As the recent ‘regime change’ operation in Iran has now evidently failed the media are allowed to revile some details of the powers behind it.
Inside the Fight to Keep Iran Online (archived) – NY Times, Jan 16 2026
Activists spent years preparing for a communications blackout in Iran, smuggling in Starlink satellite internet systems and making digital shutdowns harder for the authorities to enforce.
Iran’s communications blackout last week seemed complete. Internet and cellular networks had been shut down by the authorities. Online banking, shopping and text messaging services stopped working. Information about the growing protests was scarce.
Yet a ragtag network of activists, developers and engineers pierced Iran’s digital barricades. Using thousands of Starlink satellite internet systems that they had quietly smuggled into the country, they got online and spread images of troops firing into the streets and families searching for bodies.
A ‘ragtag network’ of ‘activists’ … Let’s see who, according to the piece, belongs to it:
“You need to plan to have that infrastructure in place,” said Fereidoon Bashar, the executive director of ASL19, a digital rights group focused on Iran. “This is because of years of planning and work among different groups.”
ASL19 is an Iranian ‘regime change’ group in Canada. Its website says:
We build innovative solutions to advance human rights and civil liberty in Iran
Its ‘About’ page says nothing about who is behind it or how the group is financed. A Wikipedia page about the organization leaves some doubt about the its integrity:
ASL19 (Persian: اصل ١٩) is an independent technology organisation that works toward practical responses for online access to information. Their work has been mired in allegations of sexual abuse and workplace harassment.
Based in Toronto, ASL19 was founded in 2012 with the support of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.
The University of Toronto has sought to distance themselves from the organisation since controversy about the organization was raised in 2017.
…
An investigative reportage by The Verge and an open letter from anonymous former female employees alleged workplace abuse and harassment existed within the organization. A freedom of information request from Ontario human rights tribunal demonstrated that an allegation of abuse and sexual assault had occurred within the workplace, while ASL19 managing staffs were allegedly complicit in covering up the alleged abuse. In the one reported case the organisation reportedly sought out a non-disclosure agreement.Digital rights organisation Access Now terminated their partnership with ASL19 for their RightsCon summit series in December 2017.
Back to the NY Times piece:
“This is the most severe internet shutdown that we have experienced,” said Ahmad Ahmadian, an exiled activist who was also involved in smuggling the satellite internet systems into Iran. “Starlink is a lifeline.”
Hmm…:
Ahmad Ahmadian is President and CEO of Holistic Resilience, a U.S.-based nonprofit that develops technologies to deliver uncensored information and counter state surveillance, with a primary focus on Iran. …
Holisticresilience.us has a one page website with some blubber but no real information on it. None of the projects Ahmad Ahmadian claims to lead is mentioned. There is a contact form without any name on it.
There is also a ‘donation’ page leading to a fundraisup.com page which says that it has ‘$17,392.70 raised of $1M USD goal’ to buy Starlink antennas. An Ahmad Ahmadian Twitter account, launched in 2009, follows 995 person but is itself followed by only 650 other users. A related joinNASNET (NasNet l استارلینک برای ایران) tweets a lot about Starlink in Farsi. It is following 49 others and has about 10,100 followers.
Onto a another ‘ragtag activists’ in the NY Times piece:
[O]n Jan. 8, as mass protests swelled, Iranian officials turned off the internet altogether, sending the country of 90 million people into a digital blackout. VPNs stopped working. Iran’s internet traffic dropped 99 percent, according to the monitoring group Netblocks.
The government “panicked,” said Amir Rashidi, a cybersecurity expert with Miaan, a digital rights group focused on Iran.
Miaan.org has at least some pages on its website. Its About page says that:
Miaan is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit entity headquartered in Austin with staff and activities across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia.
It mentions 11 people working for it. There is zero information on how Miaan is financed.
But we do not have to guess much about that. We are now down at the 18th paragraph of NY Times piece on a ‘ragtag network of activists’ which finally hints to who is organizing and financing it:
The State Department coordinated with SpaceX on the sanctions exemption for digital communication tools in Iran. It also provided support to civil society groups about how to hide the systems from government detection, according to a Biden administration official involved in the plans.
It is the U.S. government which provided the various regime change groups with the money to smuggle some 50,000 Starlink terminals into Iran.
But the whole costly endeavor did not play out as planned. Starlink terminals use GPS to define their own position which they need to know to be able to find and connect to Starlink’s satellites. GPS signals are weak and easy to fake. The Iranian government is spoofing GPS signals giving fake locations which confuses the Starlink terminals. They can not find and connect to the satellites they need. (There are additional ways to detect and locate single active Starlink terminals. But to disable a large number of them GPS spoofing is currently the best way to go.)
With Starlink out the foreign coordinators of the armed rioters on the ground in Iran have no longer the means to control them.
The media ‘regime change’ influencers no longer receive the fresh ‘horror’ videos to keep the public anti-Iran campaign going. AI created fake videos spread by bot-accounts are only a sad replacement (archived):
The internet blackout in Iran has stanched the flow of reliable information about the political unrest roiling the country. Filling the void has been a deluge of propaganda, disinformation and influence campaigns from countries or parties trying to shape the outcome of the conflict.
Inauthentic accounts online — also known as bots — have spread false and conflicting narratives on X, Instagram and other social media platforms in recent days, according to several experts in disinformation flow and the Iranian information ecosystem. The bots have shared misleading or artificially generated photographs and videos, further muddling what is actually happening on the ground.
…
A report published in October by the Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity watchdog group, concluded that a network of more than 50 inauthentic profiles on X, the social media platform, was organized by the Israeli government or a closely supervised subcontractor. The network, according to researchers, started ramping up its use of artificial intelligence early last year to spread narratives encouraging Iranians to revolt.
…
A separate campaign on X has sought to bolster support for Mr. Pahlavi, the scion of the dynasty that once ruled Iran, according to Philip Mai, senior researcher of the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University. (Other researchers and journalists have recently linked Israeli influence operations to online content that is written in Persian and supportive of Mr. Pahlavi, a figure known to have close ties with Israel.)
Having watched several regime change attempts over the years I find interesting and somewhat surprising that communication is the major weak point for such operations. Iran has proved that by shutting it down, if only temporarily, can stop the immediate action.