It is difficult to know exactly what is happening in Iran since the government shut down the Internet on January 8, plunging a nation of more than 90 million people into digital darkness.
The crackdown on anti-government protesters has led to at least 2,600 deaths, although some estimates put the death toll at more than 20,000. According to the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, more than 18,000 protesters have been arrested.
The protests began in late December in response to dire economic conditions and took on a broader anti-government character as people demanded an end to Ali Khamenei’s government. The Iranian rial is now the least valuable currency in the world. The country has an inflation rate of around 40 percent, making necessities unaffordable for most people. Iran is enduring a long-lasting economic crisis, fueled by sanctions, government austerity measures and last year’s war with Israel. Many parts of the country, including the capital Tehran, are facing a severe and unrelenting drought, as I reported in November.
The government also cut phone lines on January 8. While the government eased some of these restrictions on Tuesday, allowing some Iranians to make international calls from the country this week, many reasonably fear government surveillance. People outside the country are still unable to call Iranians. Several people in Tehran called the Associated Press on Tuesday, saying that text messaging services remain down and that Internet users can connect to local government-approved websites, but not international ones.
That’s why Elon Musk’s Starlink, which provides high-speed Internet access in hard-to-reach places via satellites that receive radio signals from user terminals on the ground, has become a lifeline for Iranians trying to share what’s happening on the ground. SpaceX has made Starlink free for its tens of thousands of Iranian users, but since the Iranian government criminalized the use of satellite internet services like Starlink last year, they face substantial risk by accessing them illegally.
And yet, many Iranians are using it anyway.
If satellites are in danger, so is truth itself.
According to Iranian internet rights group Filter.Watch, the government has attempted to jam signals from Starlink satellites and is actively pursuing people it believes are using the service.
New upgrades to Starlink terminals thwarted some of the government’s efforts to jam the signal. Since the launch of Starlink in 2022, activists have smuggled terminals into the country, and there are now around 50,000 hidden in the country. Developers have created tools to share Starlink connections beyond a single terminal.
“A big problem with Starlink is that it ultimately represents a single point of failure for communications,” Steve Feldstein, a political scientist and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me by email. Despite this, Starlink is the best option Iranians have. “No other tool offers such scalability and affordability to Iranian citizens,” Feldstein said.
At a time when misinformation and intentional obfuscation can downplay the magnitude of death or hide that atrocities are taking place, satellites (and not just Starlink ones) are proving their place in uncovering humanitarian crises. Without them, the world will be dark.
Satellites are a human rights issue
Satellites are effectively the only way to follow humanitarian crises during information blackouts or when no one can get in or out. In November, my colleague Sara Herschander reported on the Sudanese civil war, in which the violence is so severe that the bloodshed is visible from space. Only satellite images and geolocated posts on social media provided evidence of the atrocities due to the communication blackout.
Currently, around 15,000 satellites orbit the Earth; The number has skyrocketed in recent years as companies launch large satellite networks called megaconstellations to provide broadband Internet access. Most of them are in low Earth orbit, up to 1,200 miles above the Earth’s surface. More than two-thirds of active satellites in low Earth orbit belong to the Starlink megaconstellation.
Bear with me for a second, but if you care about what’s happening on Earth, there’s one thing we need to worry about: space traffic.
In 2040 there will be more than 560,000 satellites in orbit. The more satellites we send, the greater the risk of them colliding with each other or with pieces of space debris. This could cause massive service interruptions or, in the worst case, lead to a phenomenon known as Kessler syndrome. This is when a cascade of new collisions occurs in a chain reaction, potentially rendering low Earth orbit useless, meaning no more satellite launches, the end of our space exploration ambitions and the serious disruption of technologies such as GPS, weather alerts and satellite internet.
But that’s the worst case scenario and SpaceX is aware of that. The company announced Jan. 1 that it plans to lower 4,400 of its satellites from 342 to 298 miles above the Earth’s surface throughout the year to reduce collision risks.
By 2023, the United Nations International Telecommunication Union estimated that 2.6 billion people (a third of humanity) will lack Internet connectivity. The UN considers Internet access a human right. An underappreciated consequence of low-Earth orbit becoming increasingly unusable is the loss of satellite Internet access and images that allow us to see the rhetoric of the past.
Satellite images are how we know what is happening in conflict zones like Ukraine and Sudan. If satellites are in danger, so is truth itself.