Iran’s Internet Imperative

The Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal

imperative image (not from article) from

No one knows how Iran’s political protests will evolve, and perhaps the current moment is more like Poland in 1981 than 1988. That’s all the more reason for the U.S. to assist Iran’s political opposition as it seeks to use the internet to evade regime censors and build a larger movement.

We do know that demand for information inside Iran is skyrocketing. Iranians are flocking by the millions to use circumvention software like Psiphon and Lantern to hide their identities from Tehran’s cyber authorities and access social media, messaging apps and trustworthy news sites. Silicon Valley tech company Ultrareach Internet Corp., which invented the Ultrasurf circumvention software, reported its servers failed this month as Iranians flooded their systems. More than half of the Iranian population owns a smart phone.

The authorities in Tehran are reluctant to order a wholesale internet shutdown lest it damage Iran’s already-weak domestic economy and anger more Iranians. But they also want to control the flow of news and information into and throughout Iran. Toward that end they’ve blocked Twitter , Facebook and in particular Telegram, a messaging app with more than 40 million Iranian users. Meanwhile, President Hassan Rouhani uses government TV and social media to offer lip service to the right of Iranians to express themselves.

This an opportunity for the Trump Administration to learn from the Reagan Administration, which used the telecommunications tools of the 1980s to spread information behind the Iron Curtain. The tools then were short wave radio, satellite news and fax machines. Today’s dissenters need software to evade the regimes’s internet firewalls.

Yet the U.S. government seems remarkably slow and backward in spreading the freedom message, starting with the taxpayer-backed Broadcasting Board of Governors. The BBG’s mission is to “inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy,” which should put it in the center of Iran’s online battle.

But the presidentially appointed BBG board has become a political sinecure, rather than a home for foreign-policy experts who want to fight oppression. Its current CEO, former cable industry executive John Lansing, was appointed by President Obama. President Trump hasn’t nominated a replacement.

While Iranians are desperate for reliable circumvention technology, the BBG leadership has spent only $15 million of its $787 million 2017 budget on internet freedom and anti-censorship projects, and the agency is telling vendors it’ll take weeks to direct more funding to these projects. The place needs a thorough rethinking for the internet age. Is President Trump aware that he could dismiss the BBG’s current board and nominate a CEO who’s more attuned to foreign policy and the fight for freedom?

Ronald Reagan once observed that truth is “the ultimate weapon in the arsenal of democracy.” That belief animated U.S. policy during the 1980s and, along with a U.S. economic revival and military buildup, sowed the seeds of revolution across the Soviet bloc. The Trump Administration needs a similar strategy toward Iran, North Korea, and for that matter Cuba, Venezuela and China.