Intelligence on Iran's digital operations. Cyber, influence, sanctions evasion, network infrastructure. Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Joined April 2019
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Bank Melli Iran has been on the US Treasury's sanctions list since 2007. Its messenger spent eighteen days on Apple's App Store anyway.
Not because Apple missed the tie. Because the filing left nothing to find.
digimpactlab.substack.com/p/…
On September 30, Iran’s Deputy Minister of Communications, Mohammad Hafez Hakami, said if Starlink spreads, the state loses the ability to cut the internet in a crisis. It would have to cut the electricity instead.
Iran Digital Pulse, September 2026:
digimpactlab.substack.com/p/…
Iran’s shutdowns work because traffic runs through a few gateways the state controls. A Starlink terminal uses none of them. A grid cut would also stop banks, hospitals and water pumps, so the warning reads as a message to would-be buyers.
Users were counting other costs. Dataak logged 116 days of restrictions or outages in 15 months, and only 59% of Instagram shops have returned. Starlink was the most referenced actor in our 7,360 posts this month.
digimpactlab.substack.com/p/…
Iran's internet came back in May, but it came back different.
A government official says nobody can trace 12 trillion Tomans in VPN revenue, even though every purchase ran through bank cards on a state-run network. That's not a mystery. It's a choice.
digimpactlab.substack.com/p/…
Two tiers on one network. A VPN tax stacked on data already paid for. A communications minister facing public calls to resign over service that still doesn't work.
Add it up, and the outages start looking less like negligence and more like a pricing strategy.
As one user put it: an Iranian doesn't fear war, an Iranian fears the internet being cut off.
Six months after the shutdown, that fear comes with a monthly bill.
digimpactlab.substack.com/p/…
The App Store filing traces to a personal developer account with no company name attached. Iran's Official Gazette names that account holder chairman of one of Bale's own operating entities, for a term covering the entire window the app was live.
Apple's review catches a filing that names a sanctioned bank, a subsidiary, a country. It has no way to catch one that names nothing, filed by someone whose only tie sits in a registry an ocean away.
digimpactlab.substack.com/p/…
Iran's social commerce market generates $6.98 per person a year. Egypt, poorer by every conventional economic measure, generates $31.95, nearly six times as much. Income is not the reason.
open.substack.com/pub/digimp…
The panel that followed did not blame payments. Card to card transfers work. Processors function. The friction sits one layer up: sellers building storefronts behind a VPN, on platforms buyers can only reach the same way.
Iran has not reopened Instagram, Telegram, or WhatsApp. It built alternatives instead, a tacit admission messaging and commerce are one layer. The wall was a choice. What it now costs, on every side of it, is not.
open.substack.com/pub/digimp…