An order to cut the internet in Iran usually comes from the Supreme National Security Council, but someone has to turn the switch.

An examination of thousands of public documents shows that a network of managers and companies controls Iranians’ communications and, at certain points, cuts them off. The core of this network consists of 690 managers and 298 companies. At its heart are the “Implementation Headquarters of the Order of Imam” and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Nearly 10 months after the massacre of Dey, the exact number of those killed remains unclear; estimates vary from several thousand to more than 50,000. That massacre, in addition to suppression forces and bullets, needed something else: “darkness”; an element that has caused its figures and scope to have not been precisely clarified to date, similar to the massacre of Bloody Aban in 1398. The order to cut the internet in Aban 1398 and Dey 1404 came from a security institution, but it was carried out on a platform that this network has built. In addition to the Implementation Headquarters and the IRGC, companies that describe themselves as “private” and “knowledge-based” are active in providing the hardware and software for monitoring and filtering. One of them is Data Processing of Doran; a company that was founded by the owners of the Panbeh-Riz group and managers who were born in Iraq, and then was run on a family basis afterward.

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