Top Iranian graduate student faces imminent execution, activists warn

Most affected are businesses reliant on Instagram and other global services, but even users pushed onto domestic platforms described repeated outages, poor functionality and heavy censorship on apps such as Rubika, Bale and Shad.

One citizen said Rubika often fails to send photos and videos for much of the day and alleged the platform checks users’ phone galleries. Another said uploading a single image on Rubika can take an hour.

Citizens also raised concerns that domestic applications could expose their data and devices to state monitoring.

Internet monitoring group NetBlocks said Thursday that 69 days of widespread international internet disruption in Iran had fueled unemployment among workers and redistributed wealth in favor of groups aligned with the government.

Education disrupted

Dozens of students, parents and several teachers said Shad, Iran’s state-run online education platform, does not allow users to properly download photos and videos and does not provide a suitable environment for teaching.

“The children’s classes are online, but the application is designed so only the teacher can speak,” the mother of one student said.

“If a student has a question or does not understand something, they have to wait until five in the afternoon, when student access is reopened. In reality, students are present in the online class, but even if they are absent the teacher does not notice. The entire education process depends solely on parental supervision.”

Some teachers continue to expect students to produce clips and upload them despite low internet speeds, users said.

The problem of accessing information through domestic networks has also affected university students.

A computer student in Tehran said: “Neither the online classes have quality nor can you find anything worth learning in the ‘dictatorship information network.’”

Students said online learning and access to professors’ teaching materials have effectively come to a halt.

Costly barriers

With Instagram blocked by the state, many Iranians have lost a free channel to market goods and services, while domestic apps such as Rubika and Bale charge high advertising fees and impose lengthy, censorship-driven approval processes, citizens said.

Several citizens said Rubika charges business owners about 63 million tomans, roughly $359 at the current open-market exchange rate, for 15 minutes of advertising.

She pointed to what she described as the government’s contradictory treatment of insiders and outsiders in recent months, saying the Islamic Republic used women without compulsory hijab or women with looser dress to promote pro-government nighttime gatherings during and after the war, while rejecting a short advertisement because an elbow was visible for a few seconds.

One female business owner said she was forced to advertise on a domestic app after two months without work so she could sell goods left in her inventory.

“Before approving my channel they took my money, but then rejected my ad with the excuse that my activity on the app was low and my elbow was visible in the video,” she said.

The female business owner added that when she called to ask for the advertising fee back, she was told the money would remain in her wallet until she “fixed the video and channel.”

“So I have to work on an empty channel for several months, bring in goods and invest, just for an empty channel, so maybe they will approve my ad?” she said.

“I spent eight years on Instagram and put time into building my page, but with the internet cutoff I effectively came to a halt. How am I supposed to start again?”

Another user referred to the “thousands of rules and clauses domestic apps have imposed for advertising” and said the platform took “a huge amount of money” before saying it would not advertise an “underwear channel.”

“What am I supposed to do with all this merchandise?” the user said. “Set myself on fire or burn the goods? My business was on Instagram. Restore the internet so I can go back to work.”

A user on X had earlier written that searching for “women’s underwear” on Zarebin, a search engine promoted as Iran’s domestic version of Google, leads to a “no results found” page, while searching for “men’s underwear” produces meaningful results.

“With the national internet, you cannot even buy women’s underwear. It is both ridiculous and tragic,” the user wrote.

Other users said people had turned “out of necessity” and because of the two-month internet cutoff to the Islamic Republic’s “fake” networks such as Bale and Rubika, but said it remained unclear how much access the government could gain through the platforms to citizens’ phones and whether it could monitor or surveil their devices.

Efforts to bypass censorship

Despite the imposed restrictions, users said they continue to find ways to bypass content censorship.

Several citizens said that after access to Telegram was blocked, several channels appeared on local apps such as Soroush Plus, Rubika and Bale offering free or low-cost configurations to bypass filtering.

“They nationalized the internet to gather supporters for the government, but exactly the opposite is happening,” one user said.

Users said this contrasted with content circulated by government-linked figures and channels, which they described as including false claims about the Islamic Republic winning the war with the United States and Israel, false reports of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s death and inaccurate accounts of negotiations.

One user said government-linked content on Rubika portrays the Islamic Republic as defined by “peace, friendship and human rights.”

Despite the government’s efforts to keep the platforms tightly controlled, accounts using the Lion and Sun as profile pictures have appeared. The historic Iranian national emblem is associated by many with the pre-1979 monarchy.

Other accounts have used portraits of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last shah of Iran who was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, as profile pictures.

Citizens said such accounts, as well as channels reposting news from the outside world, are blocked and banned after some time.

Still, they said daily resistance continues, with new and larger channels replacing those that are shut down.

I grew up in the Soviet Union and learned early that the walls had ears, letters were opened, and you never knew who was listening to your phone calls. My parents and grandparents spoke in half‑sentences. We were what Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky called “doublethinkers,” saying what the state wanted to hear while thinking the opposite.

But at night, doublethinkers like my family would gather around a shortwave radio and twist the dial until the static gave way to the sounds of Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. The signal may have faded in and out, but the message was clear: the world was bigger than the one the regime allowed us to see.

That same hunger for an unfiltered signal is palpable today in Iran. Since Feb. 28, 2026, the Islamic Republic has flipped the kill switch, keeping 92 million Iranians at roughly 1% connectivity—the longest nationwide shutdown ever recorded.

The question for the West is whether we will help them hear the signal or let the regime kill it.

The Iran playbook

Circumvention today is a layered game. No single tool defeats a full shutdown. What works is redundancy and creativity.

Software that adapts under fire. Cheap VPNs are largely dead. The regime deploys military-grade jamming to hunt them down. But purpose-built tools persist. Psiphon and Conduit allow diaspora activists to share their laptop connections with users inside Iran—roughly 400,000 used Psiphon to pull people through. FreeGate, built on a peer-to-peer proxy network, leaves no trace.

Obfuscation protocols like V2Ray and Shadowsocks hide traffic by making it look like standard web browsing. Direct Tor connections are blocked, but bridges with pluggable transports open during the brief windows when international routes flicker back on.

Satellite with discipline. Starlink was a lifeline during Iran’s 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests. Now it faces 30% packet loss from sustained RF jamming. The operational fix is rigorous: hide dishes, camouflage them, power on only briefly, never reuse a location.

We should also utilize satellite data broadcasting, like Toosheh, which allows users to “record” news and software from standard satellite TV dishes, bypassing the internet entirely. The next frontier is Direct-to-Cell—satellites that connect to standard smartphones, requiring no visible terminal and leaving no dish to confiscate.

Low-tech resilience. When bandwidth is throttled, Iranians switch to text-only news, email digests, RSS feeds, and messaging apps running in “light” modes. Users are also distributing "offline Wikipedias" and content packages via high-capacity SD cards.

When the internet goes dark entirely, they build offline networks using Bluetooth mesh apps, Wi-Fi Direct file sharing, and USB drives passed hand to hand. Near the Azerbaijan border, some Iranians roam onto foreign towers. Private rooms inside multiplayer video games become covert chat channels.

The bread emoji (🍞) once organized food-price protests in Iran beneath the radar of automated filters. Code evolves faster than censors.

This cat-and-mouse dynamic has always defined information warfare under repression. In China, students held up blank white sheets of paper—a silent protest against a regime that had made even the simplest words illegal. In Hong Kong during the 2019 protests, AirDrop became a political tool, pushing messages directly to strangers in public spaces without relying on open networks.

Censors ban words, dissidents find symbols. They block a platform, activists find a workaround. During Romania’s Ceaușescu era, Irina Margareta Nistor secretly dubbed thousands of banned Western films. Her grainy VHS tapes, smuggled apartment to apartment, helped puncture a system built on lies. Today’s dissidents have different tools, but the same ingenuity.

What US and Silicon Valley should do

A growing ecosystem in the free world is building tools to keep information flowing under pressure. The Open Technology Fund and Tor Project support censorship-resistant networks and rapidly deployable bridges, while SpaceX pushes satellite connectivity toward direct-to-cell models. Jigsaw and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are advancing tools that make platforms harder to block and safer under surveillance.

Washington’s task is to scale, coordinate, and sustain this stack so the signal gets through even under a full blackout.

Fund the stack that works under fire. The US should maintain Psiphon, Conduit, FreeGate, and Tor bridges, rotating them rapidly during thaw windows. This means supporting mirror sites, secure hosting, and offline content packages—and requiring low-bandwidth, offline-first design as a condition for any platform operating in high-risk markets.

Accelerate Direct-to-Cell. Streamline spectrum allocation and licensing so D2C technology can scale quickly. The goal is connectivity without hardware the regime can seize or jam.

Sanction the enablers. Target firms selling RF jammers, deep packet inspection systems, and surveillance technology to Tehran. Make information control a balance-sheet risk, not just a diplomatic talking point

Empower diaspora networks. Iranian diaspora communities verify video footage, translate eyewitness accounts, and run independent media that is trusted inside the country. During Belarus’s 2020 protests, SMS chains, printed leaflets, and neighborhood word-of-mouth coordinated action when connectivity collapsed. Iran’s diaspora is running the same model now and deserves structured support.

Pre-bunk, don’t just debunk. Companies like Jigsaw have pioneered inoculation-style media literacy—teaching people to recognize manipulation before they encounter it. In a world of deepfakes and synthetic media, this preparation is essential. This “pre-bunking” content should be scaled through diaspora-run news channels to reach users before the regime's propaganda takes root.

The crack of light

Václav Havel famously wrote that the “power of the powerless” is the ability to live in truth. For those of us in the free world, that imposes more than a moral obligation; it creates a strategic necessity.

The Cold War was won, in part, because a static-filled shortwave radio delivered the sound of freedom to those behind the Iron Curtain. Today, the “signal” is digital, but the stakes are identical.

Washington and Silicon Valley must act now to scale the tools of circumvention, raise the economic cost of censorship through data-driven diplomacy, and strengthen the “mental immune system” of those under fire. We have the technology to puncture the digital Iron Curtain. Our job is to ensure the crack of light gets through.

The detainees include women swept up during the nationwide uprising and others arrested following the military conflict involving Iran, the US, and Israel that began in February.

According to the HRANA report, 23 women are being held in the Aramesh ward, described as a basement-like structure with low ceilings and minimal ventilation.

Former detainees told the group the cramped conditions, which one compared to an ant nest, frequently trigger breathing problems and panic attacks.

Seven other women are currently being held in a quarantine unit characterized by poor sanitation and sewage odors. HRANA said that prisoners face a shortage of beds, limited medical treatment, and are often denied phone calls and family visits during their interrogation.

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Serious charges and legal limbo

The reports of poor conditions coincide with concerns over the legal status of those currently held in the facility. Iran International reported earlier that three female political prisoners – Mahboubeh Shabani, theatre actress Sima Anbaei Farimani, and Azar Yahou – remain in legal limbo at the prison.

These women face severe charges including enmity against God, conspiracy against national security, and alleged links to Israel. Despite weeks in detention, they have been denied access to lawyers and have not been informed of the status of their cases.

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Escalation of executions

The crackdown in the northeast reflects a wider national trend of severe punishment for security-related detainees. Center for Human Rights in Iran reported that at least 28 prisoners accused in political and security cases have been executed across Iran in the past 50 days.

Of those executed, 13 were individuals detained during the recent winter protests.

The sources said Keyvani was executed on the morning of March 18 without his family being informed, and his body was buried on March 23 in Khavaran.

Keyvani’s family later tried to mark the unmarked gravesite by placing stones nearby, but authorities removed them to prevent the burial location from being identified, the sources told Iran International.

Khavaran, in southeast Tehran, is known as a burial site associated with executed political prisoners, including victims of Iran’s 1988 mass executions. Families of those buried there have long accused authorities of preventing them from marking graves or holding public mourning ceremonies.

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Sources said Keyvani had been arrested on June 16, 2025, in Kordan, a mountainous village in Alborz province, west of Tehran and near the city of Karaj.

One source said Keyvani had a strong interest in motorcycling, especially jumping with motorcycles, and was riding in Kordan on the day of his arrest.

The source said security agents confiscated his phone during the arrest and used landscape photos he had taken in the area as evidence in the case, alleging links to Mossad and opposition groups.

Iran's judiciary-linked Mizan news agency on March 18 announced that Keyvani had been executed after his death sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court. Mizan alleged that Keyvani had passed “images and information of sensitive locations” to officers of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency.

At the time, Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard expressed deep regret over the execution and said the Swedish government sympathized with Keyvani’s family in Sweden and Iran. She added that the legal proceedings leading up to the execution did not meet the standards of due process.

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Sources told Iran International that on the night before the execution, Keyvani was summoned via loudspeaker without prior notice and held in solitary confinement until morning.

After Keyvani's detention, his family had no information about his condition or whereabouts for around 40 days. He was held in solitary confinement for nearly eight months and was told he would be released if he accepted the charges and made a "forced confession," according to the sources.

According to forced confessions later published by Iranian state media, Keyvani said he had been forced into espionage because of financial need and residency issues.

But sources indicated to Iran International that he had lived in Sweden for around 10 years and did not face financial difficulties. The sources also described him as intelligent and fluent in six languages.

Keyvani was among the latest in a series of executions in Iran of people accused of espionage for Israel, a pattern that has intensified since the 12-day war in June 2025. The executions have continued during and after the 2026 US-led war.

Iran has one of the highest execution rates in the world and has long used the death penalty in national security cases, including allegations of spying.

Following the conflict, rights groups and international media have reported a sharp increase in arrests and executions on such charges.

The Foremans, both in their 50s, were arrested in January 2025 while on a motorcycle trip through Iran. Their family says they had valid visas, a licensed guide, and an approved itinerary. They deny the espionage charges.

The Foremans are being held in separate wings of Tehran’s Evin prison, which rights groups have long criticized over alleged torture and inhumane conditions.

A source familiar with the matter said visits between political prisoners and their families were cut off after the Iran-US-Israel war began, with cabin visits restored for some prisoners only in the past two to three weeks.

The source said prisoners with relatives also held in Evin had been allowed ward-to-ward visits.

But when Lindsay and Craig Foreman asked prison officials on Sunday to see each other, they were told they had been banned from both in-person and cabin visits for three weeks because of their BBC World interview, the source said.

Lindsay Foreman said in the interview that her situation was frightening, adding that while it would one day end for them, “for these people it may never end.”

Craig Foreman said four of his cellmates had been taken away for their sentences to be carried out since he was transferred to Evin, with news of their executions broadcast on state television the following day.

Britain’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has previously said it was “deeply concerned” by the couple’s detention and that it continued to raise the case directly with Iranian authorities.

Rights groups and Western governments have long accused Iran of engaging in so-called “hostage diplomacy” by detaining foreign nationals to gain political or economic concessions, an allegation Tehran rejects, saying it faces Western intelligence infiltration.