Speaker: Ahmad Ahmadian, Founding Executive Director, Holistic Resilience

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Time codes refer to the session video.

[00:02] Ahmad Ahmadian

Seventeen years ago today, I was put in solitary confinement in Iran. I spent 27 days in a six-by-nine-foot cell. I didn't choose this date for my talk, but here I am, talking about how we help people communicate when someone, especially the government, wants to silence them. Thank you for having me here.

I want to take you back with me in time, to between 2006 and 2010. I was a student activist at the University of Tehran. My friends and I published a magazine called Divar, which in Persian means "the wall." It was inspired by Pink Floyd's famous song "Another Brick in the Wall." The university banned it at the second edition. We kept publishing it anyway for three years. During the election, the print run sometimes went up to 5,000 or 10,000, and we had to distribute it covertly in the university. We had to find underground print shops and get the copies in through the side fences, through the side gates, and sometimes over the walls. Looking back, my first experience getting around the firewall involved a real wall.

That activism led me to prison. I was arrested with other student activists during a meeting outside the university, and after we were taken to the prison, I didn't know where they were or whether they had been released. In solitary confinement in Evin prison, as some of you might know, communication became very personal to me. Interrogators told me that my family was not feeling well, and I had no way to check on them, or even to let them know that I was alive.

[02:23] At night, whenever a new detainee came into the next cell, we would try to communicate through the heating ducts and exchange names and numbers, so whoever got out first could let the other families know. Before my release, I was moved to a shared cell with a Belgian cyclist who was accused of espionage because he had unknowingly taken a photo of a military site in Iran. He had been held for a month in solitary confinement, and nobody outside knew he had been detained. He had taken a pen from one of his interrogation sessions, and he wrote his name on a napkin and gave it to me, and I managed to get it out. I brought his name to public attention, and I learned two months later that he was released. A napkin got his story out.

Fast forward to my fourth year at the university: I was expelled, barred from higher education, and later sentenced to three years in prison. I decided to leave the country, and I had to be smuggled out across the border to Turkey. Yet another wall—or, better said, a mountain—to overcome. A year later, in 2012, I came to the US as a refugee, and for the first time I experienced the open internet, something I didn't need a workaround to access. But being on this side of the firewall didn't mean I could reach my family, my friends, or my colleagues back in Iran.

[04:33] Internet freedom became my work, and I've been involved in it for the past 14 years. I know from personal experience what it feels like when someone controls everything you hear and who can hear you. Today, this control is exercised through the internet. In Iran, our findings show that 80% of commonly used global traffic was blocked earlier this year. During the shutdowns, it went up to 96% and sometimes 99%. Your phone has a signal, but you cannot go on YouTube. You cannot open Instagram. You cannot make a call to your family. For anything ordinary you need to visit, you need a workaround, a circumvention tool.

And the filtering goes far beyond blocking addresses. Iran uses deep packet inspection. To give you an example: imagine a postal service that refuses letters because of the addresses on the envelope. Now imagine it also opens those envelopes and inspects what's inside. Encryption keeps the content private, of course, but the censor still reads the pattern and blocks the letters, and the traffic, even if it doesn't recognize it. So our job is to look for weaknesses and holes in the firewall and to build workarounds that make the traffic look like ordinary web browsing or a simple video call. The censor adapts, so we also have to adapt. And our job is to keep the workarounds simple, so that every non-technical user can use them too.

[06:36] Over 90% of Iranian internet users use a VPN. It's simply the only way for them to get online. In 2022, after Mahsa Amini was killed and the Woman, Life, Freedom movement began, we started the work that later became Holistic Resilience. Our community-driven initiative connects people to VPN connections that volunteers contribute through MahsaServer. MahsaNG, the application users rely on, has passed 5 million downloads, and our operational figures show 100 million successful connections facilitated every month. That means 100 million times a month, a user in Iran is able to reach the open internet or make a call securely.

But I already knew there were limits to relying on a VPN alone. In November 2019, during protests, the Iranian government shut down the internet, cut international access, and carried out a violent crackdown. Reuters later reported that they killed 1,500 people on the streets over about ten days. Families abroad couldn't connect with their families inside. We didn't know what was going on in Iran. I was one of those families. Only when the government began partially restoring the connection did the footage start to come out and reveal what had happened inside the country. That was the wake-up moment for me. A VPN still needs a route to the open internet. When the government cuts that route, another app cannot bring it back. By some conservative estimates, the Iranian government has invested over $10 billion in its National Information Network to isolate people from the rest of the world,

[08:53] while keeping their domestic services, and their surveillance systems, running. China has entrenched this. Russia is building it. We call it the splinternet. This time, we needed infrastructure that no government and no person could control.

Then, in September 2022, protests returned after Mahsa Amini was killed, and so did the shutdowns. It had become a standard tactic for the government. But this time there was something different: Starlink coverage became available over Iran. Information could come from the sky, literally. In the first week of coverage, we managed to smuggle the first Starlink unit—the one you see in the picture—into Iran. We tested it, and it worked. Years earlier, I had needed help getting out myself. This time, it was my turn to get connections in.

But a working terminal was only the beginning. The equipment was super expensive, cost-prohibitive for an average Iranian. It was dangerous to have and difficult to get. And donations, as many of us know, would never meet the demand. So we created an underground Telegram marketplace called NasNet: verified suppliers, trusted communities, transactions designed to limit exposure to government surveillance, and, of course, security education materials. Buyers had a reason to buy, suppliers had a reason to sell, and access could grow beyond what anyone could imagine. I had studied economics, and I trusted Adam Smith's invisible hand to take care of this. So instead of me getting into the details—

[Video clip: news coverage of Iran's internet shutdowns, including reports that the blackout was the longest national shutdown ever recorded and that Iranians were turning to VPNs and smuggled Starlink terminals despite the risk of prison.]

[11:46] These are just a few of the Starlinks that got in—maybe one or two days of operations. Still, most people could not afford a Starlink unit. Each connection had to reach many more people. That's why we built NasNet Panel, a companion operating system that lets you reconfigure any off-the-shelf router into a micro-ISP that no government can control. NasNet Panel lets someone with an internet connection—it could be a Starlink, it could be a border-roaming SIM card—share it with anybody else, anywhere in the country, over the domestic network the government built to isolate people. People farther away can establish a VPN to wherever the Starlink is, over the domestic network, and tunnel their traffic out of the country. So when the government cuts international access but leaves its domestic infrastructure running, people use that domestic network to reach someone who has a way out.

Think about that. The $10 billion investment—or, by some estimates, $22 billion including private-sector investment—in a National Information Network built to keep people inside and isolated from the rest of the world now carries people out. We don't have to replace a single cable to undermine it. We use it. One terminal can serve 50 people, and for basic messaging it can go up to 200.

[13:45] So the 100,000 Starlink units in Iran right now could translate into millions of connections. One NasNet Panel user whom we had helped before the war earlier this year wrote to thank us for saving his father's life. Before the war, he had set up Starlink and NasNet Panel in his hometown. During the January blackout, his father had to travel to Tehran, got caught up in the protests, and was hit and injured. They couldn't communicate back, because the internet was down and the phone lines were not secure. But they realized the VPN was working and WhatsApp was running, so they were able to get word out, and the son could get help to them. When I read that, I thought about the time I didn't know how my family, how my mother, was doing, back when I was in prison. But this time, this family already had the connection they needed. We are working hard to make that access available to every family in Iran, whenever they need it.

During the 12-day war last year, the January blackout, and then the wartime blackout, which lasted 88 days, information kept getting out from the very first moment.

[15:32] We saw the footage and the crackdown inside the country from the very beginning. That was thanks to brave and defiant Iranians who took the risk of having those Starlinks and building this network.

As discussed in the previous panels and yesterday, this is not an issue isolated to Iran. It is a wider issue. In 2024, Brazil blocked X and threatened fines for anyone who used a VPN to access it. The Freedom on the Net report shows we are now in the 14th consecutive year of declining internet freedom around the world. The question of who controls our ability to communicate matters everywhere. So the question remains the same: a legal right to speech needs a practical way to be heard, especially in the digital age, and it needs protection for the person who speaks—freedom of speech and freedom after speech.

So what comes next? We have to move toward building a global communication infrastructure with multiple, redundant providers and independent routes, where communities share and maintain their own connections and their own networks. That requires open protocols and decentralized networks, where control is spread across users rather than held by any single government or person. We need encryption and anonymity built in by design. Starlink has been vital in Iran and in many other cases, like Ukraine,

[17:25] but we also need options alongside it. We cannot be at the mercy of one person or one government. For everyone here who works on freedom of expression, this has to become part of the agenda. We have to support the connections, whoever maintains them, and the people who do the research to secure them. I urge everyone here to build this before the next crisis, not during it.

Seventeen years ago, I was trying to reach another person through a heating duct. I carried a message out on a napkin. Today we are helping communities, millions of people, build their own ways to reach the world. Overcoming digital state censorship requires moving beyond standard software workarounds toward a hybrid, decentralized hardware and protocol ecosystem that actively repurposes restrictive network infrastructure for open communication.

Finally, I want to reiterate that as technical mechanisms evolve, advocacy networks must address two distinct aspects of freedom of expression for those most at risk: freedom of speech, which is the practical ability to transmit an idea and a message, and freedom after speech, which is the protection, operational security, and physical safety that any speaker needs after the message has been delivered. We are trying to build to secure both. Thank you so much.