The shutdowns, ‘one of the regime’s most powerful tools of repression,’ have allowed Tehran to violently crack down on protests
A coalition of advocacy groups petitioned House Foreign Affairs Committee leadership to immediately advance three pieces of bipartisan legislation that would help Iran’s embattled population to access the internet, according to a copy of a Monday letter shared with the Washington Free Beacon.
The three measures would collectively help the Iranian population use secure networks to circumvent the regime’s internet blackouts and will likely receive significant bipartisan support once sent to a full vote in the House of Representatives. The advocacy groups recommend in their letter that the committee pass the bills as one larger measure “as a comprehensive package to advance internet freedom, human rights, and transparency for the Iranian people.”
The 12 groups, led by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ sister organization FDD Action, sent the letter to committee chairman Brian Mast (R., Fla.) and ranking member Gregory Meeks (D., N.Y.) amid ongoing nationwide internet blackouts meant to keep Iranian protesters off the street. The Islamic Republic plunged its people into darkness when the United States and Israel launched their military campaign against the regime, repeating a similar tactic it employed earlier this year. A state-imposed internet outage provided Tehran the cover it needed to slaughter as many as 30,000 civilians during historic nationwide demonstrations in January.
As of now, the Iranian people’s options for overcoming the blackouts are extremely limited. Internet monitoring firm NetBlocks assessed over the weekend that “few circumvention tools work as authorities crack down on satellite and VPN users outside the state-approved whitelist.”
“Internet shutdowns have become one of the regime’s most powerful tools of repression—facilitating violence, mass arrests, and grave human rights abuses while preventing Iranians from communicating with one another and the outside world,” the advocacy groups—which also include the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans, the Vandenberg Coalition, the National Union for Democracy in Iran, and the Iranian American Bar Association, among others—wrote. “More recently, the regime has again imposed widespread internet disruptions during this current period of conflict, further cutting off critical lines of communication between the Iranian people and the global community.”
The Iran Human Rights, Internet Freedom, and Accountability Act aims to facilitate “the immediate expansion of unrestricted internet access and civilian lines of communication across Iran” by authorizing the U.S. government to research satellite and direct-to-cell technologies that could cut through the blackout without regime interference, according to the bill text. It also directs the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit to develop new technology that could do the same.
The second measure in the package, the IRAN Act, instructs the State Department to lead a government-wide task force aimed at “providing to Iranian civilians the technology and other tools necessary to access the open internet”—effectively implementing the provisions in the first bill. The examples listed in the bill include VPNs that obscure a user’s location and end-to-end encrypted messaging software.
The third bill, the FREEDOM Act, complements both measures by requiring the State Department, Treasury Department, and FCC to provide Congress with a comprehensive strategy to boost internet freedom in Iran. The measure directs those agencies to “analyze threats like drone-based platforms and signal jamming, and survey telecom providers operating in Iran,” according to the groups’ letter.
Neither Mast nor Meeks immediately responded to requests for comment on the letter or legislation.
“These three bills address complementary aspects of internet repression in Iran,” the organizations wrote. “They form a comprehensive bipartisan response to internet shutdowns and censorship in Iran.”
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