state surgically removed social features, such as comment sections on news sites
and chat boxes in online marketplaces. The objective seems clear. The Iranian
government aimed to atomize the population, preventing not just the flow of
information out of the country but the coordination of any activity within it.

This escalation marks a strategic shift from the shutdown observed during the
?12-Day War? with Israel in mid-2025. Then, the government primarily blocked
particular types of traffic while leaving the underlying internet remaining
available. The regime?s actions this year entailed a more brute-force approach
to internet censorship, where both the physical and logical layers of
connectivity were dismantled.

The ability to disconnect a population is a feature of modern authoritarian
network design. When a government treats connectivity as a faucet it can turn
off at will, it asserts that the right to speak, assemble, and access
information is revocable. The human right to the internet is not just about
bandwidth; it is about the right to exist within the modern public square.
Iran?s actions deny its citizens this existence, reducing them to subjects who
can be silenced -- and authoritarian governments elsewhere are taking note.

The current blackout is not an isolated panic reaction but a stress test for a
long-term strategy, say advocacy groups -- a two-tiered or ?class-based?
internet known as Internet-e-Tabaqati. Iran?s Supreme Council of Cyberspace, the
country?s highest internet policy body, has been laying the legal and technical
groundwork for this since 2009.

In July 2025, the council passed a regulation formally institutionalizing a
two-tiered hierarchy. Under this system, access to the global internet is no
longer a default for citizens, but instead a privilege granted based on loyalty
and professional necessity. The implementation includes such things as ?white
SIM cards?: special mobile lines issued to government officials, security
forces, and approved journalists that bypass the state?s filtering apparatus
entirely.

While ordinary Iranians are forced to navigate a maze of unstable VPNs and
blocked ports, holders of white SIMs enjoy unrestricted access to Instagram,
Telegram, and WhatsApp. This tiered access is further enforced through
whitelisting at the data center level, creating a digital apartheid where
connectivity is a reward for compliance. The regime?s goal is to make the cost
of a general shutdown manageable by ensuring that the state and its loyalists
remain connected while plunging the public into darkness. (In the latest
shutdown, for instance, white SIM holders regained connectivity earlier than the
general population.)

The technical architecture of Iran?s shutdown reveals its primary purpose:
social control through isolation. Over the years, the regime has learned that
simple censorship -- blocking specific URLs -- is insufficient against a
tech-savvy population armed with circumvention tools. The answer instead has
been to build a ?sovereign? network structure that allows for granular control.

By disabling local communication channels, the state prevents the ?swarm?
dynamics of modern unrest, where small protests coalesce into large movements
through real-time coordination. In this way, the shutdown breaks the
psychological momentum of the protests. The blocking of chat functions in
nonpolitical apps (like ridesharing or shopping platforms) illustrates the
regime?s paranoia: Any channel that allows two people to exchange text is seen
as a threat.

The United Nations and various international bodies have increasingly recognized
internet access as an enabler of other fundamental human rights. In the context
of Iran, the internet is the only independent witness to history. By severing
it, the regime creates a zone of impunity where atrocities can be committed
without immediate consequence.

Iran?s digital repression model is distinct from, and in some ways more
dangerous than, China?s ?Great Firewall.? China built its digital ecosystem from
the ground up with sovereignty in mind, creating domestic alternatives like
WeChat and Weibo that it fully controls. Iran, by contrast, is building its
controls on top of the standard global internet infrastructure.

Unlike China?s censorship regime, Iran?s overlay model is highly exportable. It
demonstrates to other authoritarian regimes that they can still achieve high
levels of control by retrofitting their existing networks. We are already seeing
signs of ?authoritarian learning,? where techniques tested in Tehran are being
studied by regimes in unstable democracies and dictatorships alike. The most
recent shutdown in Afghanistan, for example, was more sophisticated than
previous ones. If Iran succeeds in normalizing tiered access to the internet, we
can expect to see similar white SIM policies and tiered access models
proliferate globally.

The international community must move beyond condemnation and treat connectivity
as a humanitarian imperative. A coalition of civil society organizations has
already launched a campaign calling for ?direct-to-cell? (D2C) satellite
connectivity. Unlike traditional satellite internet, which requires conspicuous
and expensive dishes such as Starlink terminals, D2C technology connects
directly to standard smartphones and is much more resilient to infrastructure
shutdowns. The technology works; all it requires is implementation.

This is a technological measure, but it has a strong policy component as well.
Regulators should require satellite providers to include humanitarian access
protocols in their licensing, ensuring that services can be activated for
civilians in designated crisis zones. Governments, particularly the United
States, should ensure that technology sanctions do not inadvertently block the
hardware and software needed to circumvent censorship. General licenses should
be expanded to cover satellite connectivity explicitly. And funding should be
directed toward technologies that are harder to whitelist or block, such as mesh
networks and D2C solutions that bypass the choke points of state-controlled
ISPs.

Deliberate internet shutdowns are commonplace throughout the world. The 2026
shutdown in Iran is a glimpse into a fractured internet. If we are to end
countries? ability to limit access to the rest of the world for their
populations, we need to build resolute architectures. They don?t solve the
problem, but they do give people in repressive countries a fighting chance.

This essay originally appeared in Foreign Policy.

** *** ***** ******* *********** *************
LLM-Assisted Deanonymization

[2026.03.02] Turns out that LLMs are good at deanonymization:

    We show that LLM agents can figure out who you are from your anonymous
online posts. Across Hacker News, Reddit, LinkedIn, and anonymized interview
transcripts, our method identifies users with high precision and scales to tens
of thousands of candidates.

    While it has been known that individuals can be uniquely identified by
surprisingly few attributes, this was often practically limit
--- FMail-lnx 2.3.2.6-B20251227
 * Origin: TCOB1 A Mail Only System (618:500/1)