The government of Lebanon is cooperating with Israel - it's only the southerners/Hezbollah in conflict, at least for now. The people of Gaza are cut off for the most part. The strict censorship inside Israel is what you should compare to - not as strict as a total access ban, but if you say the wrong things or take pictures of the wrong stuff you're going to prison.
If they could credibly threaten your infrastructure then it makes sense. If they have no real organized hacking capabilities then no. But the US has already attacked Iran through computers before with Stuxnet and is the world leader in software and networking knowledge so it does make perfect sense for Iran to disconnect its networks from outside.
You might also have to consider the propaganda campaigns the US could run against an Iranian population with web access. If the population isn't more discontent now than it already was, "secretly" replacing commercial ad placements on western websites with US propaganda when the requests come from Iranian sources could make them discontent or inflame them further, which is bad for the Iranian government.
> consider the propaganda campaigns the US could run against an Iranian population with web access.
I’m amazed at people who have access to freely express their opinions online, prescribe that 90m people should not have the right to freely access information because they somehow can’t be trusted to not fall for propaganda. What a patronizing and self righteous take.
Just because I can see things from the view of the current Iranian government doesn't mean I support them or their actions. And its not like the US does nothing to suppress foreign propaganda already, they just more often try to drown it out with our own. Hell we just recently were talking about banning tiktok because just shaping what user-made videos was considered too strong of an ability to push Chinese propaganda and influence US citizens.
And yes, we already know large masses of people will readily fall for propaganda, just look at the US political landscape, look at the entire field of marketing which is just propaganda for profit. Everybody across the entire world is vulnerable to propaganda, marketing and propaganda didn't become less common going into the 21st century, it just got better and harder to identify.
My point is that the people of Iran aren’t the target of the disruption.
Remember when Ukraine used the Russian cellular internet to operate drones that destroyed numerous Russian heavy bomber aircraft? That’s what the US/Israel would logically be expected to do if there were wide open internet access in Iran.
This is obvious game theory playing out militarily, people only see political suppression but warfare is a totally different ballgame.
If China were waging large scale war on the US I’d expect the exact same countermeasures to happen.
Yeah exactly! That’s why islamic regime maintains free flow of information for citizens and invites independent third party investors to find out what really happened!
But this article is about cyber attacks, radar interference, etc. on military and strategic targets. The US/Israel can still do these even with total internet blackout. We saw this in the war! Israel/US still bombed who and whatever they wanted! What does this have to do with internet censorship?
If you really want to get informed about the protests in January and the death toll start looking at Amnesty’s report and you’ll see the 30000 is not dubious. Cherry picking who reported on a piece of news doesn’t invalidate the content of it.
I could not find the 30000 figure in the link, while it does mention "thousands", what is contested here is the fact that 30000 is an order of magnitude larger number.
The fact that your account is only used to comment about Iran is also weird.
> noting that according to information she received from medical sources, the death toll might be as high as 20,000 . Due to the ongoing internet shutdown, the scale of mass killings that took place and Iranian authorities’ well-documented pattern of carrying out reprisals against families of victims who speak out, the true number of those killed is likely higher.
I don’t see how this is hard to understand. As I mentioned, the 30000 figure is not dubious, according to UN special rapporteur.
What’s so sad about the whole situation in Iran, apart from what happened, is people trying to “haggle” the number of death. It should be obvious that even one death is too many!
You’re right and that’s the sad part. They have their underground cities but haven’t bothered to build shelters for civilians. They care for the school children as little as the US bombs do.
Iranian here! I want to see the regime answer for its crimes. They act like an occupying force, taking the country hostage.
With that being said I don’t like/want the war. I understand and sympathize with the emotional response from my compatriots because they see the oppressors are getting the bloody beating they well deserve. But I don’t really think that the current war brings anything good for the people. I wish it did but it doesn’t look like it. I wish the regime would fall but they haven’t and we now have ~2000 more innocents dead on top of thousands that government killed in January.
I am guessing you're not a supported of Reza Pahlavi?
How in your mind do we get to the regime answering for its crimes? What is going to dislodge them? If they are not dislodged and continue to indoctrinate more people where does this go? If they have more weapons where does it go?
Is any chance that some elements within the current regime will change sides? What percent of soldiers or militia are die hard fanatics vs. people who will jump ship if there's a good chance of that "ship" sinking?
> But the thing that gets them rioting is economic failure
I believe Iranians want to be able to decide their own fate, with the dignity that all humans deserve. Without criminal domestic religious zealots and without foreign meddling and bombing.
The previous protest was followed by the killing of Mahsa Amini, in morality police’s custody because of improper hijab. It’s not only economic hardships. But you’re right that war has made the situation worse, obviously.
> I believe Iranians want to be able to decide their own fate, with the dignity that all humans deserve.
They certainly do, the domestic religious zealots/terrorists on the other hand murdered over 30,000 protesters in 2 days to stop that from happening.
> Without criminal domestic religious zealots and without foreign meddling and bombing.
The domestic religious zealots have essentially ensured that foreign military intervention is required to some degree for Iranians to have the ability to decide their own fate. At this point it's likely most Iranians support some form of foreign intervention.
Iran having nukes is unsubstantiated. I also don’t think they wanted to have nukes. But they also enriched Uranium up to 60% according to IAEA which has no non-military use. They perhaps wanted to use that as leverage in negotiations which turned out to be not much of a deterrence.
Can you point out some signs of concession from islamic regime? I think they wouldn’t concede, with or without war. That’s not in their DNA. They are religious extremists.
