently do/have done.
The wealthiest entity in the USA is the government itself. It's not even close.
Further, if currency was not able to influence things then that eliminates the main purpose of fiat currency, there is obviously a place for it in any case. Just because you don't like the direction it's being used doesn't mean you have a reasonable position either. Fiat is a benefit to the government in all ways and its in it's best interest to uphold the strength of their currency, not just for the locals to the land in the borders, but if they want to influence the rest of the world.
You should go down the path of "fair elections" because you otherwise lose all points for being vague and imprecise that no one can contest you on because you don't think we are worth the argument.
If tomorrow I owned 1 zillion dollar, that wouldn't make me able to change the course of next US (presidential) elections. It's not the only factor, ofc, but it is a very relevant one. Let's consider other factors that might be relevant: influence, visibility, arguments, fame, political weight, political knowledge, time, will. There are others. Someone with no influence on these factors and no money can hardly influence the outcomes of a nation election. If that someone was made a billionaire overnight, it can gain control over some factors, improving the likelihood of their impact over the next elections. Will they succeed? Not necessarily, but that their impact can become perceivable is undeniable.
Fair elections: in the US there are a bunch of practices related to vote that I don't consider fair. First and foremost, how votes are counted. Then, how money can be used to finance parties and campaigns. Gerrymandering is another one.
Billionaires can do this in any country. In US, the difference is other billionaires than the rulers of the country are allowed to exist.
I think this is not true. Russia and China come to mind: billionaires are there, but they are not allowed to subvert the regime.
Edit just to clarify: presence of billionaires that are not hostile to the regime does not mean they are allies either.
Billionaires there are subjects to the regime, and only remain billionaires while they are absolutely loyal to the regime. And threat of disagreement not only would cause them stop being billionaires, but also stop breathing altogether. I mean, running away could be an option, but then one stops being Russian or Chinese billionaire. And also this may not preclude "stop breathing" option, as some examples show.
You're right! Still they are billionaires in their countries with many benefits for being billionaires! Except, steering the government where they want - which typically means getting even richer. In the USA this happened, though.
My point is that, even in self-proclamed democracies, it's quite hard to actually give power to the people, precisely as in regimes. It's not a "it's all the same" position, of course: I mean to say that taking some values as absolute is not great if we don't clearly define what we are optimizing for. The USA model of democracy doesn't optimize for individual freedom nor for general population happiness.
> Russia and China come to mind: billionaires are there, but they are not allowed to subvert the regime
Putin and Xi are billionaires. So are their cronies. They get richer faster than the rest of their population because they’re literally billionaires in control of the regime with no peaceful path to removing them.
I'm aware of that and I agree. So what? My comment was that they are not the only billionaires.
I'm genuinely a bit confused — it seems like you're arguing that people should be able to have freedom to choose what to do, but not?
People can do whatever they think is right, of course (: so there is no "should". My point was that saying that a government should not impose communication restrictions is not necessary right. So, no, people should be happy: if they are happy without freedom, then let them be. If they are unhappy without freedom, let them make a revolution.
> There are indeed drawbacks in a lack of freedom, but assuming that a government should not be able to filter the content diffused to the population is wrong in principle.
Why?
It boils down to what one considers to be relevant for humans: I think that well being is more important than freedom. Historically, freedom was not a predominant part in human societies. On the contrary: slavery, kingdoms, empires, took part in human history more than freedom. Authoritarian government is not wrong per se, as long as people are well. In the same way, freedom of knowledge anything at any time is not necessary good. Actually, the ability to immediately access any content, beneficial or not, is something that humans acquired very recently in their history, and it's absolutely not clear that this is in fact something good in the long term. I think it is, but it's just speculation. Being conservative and NOT giving free communication is, I think, a more sensible default for a government. Also, there are cases where we already know that freedom doesn't help: CSAM, revenge porn, and other nasty stuff. ()
() edit: no, I was partly mistaken with these examples. I provided example of things that are known and widely accepted to be damaging of other liberties, while I meant to provide something more subtle, like fake news.
Seems like a big flaw that low-orbit constellations have a dependency on GPS, which are high-altitude satellites. They're 40x further away and so have 1,600x greater path loss. Why can't they use their own satellites for this?
> "But Starlink receivers use GPS to locate and connect to satellites. “Since its 12-day war with Israel last June," The Times says, “Iran has been disrupting GPS signals.”"
This isn’t even true; Starlink can use the local starlink constellation for positioning and the option is available in the customer facing configuration specifically for GPS denied areas (since about two years ago), where it’s been used for ages.
Something else is going on here - perhaps there’s an edge case where Starlink can be made to perform poorly without falling back away from GPS, but I wouldn’t expect this since it’s been “tested” in the most GPS hostile places for quite some time now.
It sounds like Starlink uses GPS to localize the receiver, rather than for any active step in the communication link. Since most receivers are static, I wonder if an effective workaround to this is for the receiver to just remember its last GPS fix for longer, or worst-case allow a manual location specification in lieu of a GPS fix.
A user provided location cannot be trusted for geofencing purposes. A GNSS (GPS or other) is needed sooner or later. This is a legal requirement for sanction and regulation enforcement (US, if not others).
The user-provided location would only be used for the initial bootstrapping. After it connects, the Starlink network itself will localize the receiver to within 1 km.
If the user inputs a bogus lat/lon, it would simply fail to connect. There's no way to 'spoof' your location on this type of global satellite comm network.
EDIT It will be interesting to see what anti-censorship and anti-DOS hardening features are coming in future software updates. Full GPS denial bootstrapping is the most obvious, and actually this should be possible without needing to input a location. Adding offline update packages, so signed anti-denial firmware updates can "sneakernet" across oppressive regimes to recover DOSed terminals, would be even better.
Starlink system inevitably knows the terminal location down to a service cell, which is what, a 20km grain? Good enough for "regulation enforcement".
The satellites know where they are TX beamforming to a fine-enough degree of specificity for geofencing.
Assuming the jamming is coming from close to the horizon, I wonder if one could improvise a choke ring around the antenna with some sheet metal or foil.
Gps is free to use. Running your own gnss service requires an atomic clock and possibly separate transmission hardware, which is possible, but adds cost, volume, and weight.
According to [1], “[o]ne of the current generation of GPS satellites (Block III) weighs over 2,200 kg (4,850 lb), the weight of an average pickup truck. The body of these satellites are 1.8 m x 2.5 m x 3.4 m (5.9’ x 8.2’ x 11.2’) in size”. In comparison, “the current V2 Starlink satellite version weighs approximately 1,760 lbs (800 kilograms) at launch, almost three times heavier than the older generation satellites (weighing in at 573 lbs or 260 kg)” [2]
[1] https://novatel.com/an-introduction-to-gnss/basic-concepts/s... [2] https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html
> Gps is free to use. Running your own gnss service requires an atomic clock and possibly separate transmission hardware, which is possible, but adds cost, volume, and weight.
Thanks you provide some great insights on why starlink didnt use gps but still if starlink wants to focus itself as the uncensorable internet in places like protests etc. I feel like they can probably do this after this recent incident
I just can't feel but sad right now because starlink was still providing activists ways to report outside and that helped protestors a lot and information. Now even starlink got removed because starlink tried to save money and I think might not have thought about what if gps itself gets blocked.
This is giving very bad signals for Iran. Is there any way now that Protestors are able to communicate to the outside world/ activists be able to report data outside?
Yes, ask their Mossad direct and local handlers (as per Mike Pompeo [1]) about how things are going, I’m sure that this being Mossad they have a ground-based way to get the information out.
[1] https://xcancel.com/mikepompeo/status/2007180411638620659
Mike Pompeo is a private citizen; is there some reason to believe that he has direct knowledge of foreign involvement in these protests? It seems unlikely, and doubly so that he’d actually disclose it if he did.
You and I are private citizens, he’s former US Secretary of State, let’s quit the charade.
“Former” is operative. I don’t see any reason to believe that Pompeo has special insider knowledge here, and sharing it makes zero sense even if he did. The more parsimonious explanation is that he’s a sidelined grifter whose only way to stay relevant is to speculate on social media.
After reading Walter Isaacson's biography of US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, I would be extremely surprised to find that a former Secretary of State was suddenly out of the loop on major events.
Henry Kissinger was a notorious power broker, and basically remained "in the loop" until the day he died. Pompeo is neither of these things.
But there's an even simpler way to reach this conclusion: given everything you and I know about Pompeo's politics, is there any reason to believe he'd want to introduce doubt about the legitimacy of popular protest in Iran?
> if starlink wants to focus itself as the uncensorable internet in places like protests etc
I’m not sure Musk would actually want that though, especially these days.
Why not? Has Musk shut off Starlink? The reporting out of Ukraine was almost entirely wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain...
From your link, with good sources:
In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia.[18] This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.[19][20] SpaceX executives repeatedly stated that Starlink needed to remain a civilian network;[21][22][12] in late 2022, as Starlink was being used as a tool in combat in Ukraine, SpaceX announced Starshield, a Starlink-like program designed for government customers.[23][21] Musk is reported to have said that Ukraine was "going too far" in threatening to inflict a “strategic defeat” on the Kremlin.[24]
Musk, like Trump, has an interesting relationship with Russia. The investigations into that have been quashed, so we don’t get to find out about the rumoured Kremlin calls he was making.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/business/dealbook/musk-pu...
The allegation at the time was that he turned off Starlink. That was not true. He did not turn it on at Ukraine’s request because US law prohibited it.
The current administration quashed the investigation into the contact he was having with Putin.
So I guess we get to stick with your story.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0l3wl76gzo
> doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia.
that made me laugh!
Nobody brought up Ukraine
Why not?
Because his enthusiasm for free speech is variable depending on whether he likes the speech or not.
Because Musk is a fickle, unethical individual with poor impulse control and too much money who only talks about high minded concepts like “free speech” and “battling censorship” when it serves his interests at that moment.
You are correct. It’s interesting to watch how ‘free speech’ works on Twitter.
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why stop there? maybe khamenei is a CIA asset made to create a caricature of an evil external enemy?
GPS comparison is moot in this case, as there's no need for Starlink constellations to provide full GNSS capability, just locating the satellites precisely enough to facilitate beamforming.
Chip scale atomic clocks are quite small[1], have been used in space, and could be part of the existing Starlink satellites. Finding reliable details about the orbital vehicles the internet eludes me.
[1] https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/aemDocuments/documents/F...
This whole stalink for military use (Starshield) was a scam Elon sold the military from the beginning. Just like his dumb ass tunnels and his self driving cars. He is putting the military at risk.
Is there any actual evidence that Starshield doesn't work substantially as promised?
If you do find some, I encourage you to investigate the source thoroughly and with suspicion.
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> I don't know.
So why are you making claims predicated on having knowledge of the situation?
Google!
SpaceX Has Wildly Screwed Up Its Military Satellites, Researcher Finds
https://futurism.com/science-energy/spacex-starlink-nro-till...
This... Is a nothingburger?
This is what you were referring to?
If the GPS satellites are above the starlink ones how is Iran able to disrupt the GPS signals?
GPS signals are extremely weak, and they're necessarily received from omnidirectional antennas that can't provide much antenna gain. In some sense it's a miracle of signal processing that GPS can ever be received.
There have been developments in receiving antennas that are harder to jam.
Most jamming is horizontal and limited to a few bands. So by having a directional antenna and listening to all services for now it seems to work. But this is a cat and mouse game.
https://furuno.eu/gr-en/marine-solutions/gnss-positioning-ti...
By jamming the receivers on the ground
Ok that makes a lot of sense, thank you.
For legal reasons I base this off of nothing but just turn your jammer to the sky. Could get fancy and point out directly at the satellites since my understanding is it's pretty easy to know where they are.
Edit to add: I do not mean the GPS satellites or the starlink ground terminals. That was not the question so that is not my answer. I mean the starlink satellites
That doesn't work. GPS is broadcast, not bidirectional communication, so preventing the satellites from seeing the GPS receiver does nothing: they're not looking to begin with.
What are you talking about? The jammers are on the ground. Just like receivers on the ground can be jammed with bad RF nearby, so can receivers in space. You just point the bad RF towards the receiver
The GPS satellites aren't receiving anything. The GPS satellites transmit signals, and the starlink terminals (and other users of GPS) receive those signals.
Wellll you could technically jam their uplink channels, but doing so may get the US in your doorstep quite quickly
This is a great plot for a B movie or a trashy military action book. “The bad guys are jamming GPS uplink and we only have two weeks until the almanacs are out of date and the whole system breaks down. Millions of innocent Americans will drive into rivers by accident.”
More to the point, to do that to this number of satellites on this big an area you'd need nuclear power plant levels of power, and it would only degrade GPS a bit (their clocks slowly desync when uplink is blocked)
My understanding was that each satellite broadcasts a coarse ephemeris for the whole network, and that that “almanac” isn’t accurate for very long (on the order of weeks). Without uploads to the satellites, those almanacs will go stale.
I don’t think the almanacs are necessary for the system to work, in theory. But I believe they’re commonly used by receivers to narrow down the range of possibilities when trying to find a PRN match for a signal they’re getting.
(I’ve dealt with GPS and similar navigation signals for work but am not an expert, this is just the impression I’ve gotten over a few years)
Ok they said the GPS of the starlink satellites is being jammed, and the question was how. The comment I was replying to did not say the terminal, it said the satellite. Maybe that's the confusion
Maybe he's implying they're literally cancelling out the waves like ANC headphones but with emf and a large geographic area.
A CRPA should still work.
Musk tweeted a while back that the constellation could be used as its own GPS service, but it wasn’t a priority right now. Maybe later.
I am wondering if Starlink users can't compensate for it themselves by transmitting a GPS signal using some SDR device locally, just putting in correct coordinates from Google Maps into it? GPS signals are at 1.5GHz which is easily accessible for cheap SDRs.
But really, why doesn't Starlink device allow to simply enter coordinates manually? After all, if someone enters wrong coordinates (say to enable operation in a place where Starlink has no service), it won't work because it won't find satellites where it expects them to be.
Or is there something here that i'm missing?
I don't own a starlink dish, but I assume one can log in and configure some things. It would be a nobrainer to have a way to enter coordinates and system time. Also the manual could have sane advice like recommendation to use "peace time" to establish the locations GPS coordinates and write them down on some sticker or so.
If it can serve a basic web page with a world map, it may be justifiable to include it for the price of the dish (yes will require some flash storage).
Does anyone know how Iranians are _actually_ communicating right now? I remember seeing here on HN (admittedly a long time ago) some Bluetooth-mesh technologies that promised decentralized solutions to these very type of problems
You might be referring to Bitchat.
https://github.com/x011/smtp-tunnel-proxy :
> A high-speed covert tunnel that disguises TCP traffic as SMTP email communication to bypass Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) firewalls
It seems like these smuggle-disguise protocols are almost always trivially detectable.
Yes, but such tools aren't popular enough for the censor to specifically target.
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what does this have to do with smuggling tcp connections over email
At that time they created a bunch of spammy noise which caused the social media businesses significant expense.
They did that in order to run their foreign interference in US elections agenda, and their foreign agenda of late; and we don't like foreign interference in our elections either.
Note the fathers of the sarcastic TV show South Park, all bouncing around on their satellite internet access.
No mention of any security review, or even testing. Reason enough to stay away from such tools.
Good point.
The only working communication I see mentioned on X is Starlink.
I saw a comment yesterday from a user claiming to be in Iran. I think he said StarLink was usable. ( Maybe that’s changed, though. )
Maybe better for an after the brutal theocratic regime crackdown discussion?
I think IPv4 services are still present no?
So like they are very heavily DPI censored though and maybe govts able to spy on any messages you send right now but I feel like there is a still possibility that for the average communication, they might still exist but although heavily heavily censored/bad and I feel like protestors might not be able to communicate (which I feel like is the question you meant to be asking)
https://radar.cloudflare.com/routing/ir
So TLDR: protestors must have a hard time sadly and they may be using bluetooth mesh or other tech, only they can tell after we figure things out but also lets say some major services websites might still exist after all if they bypass the dpi censorship for IPv4 services.
In my opinion, I feel like Protestors must be using mesh based technologies as you mention. We'll see what really ends up happening after we get some reports from Iran.
It is said they pulled the plug for all peering on Thursday, although I would assume some kind of government-run ISP may be operational still (I haven't checked Cloudlfare radar)
Pardon me but can you please provide me more context regarding it. I am genuinely confused about the ground state of reality in Iran right now regarding Internet access at all
can you please take a look at cloudflare radar and see what the current ipv4 connectivity means? Even Ipv4 was blocked for sometime but then it got back to normal in the graph shown in cloudflare radar
Can you please tell me what you mean by plug for all peering? Like complete internet blackout?
Iranian address space is no longer in the public routing table.
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The article seems quite speculative.
I'm sure the Iranian regime would live to jam starlink, but i don't think we have any ability to know what is actually happening here.
The article claims 80% packetloss. That's still 1 in 5 packets getting through. That is annoying but not going to stop information getting out.
I also wonder, if all other coms are cut off, is it possible star link in the country is just overloaded?
In my experience 80% packet loss makes most common protocols basically unusable. Yes you can still get data out...but many apps will just fail due to timeouts and other things.
Matrix published a proof of concept a few years ago of an alternative transport layer designed to work over connections with a few hundred bits per second, and massive packet loss, while still providing E2EE:
https://matrix.org/blog/2019/03/12/breaking-the-100bps-barri...
Without knowing that much about this area, i think https://mosh.org/ is a traditional choice if you need encrypted communication in a high packet loss environment.
UDP is certainly not known to improve traffic reliability in those environments. TCP is
UDP is build your own reliability layer, so its going to depend on how you use it.
[Of course you could say the same thing about TCP i suppose depending on which congestion control algorithm is in use]
I imagine the people with illegal starlink terminals are fairly tech savy and can use custom protocols. Living in Iran they probably already have a lot of experience with vpns and lower level protocols to evade censorship.
Illegal just means there’s a black market. You pay some guy in cash and he gives you a smuggled Starlink terminal. Neither buyer or seller is likely to be anymore sophisticated here than someone trading in any other smuggled goods (cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, etc).
I'm a programmer and even i wouldn't know where to start implementing a custom network wire protocol.
I wouldn’t imagine that no. It’s “illegal” but not hard to obtain
Satellite signals are just weak RF signals and can be disrupted easily. There is nothing 'hardened' about them. It's funny that people think Starlink or any of its many incipient competitors are any different.
Starlink uses beamforming with directional antenna arrays, so it should be rather difficult to jam compared to omnidirectional antennas. It's basically a dish pointed at the satellite, so the jammer should be in between to work.
Antenna arrays aren't perfect so it still picks up some energy omnidirectionally, but it should be possible to shield it with some metal plates in a way that only sky is visible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array
> basically a dish pointed at the satellite, so the jammer should be in between to work.
Which isn't hard to do if you have the budget of a government. Directional antennae, GPS and a helicopter/Cessna flying patterns over a metro. Beams from the terminal are constantly scanning the sky chasing the constellations.
A higher hit rate option would be a fleet of low altitude drones taking high-res pictures of the ground, and running a fine-tuned classifier to identify Starlink Dishies which require a clear line of sight to the sky.
People who think Starlink is unblockable, or somehow anonymous IRL are unimaginative. Iran is well-versed enough with electronic warfare that it tricked a RQ-170 Sentinel land on it's territory - how hardened are Starlink terminals against responding to a spoofed signal and exposing their locations?
Doesn't Starlink use some sort wideband signal which is hard to jam? Combined with some sort of frequency hopping and a moving constellation should mean blocking a user or satellite signal should be pretty hard, like many times the cost of building and servicing a user terminal for use against protesters.
> Doesn't Starlink use some sort wideband signal which is hard to jam?
It probably is hard to jam, but you don't need to jam it if you can pinpoint terminal locations and send in on-the-ground enforcers to confiscate the equipment and make arrests. TV detector vans were introduced in 1952[1], the principles for finding sources of RF emissions isn't cutting edge technology.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van
You realize Iran is pretty big with lots of people and Iran can't run around with detector van across all those regions and people. Specially when they potentially lose control over certain areas. And those vans can be disabled pretty easily as well, specially in a proto-war zone.
That said, this would only be true if there were enough people with terminals.
TV emissions don't use beam forming. This is all a cat and mouse game, but Starlink being a distributed system should mean it is harder to completely block use of.
See my other comment upthread on how beamforming doesn't make terminals/emissions invisible, just harder to acquire, but well within reach of a determined adversary. Newer Starlink terminals have a 1.5° beam, and older ones are 3.4° wide . At 10,000 feet altitude, the tighter beam is 245 feet across. Starlink satellite orbits are public and predictable, and Iran has drones to spare.
This is just 1 passive RF-based approach, and there are others (e.g. drone-mounted FLIR surveys done at 3 am)
Like I said, this is a cat and mouse game, if you had terminals to spare or even just fake battery operated transmitting antennas, you could waste a lot of drone time. There are also masking techniques and it's not like the drones can't be tracked or misguided. It would take orders of magnitude more effort to stop Starlink than to keep using it minimally. Iran is a big country, it just depends on how determined and prepared the protestors are to evade censorship. Which by itself is hopefully just a start to other actions.
My starlink works fine under a ceramic tinted window that blocks 95% of UV and visible light, so you'd need a pretty fancy SAR camera for your fleet of drones.
I think, to beamform in the right direction you have to be able to locate yourself precisely, have an up-to-date almanach of the satellites, and a precise enough datation source. Jamming GNSS is a source of problems for 2 of those issues.
Also, the antennas on starlink dishes are still pretty small, likely to pick up some hard-to-remove sidelobes and the tech to cancel them properly might be export-controlled. You still need to be within electromagnetic visibility to jam them, though.
Yes, afaik the source of issues is GPS jamming.
To add to my point, with multiple antennas it's also possible to spatially separate signals. Not sure if Starlink is doing that, but I think it should be possible to escape GPS jammers by using two antennas with some distance between them. Two antennas can pick up the direction of the signals and with some math they can be separated, at least in theory.
But it's in extremely difficult to disrupt the signals across the whole country? I person go go out with a battery and setup a starlink terminal in the middle of nowhere in 2 minutes (exactly how I'm writing this post right now from Boliva)
If your objective is to stop or at least slow coordination of protests and flow of information about things the regime is doing in the major cities of Tehran and Mashhad, you're a lot less worried that plenty of rural villages get completely unhindered signals, if anyone in them happens to have a Starlink terminal.
Agreed, the only way to get starlink terminal is via smuggling it into the country and it costs 1000's of $ or 500$ or more which is more than many months of average iranian income let alone rural villages
I hope though that perhaps rural villages can shelter activists but who knows what happens in the ground level, perhaps news development from tehran doesn't reach the villages in the first case, maybe they block anyone entering and leaving the city I am not sure
This seems to be a really bad development for protestors. There were reports that some protestors were killed by the govt and now I am genuinely worried about them even more. This tyranny needs to be stopped.
Some videos are still leaking out and it’s likely via starlink (from what I’ve read). Better than nothing.
10W is enough to block GPS signals in a 15-30km radius. The signals are below the noise floor and easy to disrupt.
Optical links to ground stations are the future, if they can mitigate atmospheric interference. Laser is harder to jam.
Old article about Starlink (see bottom of page). Competitors have similar solutions in development.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90681156/elon-musk-starlink-sate...
Russia seems to have been ineffective at stopping the Ukranians using it.
There are multiple photos of Russian drones using Starlink terminals, so they would be blocking their own use of it.
> Russia seems to have been ineffective at stopping the Ukranians using it.
Russia isn't in control of Ukrainian territory, where the starlink terminals are, which would be the prime targets of any disruption operation. The situations in Iran and Ukraine are materially different.
Under packetloss my assumption is text is king, but I wonder if forward error correcting audio and video is actually better in some ways?
Media is information rich. Maybe we're beyond a samzdat moment and the value in comms is contextual immediacy of live feeds, text can squeeze alongside.
Long ago, broadcast quality TV was shipped as slow feed. Maybe a tiktok generation goes back there: use a phone on the street (probably surreptitiously) do post production and upload asynchronously on 30% packetloss or worse for redistribution.
You are acting like people dont upload videos anymore.
The people filming protests in iran are probably not in range of their home starlink connected wifi. They are almost certainly filming stuff offline then uploading it later, not livestreaming.
Yes. thats broadly what I think people will be doing. My concern was, under 30% to 80% packetloss, how well this works. I think the answer is, if you want to get media out, it works well enough, given enough time.
I would be surprised if GPS blocking is enough to completely can starlink. It improves positioning but if you don't jog the antenna, given these things are in predictable orbit, you can probably get good-enough S/N without GPS info.
Some personal observations as I am in touch with a few folks inside Iran through Starlink.
1. The jamming/disruption is local to large cities most notably the capital, Tehran.
2. Even in Tehran it is not complete and my friends are able to send and receive messages. Uploading videos is harder.
3. The regime is now raiding homes that they suspect have Starlink terminals. I don't know how they identify them but I do wonder if they are using technology to locate them.
If you have the ability to jam a signal you have the ability to triangulate the source of a signal.
How it's related? Jamming is just drowning signal in noise, how does it help locating the source of the signal?
Because ostensibly, whoever engineered the jammer (especially at these wavelengths) is capable of designing a capable-enough receiver.
Pumping out a lot of noise is usually easier than locating a source of a weak signal. That said, Russians likely have the necessary technology. The question would be do they feel like selling it to Iran and are Iranians capable of using it properly?
> Pumping out a lot of noise is usually easier than locating a source of a weak signal.
Not at the frequencies in question - this isn't 2.4GHz where a magnetron ripped out of a microwave oven will wreak havoc, these are highly-directional, beamformed signals. Also, ostensibly, there should be zero unapproved energy whatsoever in those bands.
Wow this sucks! however if i were iranian brass i would do it too. IT/OT and IoT is not safe full stop. Pull the plug. It wouldnt be pretty over here either, also china already got us good (Volt Typhoon, OPM hack, why bother to list 30 or 40 more?)
These things must be big, stationary and likely very sparsely manned (if anything, they must emit a lot of energy which is not healthy). If there ever were some good targets for a surgical application of some B-2s...
I candidly thought it wasn’t possible to block Starlink.
I guess with motivated actors anything is possible.
The title is wrong, as usual. This is a re-hash of earlier reports. Starlink is getting 30-80% packet loss, depending on where they're using it. Likely local jammers. But it still gets through.
Any satellite signal is going to be relatively weak compared to what you can produce on the ground. Inverse square law, and power limitations of a mobile transmitter.
It's fairly trivial to set up a transmitter that saturates a slice of spectrum at an amount of power that is ridiculous compared to a satellite signal. There are still AM radio stations operating that go as high as 50kW. The satellite transmitters aren't going to exceed maybe a hundred Watts, at a great distance, and that falls off at 1/(distance)^2.
The Russians have developed rather efficient GPS jamming equip., as we know, Iranian Gov't is partners with Russians, providing drone technology, so no great mystery where likely the jammers originated from.
There's a difference between possible and plausible. In the most absurd case, it was always a given that a sufficiently large faraday cage or a literal iron dome would block starlink from reaching anybody in iran therefore it was never thought to be impossible to block starlink. At best it's implausible but that would refer specifically to the construction of the giant faraday cage and the literal iron dome, not the concept of blocking starlink.
Jamming or hijacking geostationary satellites signal is trivial for literally a team of 3 hm radio veterans with 10+ years of experience.
Jamming RF is easy in general. Nowadays we can even do beamforming so i guess it would be trivial.
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Who is "we" and "them"? Don't you find it ironic, such a comment on a thread about protesting a regime which tries to control who does what?
Starlink has no ground stations on Iranian soil and is formally prohibited by its government, so there is nothing being "provided" to Iran, per se. Iranians smuggle Starlink dishes in, at great personal risk.
If it were impossible, China would've had reason to blow up their satellites in orbit. The US would do the same thing for Chinese satellite ISPs.
Jamming on such a large scale is expensive, but it's hardly impossible.
There’s no evidence that China (or anybody else) has the capacity to meaningfully harm the 9000+ satellite Starlink constellation.
Debris creating debris creating debris ... ?
Yes, I’ve seen this!
It was a small, triangular ship that blasted big asteroids, which in turn spun off and collided with other asteroids…
Only if they want to kill 99% of all sattelites since this is a game that can be played together.
Funny considering the top comment from the two-day old "Iran Goes Into IPv6 Blackout" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46542683):
> Fortunately, the government cannot enforce complete blackout because thousands of startlink terminals are active inside the country. They have been complaining about it to no avail.
Seems they finally figured out a way. Seems like yet again, you shouldn't shout hello until you've crossed the stream.
I left the comment on starlink on that thread. I should note some personal observations as I am in touch with a few folks inside Iran through Starlink.
1. The jamming/disruption is local to large cities most notably the capital, Tehran
2. Even in Tehran it is not complete and my friends are able to send and receive messages. Uploading videos is harder.
3. The regime is now raiding homes that they suspect have Starlink terminals. I don't know how they identify them but I do wonder if they are using technology to locate them.
I wouldn't consider it funny though when you realize the gravitas of the situation though but yea.
I just wanted to point out that it felt rude to call it funny but I understand what you mean and what intention but please be more sincere about such issues.
> Seems they finally figured out a way. Seems like yet again, you shouldn't shout hello until you've crossed the stream.
Someone mentions that there is a huge packet loss but its still possible. Other mentions that its possible to do this in rural villages and there are many nuances. I genuinely dont know the technological reasons or know how of what it is or what the ground state of reality is and what's actually happening but I hope that starlink still works or can have a work-around for the activists. We will see in sometime what really happens in the ground state as I must admit I still don't know if its 100% censored or what the reality is.
The situation as a whole is in no way funny, sorry I gave you that impression. What is funny to me, is a confidently incorrect comment from a related story just two days ago that also ended up the highest upvoted one, which quickly seemed to have been proven wrong. This is still funny to me, yet the situation itself remains helplessly depressing.
Hypothecally speaking. If I were to live in an authoritarian country that would shut off all means of communication like that. What off grid technology would be viable?
Lora? Shortwave radio? Or nothing at all?
in a country that hostile to you I would be worried about radiating any kind of EM, honestly. It's too easy to track and could cause undue targetting & victimization.
my real answer : I think at that point in time effort is best spent trying to arrange escape.
my technical answer : depends on the scene. directed optical/laser or microwave is very hard to track if that can facilitate the links you need -- but realistically most war-time off-grid comms historically has been established via runners, dropboxes, or community radio systems ; all options with very real inherent risks.
Yeah I like fiber optic lines
I would imagine that communicating within urban areas might be possible via some kind of a mesh network where e.g. every phone would act as a node that can forward the packets further. Something like that should be possible over WiFi I assume although I am unfamiliar with the existing protocols that would allow that.
There are two main issues with such an application that I can think of:
1. Addressing. How would the nodes know where to send the packet? But I assume there are ways to deal with that which come from the P2P networks like Tor.
2. Edge connectivity. Even if it would be possible to communicate between the regular nodes of the network, those packets would not be able to reach the outside world. So, from abroad or even from the out of town, they would still appear offline. Some kind of edge bridges would probably be necessary to reach connectivity with the outside world.
Donkey https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2004/aug/11/low-tech-strat...
Maybe more practically in Tibet I had a Thuraya sat phone which you weren't supposed to have but I don't think there's much they could do about those except maybe search you.
Carrier pigeon
I am curious how phones now can reach LEO for enough bandwidth for voice calls but you need a full dish, however small, for starlink?
Could you get at least 1mbps from a phone to LEO now for email and non-realtime data?
Link budget cuts both ways. If your user terminal sucks, you can compensate somewhat - by building a larger, beefier satellite that has better antenna directionality and pumps out more transmission juice, and throwing the data rate under the bus. This is how it's done now.
Having a terminal that doesn't suck puts less strain on the satellite side and, thus, scales better. But for emergencies and serving middle of nowhere, "direct to cell" makes sense.
You pretty much nailed it, its all about bandwidth.
The emergency SOS feature is optimized down to the byte to ensure it can work with poor signal and low bandwidth.
How do these tens of thousands of Starlink terminals get smuggled into Iran?
Iran has a huge black market. Many things from refrigerator to small things are being smuggled to Iran, mostly from the mountains on Iraq border (also from Turkey border and from other Gulf countries. The government is not peaky about smuggling since Iran is under heavy sanctions and it's hard for the government to provide USD to legit traders on official channels.
Iran has a thriving black market through its borders
Trucks I assume
My thoughts to the Iranian people, may they get what they need and deserve at a cost that is not too high.
As in all conflicts, there's always a "fog of blame" where there isn't absolute certainty about who is right and who is to blame. Though it's not that hard. Because their survival depends on it, dictators are very good at blaming others--anybody, really--for their own shortcomings, and they usually wield the kind of hard power that makes them extremely costly to topple in terms of suffering and human lives.
Life is too short to have to deal with despots. We need a better, perhaps less-crowded or less xenophobic world where every person can protect their right to exist by simply packing and leaving as a last resort.
A politicide is occuring right now in Iran.
Agreed, but right now, I'm getting Bay of Pigs vibes from the whole affair. Trump baits the protestors into action -- don't worry, we've got your backs! -- and then hangs them out to dry.
The hubris of US idealists. There's no packing up and leaving. If you leave your tribe you are dead. This was true 10k years ago and it is true again. If you weren't born under the US security umbrella you are nothing but an ant avoiding the boots of those above you. And the whole world is returning to mean once more. There's no packing bags, there's fighting for YOUR freedom or being a slave. Those above will always seek to oppress those below.
There are a lot of people not particularly under the US umbrella who are doing ok. India for example. It's debatable how under the umbrella Europe is these days with the current president.
Is this not only a side effect of Iran doing widespread GPS and GNSS jamming or spoofing?
Wasn't not being jam-able a selling point of Starlink?
HAM Radio still works
I am curious if there are any implications for the Russian invasion of Ukraine from this tactic working.
What do you mean, Russia has been doing the same thing for most of the war? The success relies on you controlling the territory, or at least territory close enough, so the results vary.
In a war zone any large high power jammer will be like supernova in the darkness visible for detectors from tens of kilometers away. So its gonna be immediately destroyed.
Iran protesters cant find or destroy jammers though.
Isn't Iran doing this from the air? That would be far more effective. In a contested space with AA everywhere that wouldn't be feasible (i.e. large parts of Ukraine)
> What do you mean...
I am an RF ignoramus. It all seems like black magic to me. I have seen "80% packet loss" being thrown around in these discussions, and also that it is just GPS spoofing.
My main question is that is there anything novel happening here? What is the actual range of disruption?
Both sides are using starlink, yes?
Also there's now guowang to contend with. I'm not sure how widely available access to it is.
I would assume both sides are heavily jamming the frontlines. But presumably long range drone operations are more likely to use it.
Jamming is subject to the inverse square law.
Yes, this is why it happens only on the front line
I don't think it will have much implication. Jamming is a two way street. You can erase some spectrums, but you are also creating massive electromagnetic beacon for home-on-jam ammunition.
However if you are a protester without any advanced weapons, then you can't do anything against that.
Why are none of the people I saw posting non-stop about Palestine saying anything about Iranian freedom? Would honestly love to hear a genuine response from anyone who is against the movement in Iran. Or even conflicted about it.
I offer two possibilities:
1. Iran has frequent large protests that consistently get crushed. So while I assume the vast majority of Americans oppose the Iranian government, it’s hard to get worked up for the 5th, 6th time.
2. The US doesn’t support the Iranian government. We already sanction them. What additional support can US citizens lobby for? In the case of Israel, decreased US support would have a tangible effect. Unclear how increased US support for Iranian protestors would matter.
> The US doesn’t support the Iranian government.
The US does support the Saudi government, though, and the collective response from the concerned citizens brigade about their relentless 10+ year pulverization of Yemen has been... nothing.
Makes sense!
I’m not against the movement, but the last time Iran had protests this bad was in 1979. It didn’t get better afterwards. It’s a huge mess and I hope they figure something out to fix it, but I’m just pessimistic.
Thanks for the reply. Makes sense.
I hope the movement succeeds.
I've been curious myself about why the activist class seems weirdly quiet on this issue.
On a quick scan of media feeds I've seen a couple of things that stand out (I do not confirm or deny how true these claims are)
1) Current Iran is a enemy of the USA and thus activists can't support the destruction of the current regime. Iran is able to create nukes so can put pressure on the USA in Middle East Politics (esp. Palestine and Israel)
2) The uprising and the Shah are CIA/Western Backed and thus supporting the protestors is de-facto colonialism/imperialism.
3) Contrary to popular belief Iran is not actually a Muslim nation, only the leadership is. The population is significantly more varied and people do not want to be seen supporting the firebombing of Mosques because Islamphobia.
I don't know how widespread these opinions are, but it IS very strange how I don't see more outrage.
There's an alliance between the new left and islamism due to some ideological similarities.
Sure one side would march for pride and the other hangs gays on cranes.
However, in foreign policy both explain anything as some product of colonialism, a phenomena that essentially disappeared 60 years ago.
This is due to the effect Edward Said had on US humanities, which was in turn was influenced by Muslim Brotherhood thought in his home country of Egypt
Ironic considering Iranians consider themselves to be under Islamic colonial oppression.
I hadn't heard of Edward Said, thanks for mentioning.
I think the left-leaning activist people in the Americas are so against any position that could align with a Trump position, that they can’t think beyond those lines. If Trump supports the revolution it must be bad.
Or because the Iranian Islamic regime supports Hamas? And they somehow align with that side. I don’t know.
You are more right than you realize. Around the time the US and Israel bombed the Iranian nuclear sites, I personally witnessed our local pro-Hamas protesters add 'stop bombing Iran' signs to their repertoire.
The core of far left activism is being anti-Western. Therefore, they can't say anything bad about even the most despicable anti-Western governments.
That is what it seems like
Speaking from an American perspective, many left-leaning commentators I've seen are focused on the ICE situation in the states right now.
But that's the most optimistic take I can conjure.
Definitely part of it. But the Mexican leftists I know are equally silent. As they were on Ukraine too. It’s really only when then can root against the US or Jews, as far as I can tell.
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There are a lot of signs that the leader being suggested would be a king, which is not something most citizens in democratic nations would feel natural fighting for.
I would say it's really about opposition to death and suffering.
The activists want the excessive death and suffering to end in Palestine, and they want to avoid death and suffering in Iran.
Many politicians want to use the protests as a pretext for military intervention in Iran, and my blunt opinion is that they don't actually have the interests of Iranians in mind. There are many reasons to believe it will end up worse for both America and the Iranians than our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A valid response would be to say that you think abuses in Iran are bad enough that a military intervention is justified and that it will lead to a better outcome for Iranians. My intuition would be to disagree with that, based on the results of past interventions, etc...
You don't have to support military intervention to pay attention. People supported Palestine without wanting to bomb Israel.
Also... Are the executed protesters not also death and suffering? What about victims and conflicts resulting from the groups Iran funds?
The problem is, I really do believe any kind of mass support for the Iranian protesters will in fact be co-opted to start a war with Iran--at least at this particular moment in time.
And the executed protesters are a bad thing. But I don't think military intervention will lead to a better outcome.
Supporters of Palestine had pretty specific requests, none of which apply to Iran (conditioning weapons sales, divestment, etc...)
You're the one certain about military intervention. I just want them to keep pressuring a regime that's killing it's own people.
> The activists want the excessive death and suffering to end in Palestine, and they want to avoid death and suffering in Iran.
And yet they are silent on the death and suffering in: Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Ethiopia, Congo, Myanmar, Libya. Just to name current active conflicts where people are dying, to say nothing of all the others that have flared up and subsided in my decades on this earth as I've watched "activists" ignore them all so they could hyper-focus on whatever Israel was doing at the time to protect its citizens and the Jewish diaspora. The word "exhausting" doesn't even scratch the surface of how it feels to deal with otherwise smart, educated people who roll around in this hypocrisy-laden dogpile.
In none of those conflicts you mentioned does the US act as the main benefactor to the side causing excessive suffering. And in none of those conflicts do they lobby aggressively for the support of US politicians.
Considering that reality, does it not make sense that Americans would be more vocal when it comes to this conflict, because we actually have agency to affect it?
I genuinely want to know what your response is to that argument, because it's not a new one, and seems very obvious to me.
> In none of those conflicts you mentioned does the US act as the main benefactor to the side causing excessive suffering.
The United States is far and away the Saudis' most important and pivotal ally. We almost single-handedly ensure their security and and diplomatic standing. Now, many believe the "side causing excessive suffering" in that conflict is actually the Houthis. I would be interested to know if you fall in that camp, while (it would seem) not feeling the same way about Hamas, as that would do a better job of making my point than I could ever do on my own.
I think the impression most people have is that the United States is no longer dependent on Saudi oil. The main reason we're their most pivotal ally is to encourage normalization with Israel, and to make sure they help counter Iran. So kind of the same root cause.
Beyond that, the Houthi / Saudi conflict is a lot less asymmetric, which I think plays a factor in people's response to it. The Houthis have more territorial control, weapons, agency. It's closer to a state-state war. Gaza is quite literally boxed in--air, sea and land.
Respectfully, you're making things up and adding the words "I think the impression most people have". That's motivated reasoning.
If you're actually interested in the geopolitics of this I suggest you just spend some time tonight reading about these relationships and their history.
To be fair, I'll admit there's somewhat of a double standard when it comes to silence in regard to US support for Saudi Arabia vs Israel. But realistically, for me, I don't think the answer is to offer full-throated support to Israel and to be quiet about issues Americans have with it. Especially if it risks spiraling into a broader conflict.
I do think there are particular aspects about US support for Israel, outside of humanitarian concerns, that lead to people being more critical about US involvement in the conflict.
I have a less charitable and more direct answer. Right now there is a notion in Left that Israeli are the oppressor. In Iran large majority of population is Persian but MINO (Muslim in name only due to dictatorship). They are struggling to get freedom from the Islamic regime and getting some help from Israel. This flips the narrative in Left's mind (if they accept it) that Muslims can be oppressors too and that is untenable for them. especially because Left in Western nations has basically aligned themselves with muslims so its easier for them to just ignore it.
BTW its not just left here, I originally hail from India and you can feel the pin-drop silence from left on Iran there too. They just hope the rebellion gets crushed by regime like other ones and they'll pretend status quo.
My TLDR takeaway: Muslims only care about when they are oppressed & Left is completely aligned with them right now.
I completely agree with you.
In certain subreddits I have seen the idea that there is no revolution, it's all mossad/CIA propaganda. It's quite conspiratorial but it's the same subs that typically love China, NK etc so it's not surprising.
However, I have seen these thoughts spread to more seemingly mainstream geopolitical subs as well. I am not sure how much astroturfing is going on here. Probably quite a lot.
Because the Iranian regime was the one pushing that pro Palestine narrative.
Yup. Hard to be pro Hamas and then cheer a secular revolution in Iran.
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Which governments are referred to as "regimes" is usually propaganda about how you should feel about them. Consider: all articles written about US using the words "The US regime".
I don't think I've ever read an article using the term "US regime," as that usually refers to an undemocratic or authoritarian government. You might want to clean up your information diet if you're reading lots of articles over the years with that term...
Yes it is a value judgement, but Iran's government is nothing if not oppressive and authoritarian. Until recently the US had taken pride in being nothing like a regime, but that may change in the coming years.
> Until recently the US had taken pride in being nothing like a regime, but that may change in the coming years.
I tend to believe the US is already past that point. It's just people are not really realizing that yet. Might take the next election for them to realize. That will be to late however.
I hope so much that this is wrong and the US turns out to be more resilient than it looks like from the outside though.
This is my belief as well. My friend fled Syria after her mother was shot in the stomach by the police at the police station for asking to see her brother (I’m sure more was involved) and I have always kept in mind to look out for red lines being crossed at faster rates than before.
>I don't think I've ever read an article using the term "US regime," as that usually refers to an undemocratic or authoritarian government.
Pretty fuckin' big rock you've been living under for the last couple years.
Am I under a rock because I haven't seen the articles, or because the government has become undemocratic and authoritarian?
Since you say "last couple years" I'm guessing you mean the articles, it's only in the past year that the government has become undemocratic and authoritarian through the destruction of its constitution, the abdication of checks and balances by Congress and the Supreme Court, and an authoritarian running unchecked and saying that the only thing controlling him is his own morality.
Or perhaps I'm being too pedantic, but if you're going to accuse me of living under a rock hell yes I'm going to be pedantic.
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Regime refers to who holds power in a nation. It encompasses power holders in both formal and informal institutions which span beyond just the government. The major distinction is democratic versus autocratic regimes, with regime on its own referring specifically to the autocratic version. There are plenty of autocratic regimes which we (assuming everyone on the internet is American or at least from the West) are friendly with, like Jordan's.
Yes, a "regime" is basically a country where they wants to have control but can't for some reason
How likely is it that those "protestors" are US and Israel propped and the plan is to do another regime change via this route?
Isn't this "son of the late Shah" a guy from the US?
> How likely is it that those "protestors" are US and Israel propped
It's almost sure that both US and Israel are meddling with the current situation. That doesn't mean the situation isn't also started by and wanted by the population.
For a comparison point in the past, the civil rights and antiwar movements in the US were grass-roots movements started by local people with legitimate claims. At the same time, opponents of the US like USSR were involved in stirring these movements, because of course they would.
There isn't much you can infer about the legitimacy of a movement by learning that the movement is helped by foreign intelligence agencies.
The best way you can avoid this kind of confusion is 1) make a society in which malicious actors don't have many latent issues to stir, and 2) make it so your country's intelligence agencies aren't malicious actors. There isn't much else to do.
Iran has a water crisis, and allegedly the economic situation is so bad that people are starting to wonder if it will soon affect their ability to buy food.
Even the Romans knew that if you wanted to stay in power you had to provide bread and circuses.
Very, but at the same time the Iranian leadership have been a really shitty government and ran the country into the gutter. People have genuine grievances.
The only way to believe this is if you're a Westerner being fed a purely US-centric media diet. Otherwise you'd know all the ways that the Iranian government has been failing their people recently and for a long time now, and how unhappy Iranians are with their government. You people act like people can't be upset at how they're being treated by their own government without being incited by an external actor. That's honestly quite the dehumanising and insulting way of looking at it.
Also, if the US wanted to do a regime change, they'd just move in militarily a la Venezuela and Trump would be talking about it non-stop. He's not the subtle type, I promise. We'd already know if they were involved.
I mean, Trump is talking about Iran nonstop.
https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/2026-01-10/ty-artic...
I don't see any tweets about how the protesters are working for the US. Like, Trump would literally say how involved they are right now, and he isn't doing it. He's a child who's incapable of being subtle or not talking about how great his "accomplishments" are. Your link doesn't show anything relevant.
...
I guess the people Israel is murdering on a massive scale are generally noncitizens, but it's still not really in a position to throw stones.
It is 100% that.
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I publicly beg people not to do this.
Sharing anything but the prompt you wrote is useless and arguably harmful.
Starlink is primarily a military technology that is used both on a battlefield and to coordinate USA-backed "protests". Why, for instance, it just become free in Venezuela? Every country needs to be able to to defend itself from Starlink.
mobile phones are primarily a military technology
Every country needs to be able to defend itself from Russia, too, apparently.
What’s wrong with that end-result?
Way worse outcomes.
No, only US-backed puppets that US uses against Russia. For example, Russia has very good relations with Belorussia where the government wasn't lured into this role and did not let US to overthrow it.
Tell me why Minsk is the most backward capital in Europe
What an insane take.
Insane only for americans who refuse to accept the fact that their country, with some of their "allies", is the primary cause of wars and instability in today's world. And who refuse to understand that providing means of communication to people of country X to organize military actions against the army and police of country X, is a military agression against country X.
Again, what an insane take.
Good for them, as they’re under external attack. For example a US ghoul like Mike Pompeo had this to say recently [1]:
> Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them
so under those circumstances anything goes to defeat the likes of Mossad and associated foreign entities doing their thing on Iranian soil.
[1] https://xcancel.com/mikepompeo/status/2007180411638620659
Iranians are living under Islamic colonial dictatorship. Blaming this unrest on Israeli and US influence is absurd. And only exposes you as a sympathizer to the oppressive regime.
You're saying that the Brits should throw their colonizer and Christian king out of the island and return to their old Celtic traditions and deities, no? Or what exactly? Because the timeframes are very comparable, Saint Colombanus died in the early 600s, while the Arabs got all the way to Merv by the 670s-680s.
I think this is a major unforced error by the USG, of course we have seen plenty of those of late. There may be Israeli, American or other intelligence agencies present. But history has shown that spies can't just foment a revolution out of thin air. The Americans' first attempt at a coup in Chile, in 1970, failed. It was only after three years of US machinations and missteps by the Allende administration that Pinochet arose — Pinochet was given his fateful promotion by Allende himself! And that was in a "friendly" country where the US had many connections.
Iranians wouldn't be on the streets right now if the government had listened to its own water engineers over the years. But the new political culture in our government is more interested in braggadocio than achieving real change. I doubt that if the protesters succeed that Iran would become friendly to the West. At the same time there is probably a not too contrived worry among the Iranians that Netanyahu will seize the opportunity to attack if a political transition occurs. Bluster like this only hurts the cause.
I have to imagine the protests would stop immediately if Iran is attacked by Israel or the U.S. You can be angry at your government while not welcoming bombers.
Ordinarily I'd have faith the governments were smart enough to know better, but at this point I've lost hope.
I think that depends very much on targeting discipline. If the bombs are surgically striking key regime figures and sites, hampering C2, reducing the regime's total conspiratorial power, and increasing latency in the regime's OODA loop, I imagine protestors would welcome the help. The mullahs have taken the people of Iran hostage and their goons are out on the streets killing protestors. Israel or the US metaphorically sniping the guns out of their hands would be a judicious and IMO proper application of military force.
On the other hand, if the bombing is indiscriminate, or has an unacceptable error rate (oopsie, those weren't IRGC command posts, they were kindergartens), then I would expect a rally-round-the-flag effect. If the sniper misses and hits the hostage, well... people are going to be unhappy.
Is them the Iranian people or their dictators?