Stealth signals are bypassing Iran’s internet blackout

Stealth Signals Are Bypassing Iran’s Internet Blackout

Files hidden in satellite TV broadcasts keep information flowing

**On 8 January 2026, **the Iranian government imposed a near-total communications shutdown. It was the country’s first full information blackout: For weeks, the internet was off across all provinces while services including the government-run intranet, VPNs, text messaging, mobile calls, and even landlines were severely throttled. It was an unprecedented lockdown that left more than 90 million people cut off not only from the world, but from one another.

Since then, connectivity has never fully returned. Following U.S. and Israeli airstrikes in late February, Iran again imposed near-total restrictions, and people inside the country again saw global information flows dry up.

The original January shutdown came amid nationwide protests over the deepening economic crisis and political repression, in which millions of people chanted antigovernment slogans in the streets. While Iranian protests have become frequent in recent years, this was one of the most significant uprisings since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The government responded quickly and brutally. One report put the death toll at more than 7,000 confirmed deaths and more than 11,000 under investigation. Many sources believe the death toll could exceed 30,000.

Thirteen days into the January shutdown, we at NetFreedom Pioneers (NFP) turned to a system we had built for exactly this kind of moment—one that sends files over ordinary satellite TV signals. During the national information vacuum, our technology, called Toosheh, delivered real-time updates into Iran, offering a lifeline to millions starved of trusted information.

How Iran Censors the Internet

I joined NetFreedom Pioneers, a nonprofit focused on anticensorship technology, in 2014. Censorship in Iran was a defining feature of my youth in the 1990s. After the Islamic Revolution, most Iranians began to lead double lives—one at home, where they could drink, dance, and choose their clothing, and another in public, where everyone had to comply with stifling government laws.

Iran’s internet infrastructure is more centralized than in other parts of the world, making it easier for the government to restrict the flow of information. Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto/Getty Images

My first experience with secret communications was when I was five and living in the small city of Fasa in southern Iran. My uncle brought home a satellite dish—dangerously illegal at the time—that allowed us to tune into 12 satellite channels. My favorite was Cartoon Network. Then, during my teenage years, this same uncle introduced me to the internet through dial-up modems. I remember using Yahoo Mail with its 4 megabytes of storage, reading news from around the world, and learning about the Chandra X-ray telescope from NASA’s website.

That openness didn’t last. As internet use spread in the early 2000s, the Iranian government began reshaping the network itself. Unlike the highly distributed networks in the United States or Europe, where thousands of providers exchange traffic across many independent routes, Iran’s connection to the global internet is relatively centralized. Most international traffic passes through a small number of gateways controlled by state-linked telecom operators. That architecture gives authorities unusual leverage: By restricting or withdrawing those connections, they can sharply reduce the country’s access to the outside world.

Over the past decade, Iran has expanded this control through what it calls the National Information Network, a domestically routed system designed to keep data inside the country whenever possible. Many government services, banking systems, and local platforms are hosted on this internal network. During periods of unrest, access to the global internet can be throttled or cut off while portions of this domestic network continue to function.

The government began its censorship campaign by redirecting or blocking websites. As internet use grew, it adopted more sophisticated approaches. For example, the Telecommunication Company of Iran uses a technique called deep packet inspection to analyze the content of data packets in real time. This method enables it to identify and block specific types of traffic, such as VPN connections, messaging apps, social media platforms, and banned websites.

The Stealth of Satellite Transmissions

Toosheh’s communication workaround builds on a history of satellite TV adoption in Middle Eastern and North African countries. By the early 2000s, satellite dishes were common in Iran; today the majority of households in Iran have access to satellite TV despite its official prohibition.

Unlike subscription services such as DirecTV and Dish Network, “free-to-air” satellite TV broadcasts are unencrypted and can be received by anyone with a dish and receiver—no subscription required. Because the signals are open, users can also capture and store the data they carry, rather than simply watching it live. Tech-savvy people learned that they could use a digital video broadcasting (DVB) card—a piece of hardware that connects to a computer and tunes into satellite frequencies—to transform a personal computer into a satellite receiver. This way, they could watch and store media locally as well as download data from dedicated channels.

Many Iranian citizens have free-to-air satellite dishes, like the ones on this apartment building in Tehran, and can thus download Toosheh transmissions, giving them a lifeline during internet blackouts.Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Toosheh, a Persian word that translates to “knapsack,” is the brainchild of Mehdi Yahyanejad, an Iranian-American technologist and entrepreneur. Yahyanejad cofounded NetFreedom Pioneers in 2012. He proposed that the satellite-computer connections enabled by a DVB card could be re-created in software, eliminating the need for specialized hardware. He added a simple digital interface to the software to make it easy for anyone to use. The next breakthrough came when the NFP team developed a new transfer protocol that tricks ordinary satellite receivers into downloading data alongside audio and video content. Thus, Toosheh was born.

Satellite TV uses a file system called an MPEG transport stream that allows multiple audio, video, or data layers to be packaged into a single stream file. When you tune in to a satellite channel and select an audio option or closed captions, you’re accessing data stored in different parts of this stream. The NFP team’s insight was that, by piggybacking on one of these layers, Toosheh could send an MPEG stream that included documents, videos, and more.

HOW TOOSHEH WORKS: At NetFreedom Pioneers, content curators pull together files—news articles, videos, audio, and software [1]. Toosheh’s encoder software [2] compresses the files into a bundle, in .ts format, creating an MPEG transport stream [3]. From there, it’s uploaded to a server for transmission [4] via a free-to-air TV channel on a Yahsat satellite that’s positioned over the Middle East to provide regional coverage [5]. Satellite receivers [6] directly capture the data streams, which are downloaded to computers, smartphones, and other devices, and decoded by Toosheh software [8].Chris Philpot

A satellite receiver can’t tell the difference between our data and normal satellite audio and video data since it only “sees” the MPEG streams, not what’s encoded on them. This means the data can be downloaded and read, watched, and saved on local devices such as computers, smartphones, or storage devices. What’s more, the system is entirely private: No one can detect whether someone has received data through Toosheh; there are no traceable logs of user activity.

Toosheh doesn’t provide internet access, but rather delivers curated data through satellite technology. The fundamental distinction lies in the way users interact with