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Being able to completely turn off the Internet in your country seems to be a non-negotiable capability to develop for any non-democratic state. I think a lot o

Being able to completely turn off the Internet in your country seems to be a non-negotiable capability to develop for any non-democratic state. I think a lot of them took a look at how Twitter and Facebook were used for organising during the Arab spring and decided that it was by far the most dangerous non-military threat. Still wonder how exactly they are interdicting Starlink, I've seen rumors that they are using Russian EW systems but those same systems are not so effective jamming Starlink-guided drones on the frontlines.

anon7000 9mo ago
Frankly, we need to get to a place where it is impossible to do shut down the internet in a country like this. P2P and distributed networks might see a resurgence here
- toomuchtodo 9mo ago
  Any RF comms can be jammed, you will need ground to satellite laser communications to accomplish this (or you were close enough to a terrestrial free space optics ground station outside of nation state borders a satellite isn't required). https://spacenews.com/aircraft-links-with-satellite-using-laser-terminals-in-interoperability-test/ https://spacenews.com/aircraft-links-with-satellite-using-la... https://event.dlr.de/en/hm2025/tesat-scot80/ https://event.dlr.de/en/hm2025/tesat-scot80/ https://www.tesat.de/products https://www.tesat.de/products
  - SJC_Hacker 9mo ago
    Planes can be shot down
    - toomuchtodo 9mo ago
      Plane was the test bed for the military application in my citation, the ground station could be ground or roof mounted and camouflaged. As it would emit no RF, you would have to know where to look for it to find it (unlike say, StarLink ground terminals, which are detectable). If you emit RF in a contested environment as a civilian, you can be found using multilateration (for this context, I assume if you have military comms equipment, you have access to exotic RF that will make this difficult similar to have quick and saturn). SDR networks on the public internet enable this today, as long as there are enough receivers online in an area and you know what you're looking for, so I don't think it's beyond the grasp of nation state actors. TDOA Transmitter Localization with RTL-SDRs - https://panoradio-sdr.de/tdoa-transmitter-localization-with-rtl-sdrs/ https://panoradio-sdr.de/tdoa-transmitter-localization-with-... - July 17th, 2017
  - amatecha 9mo ago
    RF comms can't realistically be jammed across the entirety of a whole country, though, so this is definitely a case of "something is better than nothing", and it absolutely makes sense to establish community-level networking/comms at least.
  - fennecbutt 9mo ago
    Eh I don't think there are enough jammers to get everywhere. Otherwise a twinkling sea of laser light house to house repeaters, red stars in the dark is a pretty sounding dystopia.
joe_mamba 9mo ago
>Being able to completely turn off the Internet in your country seems to be a non-negotiable capability to develop for any non-democratic state. Which technologically advanced democratic countries DON'T have this capability already developed and deployed? Do you think the 3 letter agencies in the likes of UK, Israel, Australia, Canada, Germany, Finland, Sweden, etc don't know how to turn off the internet in their countries? They'd be really incompetent if they don't. Switzerland even had all its bridges wired with explosives from like the 19th century and all the way through the cold war to blow them up inc ase of an invasion. Do you think the internet infra is somehow spared this kind of strategic planning?
- whatshisface 9mo ago
  The USA cannot do it, because there is actually a law against cutting off communications systems dating back to 1944. Of course there have been attempts to make it possible. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/hr8336/summary https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/hr8336/summary
  - bagels 9mo ago
    Laws in the era of lawlessness. Laws never really stopped all crimes anyways.
  - 0x1ch 9mo ago
    Given everything going on in this country, I don't think a silly law from 1944 is going to deter the current administration from trying.
    - mhb 9mo ago
      This "current administration" thinking is exactly the problem. When your version of the current administration had the power to diminish the power of the administration, did it do that? None of them do. Somehow there's always a failure of imagining that whatever the current administration is won't always be current.
parentheses 9mo ago
To be fair, shutting down all communications and power are our only defense against a runaway AI system. This is a capability that makes sense to have to use when absolutely necessary. I think the differentiator is always when governments choose to employ these things.
- fennecbutt 9mo ago
  Eh if you're gonna go that far with your logic then a runaway AI system intelligent and malevolent enough to require turning off the whole damn Internet in a place (or more likely globally, defeating the point anyway) will also be intelligent enough to use alternative means of communication. RF is rife in our brave new world.
- gbnwl 9mo ago
  > shutting down all communications and power are our only defense against a runaway AI system Wouldn't a centralized ability to shut down all communications and power also be one of the most vulnerable targets to an runaway AI attack though? Seems like a double edged sword if I've ever seen one.
- Unfunkyufo 9mo ago
  > This is a capability that makes sense to have to use when absolutely necessary. I definitely disagree with this. Currently there is no reason to believe we'll ever have sentient AI, or AGI or whatever term you prefer, much less a runaway one. There is definitely reasons to worry about governments using this power in an era of increasing authoritarianism, I mean we're talking about this because it is literally happening right now to cover up a massacre. I don't want the power to turn off all communications to exist, because I don't want my political enemies to have it if they win an election.
chasd00 9mo ago
> Still wonder how exactly they are interdicting Starlink a good cyberwarfare attack would be disabling whatever is being used to prevent Starlink from working. Even if it only lasts for 12 hours the flood of images, video, and just general communication from inside Iran to the world would be a blow to the regime.
- niemandhier 9mo ago
  In Germany we have the Bundesnetzagentur an agency that drives around and measures the power of your WiFi. If its to high you get fined, and they really do manage to triangulate you. I would guess the Iranian government is capable of at least the same: Triangulating specific radio frequency sources.
hearsathought 9mo ago
[flagged]
- bbor 9mo ago
  democratic states like Iran ...whelp, this thread is gonna get shut down. Everyone was being reasonable, but all it takes is one person to say some out-of-pocket shit like "the country currently massacring protestors is the real democracy" for it to descend below HN's standards for political discourse. non-democratic states like north korea And FWIW, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is ostensibly a democracy, too. AFAIR the list of openly non-democratic states is quite small: Saudi Arabia, some microstates like the Holy See, and ~6 non-micro "Executive constitutional monarchies" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_monarchy#List_of_current_constitutional_monarchies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_monarchy#List_o...)
  - hearsathought 9mo ago
    > ...whelp, this thread is gonna get shut down. No. It's about iran, so it'll get stuck on the frontpage for a while. If this was about israel, then you'd have point. > but all it takes is one person to say some out-of-pocket shit like "the country currently massacring protestors is the real democracy" for it to descend below HN's standards for political discourse. The US has massacred people, even protestors. Are you saying we are not a democracy? > And FWIW, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is ostensibly a democracy, too. There is a difference between one claiming to be a democracy and another that actually is. No?
    - bbor 9mo ago
      It honestly blows my mind that some people read about a national government killing thousands of protestors in the span of a few days amid a backdrop of decades of authoritarian repression and think "meh, NBD, other countries have done bad things too". Maybe you remember one of the most shameful, egregious acts of police violence against protestors in America, with 4 dead and 9 injured? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings EDIT: But WAY more importantly, c'mon the HN admins are not super biased. I disagree with them on lots of policy decisions, but implying that they're a secret Zionist influence is goofy. They delete political threads of all kinds with gusto unless it's incredibly important or somewhat tech-related.
ceejayoz 9mo ago
> Still wonder how exactly they are interdicting Starlink… It's an active transmitter actively shouting "I'm here!" to the right gear. IIRC, the Ukrainians found it's best to have a nice long wire between you and the terminal for this reason.
epolanski 9mo ago
To be fair though, the web can heavily and easily be flooded by foreign actors like the US in case of Iran. It's naive to think that our countries don't play the influence and propaganda war online.
pianopatrick 9mo ago
My guess is that in Ukraine the Russian EW systems are deployed tens of kilometers back from the line of contact to protect them from artillery strikes and fiber optic drones. These Russian EW systems are likely used to protect command posts and logistics bases but not the line of contact. But because Iran is not yet an active war zone the Iranians can deploy those systems close to the cities. Also, Starlink terminals can be located via their RF emissions. So using a Starlink terminal in Iran seems to come with a high risk that security forces can locate and arrest you.
- tucnak 9mo ago
  > Also, Starlink terminals can be located via their RF emissions. Starlink terminals use highly-directional antennas that point at the sky (see. beamforming) and therefore they don't leak much in terms of RF emissions. So unless you can afford to maintain a host of overhead drones on permanent rotation and wide-area coverage, it would be very hard to actually locate anybody. Not that it's impossible, but largely intractable at scale. We use Starlink a lot in Ukraine, and even though the russians have platforms with sophisticated signal processing capabilities (think Xilinx RFSoC) perfectly capable of locating emissions from most communication equipment, they are still unable to locate Starlink terminals. And this is along the frontline, mind you. To cover all of Iran would surely be prohibitive.
ggreer 9mo ago
In addition to jamming the radio signals directly, Starlink terminals use GPS, so jamming GPS can hurt connectivity. Iran has been jamming GPS in an effort to reduce the effectiveness of foreign military attacks, but maybe they've stepped it up a notch in the past week. People in Ukraine are probably so accustomed to GPS jamming that they've all gone to Advanced -> Debug Data -> "Use Starlink positioning exclusively". Ukraine has one other advantage: The jamming tends to come from one direction. If you set up a barrier on that side of the antenna, the signal from the satellites is less likely to be drowned out. People in Iran have no idea where the jammers are in related to themselves. If they're in a city, they might be surrounded. Starlink terminals also require a clear view of the sky and they broadcast on certain frequencies, so it's quite possible for governments to find the terminals and confiscate/destroy them. Still, it's a lot more difficult to shut down than a few fiber optic lines.
- Aloisius 9mo ago
  > Starlink terminals also require a clear view of the sky and they broadcast on certain frequencies That's not quite true. You can conceal the terminal using a number of materials that won't significantly interfere with the signal like a thin piece of cloth or a thin plastic bag (like a garbage bag) as long as the cover doesn't get too wet. https://edunham.net/2022/03/11/starlink_dressup.html https://edunham.net/2022/03/11/starlink_dressup.html
stuffn 9mo ago
The west would cut the internet the second shit got real. No question. Europe is already flirting with it. Look at their draconian internet speech laws. If you think that ISPs would try to stand up to the government you should read about how quickly they bent over after the PATRIOT act.

anon7000 9mo ago

Frankly, we need to get to a place where it is impossible to do shut down the internet in a country like this. P2P and distributed networks might see a resurgence here

toomuchtodo 9mo ago
Any RF comms can be jammed, you will need ground to satellite laser communications to accomplish this (or you were close enough to a terrestrial free space optics ground station outside of nation state borders a satellite isn't required). https://spacenews.com/aircraft-links-with-satellite-using-laser-terminals-in-interoperability-test/ https://spacenews.com/aircraft-links-with-satellite-using-la... https://event.dlr.de/en/hm2025/tesat-scot80/ https://event.dlr.de/en/hm2025/tesat-scot80/ https://www.tesat.de/products https://www.tesat.de/products
- SJC_Hacker 9mo ago
  Planes can be shot down
  - toomuchtodo 9mo ago
    Plane was the test bed for the military application in my citation, the ground station could be ground or roof mounted and camouflaged. As it would emit no RF, you would have to know where to look for it to find it (unlike say, StarLink ground terminals, which are detectable). If you emit RF in a contested environment as a civilian, you can be found using multilateration (for this context, I assume if you have military comms equipment, you have access to exotic RF that will make this difficult similar to have quick and saturn). SDR networks on the public internet enable this today, as long as there are enough receivers online in an area and you know what you're looking for, so I don't think it's beyond the grasp of nation state actors. TDOA Transmitter Localization with RTL-SDRs - https://panoradio-sdr.de/tdoa-transmitter-localization-with-rtl-sdrs/ https://panoradio-sdr.de/tdoa-transmitter-localization-with-... - July 17th, 2017
- amatecha 9mo ago
  RF comms can't realistically be jammed across the entirety of a whole country, though, so this is definitely a case of "something is better than nothing", and it absolutely makes sense to establish community-level networking/comms at least.
- fennecbutt 9mo ago
  Eh I don't think there are enough jammers to get everywhere. Otherwise a twinkling sea of laser light house to house repeaters, red stars in the dark is a pretty sounding dystopia.

joe_mamba 9mo ago

>Being able to completely turn off the Internet in your country seems to be a non-negotiable capability to develop for any non-democratic state. Which technologically advanced democratic countries DON'T have this capability already developed and deployed? Do you think the 3 letter agencies in the likes of UK, Israel, Australia, Canada, Germany, Finland, Sweden, etc don't know how to turn off the internet in their countries? They'd be really incompetent if they don't. Switzerland even had all its bridges wired with explosives from like the 19th century and all the way through the cold war to blow them up inc ase of an invasion. Do you think the internet infra is somehow spared this kind of strategic planning?

whatshisface 9mo ago
The USA cannot do it, because there is actually a law against cutting off communications systems dating back to 1944. Of course there have been attempts to make it possible. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/hr8336/summary https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/hr8336/summary
- bagels 9mo ago
  Laws in the era of lawlessness. Laws never really stopped all crimes anyways.
- 0x1ch 9mo ago
  Given everything going on in this country, I don't think a silly law from 1944 is going to deter the current administration from trying.
  - mhb 9mo ago
    This "current administration" thinking is exactly the problem. When your version of the current administration had the power to diminish the power of the administration, did it do that? None of them do. Somehow there's always a failure of imagining that whatever the current administration is won't always be current.

parentheses 9mo ago

To be fair, shutting down all communications and power are our only defense against a runaway AI system. This is a capability that makes sense to have to use when absolutely necessary. I think the differentiator is always when governments choose to employ these things.

fennecbutt 9mo ago
Eh if you're gonna go that far with your logic then a runaway AI system intelligent and malevolent enough to require turning off the whole damn Internet in a place (or more likely globally, defeating the point anyway) will also be intelligent enough to use alternative means of communication. RF is rife in our brave new world.
gbnwl 9mo ago
> shutting down all communications and power are our only defense against a runaway AI system Wouldn't a centralized ability to shut down all communications and power also be one of the most vulnerable targets to an runaway AI attack though? Seems like a double edged sword if I've ever seen one.
Unfunkyufo 9mo ago
> This is a capability that makes sense to have to use when absolutely necessary. I definitely disagree with this. Currently there is no reason to believe we'll ever have sentient AI, or AGI or whatever term you prefer, much less a runaway one. There is definitely reasons to worry about governments using this power in an era of increasing authoritarianism, I mean we're talking about this because it is literally happening right now to cover up a massacre. I don't want the power to turn off all communications to exist, because I don't want my political enemies to have it if they win an election.

chasd00 9mo ago

> Still wonder how exactly they are interdicting Starlink a good cyberwarfare attack would be disabling whatever is being used to prevent Starlink from working. Even if it only lasts for 12 hours the flood of images, video, and just general communication from inside Iran to the world would be a blow to the regime.

niemandhier 9mo ago
In Germany we have the Bundesnetzagentur an agency that drives around and measures the power of your WiFi. If its to high you get fined, and they really do manage to triangulate you. I would guess the Iranian government is capable of at least the same: Triangulating specific radio frequency sources.

hearsathought 9mo ago

[flagged]

bbor 9mo ago
democratic states like Iran ...whelp, this thread is gonna get shut down. Everyone was being reasonable, but all it takes is one person to say some out-of-pocket shit like "the country currently massacring protestors is the real democracy" for it to descend below HN's standards for political discourse. non-democratic states like north korea And FWIW, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is ostensibly a democracy, too. AFAIR the list of openly non-democratic states is quite small: Saudi Arabia, some microstates like the Holy See, and ~6 non-micro "Executive constitutional monarchies" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_monarchy#List_of_current_constitutional_monarchies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_monarchy#List_o...)
- hearsathought 9mo ago
  > ...whelp, this thread is gonna get shut down. No. It's about iran, so it'll get stuck on the frontpage for a while. If this was about israel, then you'd have point. > but all it takes is one person to say some out-of-pocket shit like "the country currently massacring protestors is the real democracy" for it to descend below HN's standards for political discourse. The US has massacred people, even protestors. Are you saying we are not a democracy? > And FWIW, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is ostensibly a democracy, too. There is a difference between one claiming to be a democracy and another that actually is. No?
  - bbor 9mo ago
    It honestly blows my mind that some people read about a national government killing thousands of protestors in the span of a few days amid a backdrop of decades of authoritarian repression and think "meh, NBD, other countries have done bad things too". Maybe you remember one of the most shameful, egregious acts of police violence against protestors in America, with 4 dead and 9 injured? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings EDIT: But WAY more importantly, c'mon the HN admins are not super biased. I disagree with them on lots of policy decisions, but implying that they're a secret Zionist influence is goofy. They delete political threads of all kinds with gusto unless it's incredibly important or somewhat tech-related.

ceejayoz 9mo ago

> Still wonder how exactly they are interdicting Starlink… It's an active transmitter actively shouting "I'm here!" to the right gear. IIRC, the Ukrainians found it's best to have a nice long wire between you and the terminal for this reason.

epolanski 9mo ago

To be fair though, the web can heavily and easily be flooded by foreign actors like the US in case of Iran. It's naive to think that our countries don't play the influence and propaganda war online.

pianopatrick 9mo ago

My guess is that in Ukraine the Russian EW systems are deployed tens of kilometers back from the line of contact to protect them from artillery strikes and fiber optic drones. These Russian EW systems are likely used to protect command posts and logistics bases but not the line of contact. But because Iran is not yet an active war zone the Iranians can deploy those systems close to the cities. Also, Starlink terminals can be located via their RF emissions. So using a Starlink terminal in Iran seems to come with a high risk that security forces can locate and arrest you.

tucnak 9mo ago
> Also, Starlink terminals can be located via their RF emissions. Starlink terminals use highly-directional antennas that point at the sky (see. beamforming) and therefore they don't leak much in terms of RF emissions. So unless you can afford to maintain a host of overhead drones on permanent rotation and wide-area coverage, it would be very hard to actually locate anybody. Not that it's impossible, but largely intractable at scale. We use Starlink a lot in Ukraine, and even though the russians have platforms with sophisticated signal processing capabilities (think Xilinx RFSoC) perfectly capable of locating emissions from most communication equipment, they are still unable to locate Starlink terminals. And this is along the frontline, mind you. To cover all of Iran would surely be prohibitive.

ggreer 9mo ago

In addition to jamming the radio signals directly, Starlink terminals use GPS, so jamming GPS can hurt connectivity. Iran has been jamming GPS in an effort to reduce the effectiveness of foreign military attacks, but maybe they've stepped it up a notch in the past week. People in Ukraine are probably so accustomed to GPS jamming that they've all gone to Advanced -> Debug Data -> "Use Starlink positioning exclusively". Ukraine has one other advantage: The jamming tends to come from one direction. If you set up a barrier on that side of the antenna, the signal from the satellites is less likely to be drowned out. People in Iran have no idea where the jammers are in related to themselves. If they're in a city, they might be surrounded. Starlink terminals also require a clear view of the sky and they broadcast on certain frequencies, so it's quite possible for governments to find the terminals and confiscate/destroy them. Still, it's a lot more difficult to shut down than a few fiber optic lines.

Aloisius 9mo ago
> Starlink terminals also require a clear view of the sky and they broadcast on certain frequencies That's not quite true. You can conceal the terminal using a number of materials that won't significantly interfere with the signal like a thin piece of cloth or a thin plastic bag (like a garbage bag) as long as the cover doesn't get too wet. https://edunham.net/2022/03/11/starlink_dressup.html https://edunham.net/2022/03/11/starlink_dressup.html

stuffn 9mo ago

The west would cut the internet the second shit got real. No question. Europe is already flirting with it. Look at their draconian internet speech laws. If you think that ISPs would try to stand up to the government you should read about how quickly they bent over after the PATRIOT act.