DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Guns drawn, Iranian intelligence agentsrushed into the apartment of a Washington Post reporter and his journalistwife in Tehran.

Threatening to kill Jason Rezaian in front of his wife, Yeganeh, the 20agents in the July 2014 raid tore through their belongings and rifledthrough drawers, clothes and valuables for an hour.

But perhaps their most eagerly sought target wasn’t exactly inside thehouse: They forced the couple to hand over the passwords to their email andsocial media profiles.

That raid demonstrated how much of a threat Iran’s theocratic governmentsees in the internet. It has long sought to strictly control cyberspace andsocial media — and, thereby, the flow of information to the public.

But the Islamic Republic’s relationship with the world wide web is far morecomplicated than simple repression. Over the past four years, authoritieshave encouraged wider use of the internet among Iranians, hoping togenerate the benefits of a more modern economy. As a result, nearly halfthe population have in their pockets a tool that the state is struggling toconstrain: smartphones, with cameras and internet links that let anyonebroadcast to the world.

Those smartphones helped spread the startling burst of protests across Iranthat opened 2018. The government succeeded in suffocating the flare-up inpart by shutting off key social media and messaging apps, but the lessonwas clear: The same oxygen that can resuscitate commerce can also givebreath to potential revolt.

Authorities’ solution has been to create a so-called “halal net,” Iran’sown locally controlled version of the internet aimed at restricting whatthe public can see.

As Iran approaches the 40th anniversary of the revolution that brought itscleric-led rule to power, how it handles the power of cyberspace will becrucial to its future, determining whether it moves to greater openness orseals itself off from the world.

“The Islamic Republic is not black and white. It shows a myriad ofcontradictions and its internet policy I think is one of the great examplesof those contradictions,” said Sanam Vakil, an associate fellow at ChathamHouse who studies Iran. “The government has taken the internet andeffectively used it for its own purposes and also has realized the dangersof it as well.”

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Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, how information spreads across massmedia has been tightly controlled.

All television and radio broadcasts within Iran are from state-runstations. Satellite dishes remain ostensibly illegal, though they areplentiful, drawing occasional attacks from bat-wielding governmentenforcers. Journalists face restrictions in what they can cover and wherethey can travel across a country of 80 million people that’s nearlytwo-and-a-half times the size of Texas.

The internet helped collapse that distance. During Iran’s 2009 protestssurrounding the disputed re-election of hard-line President MahmoudAhmadinejad, still nascent social media spread word of the events amongIranians and brought videos of the shooting death of 26-year-old Neda AghaSoltan to the world.

Iran’s government, overseen by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,violently suppressed the demonstrations. The crackdown killed dozens andsaw thousands imprisoned, with some tortured by their jailers.

Even before the 2009 protests, Iran blocked access to YouTube. Twitter andFacebook followed amid the unrest, as did many other sites later. Some inIran began using virtual private networks, or VPNs, which allow users tobypass government censorship.

The chief difference between then and the protests that rocked the countrycoming into 2018 was the massive proliferation of smartphones. As recentlyas 2014, only an estimated 2 million Iranians possessed one. Today,estimates suggest Iranians own 48 million.

That explosive growth was spurred by the administration of President HasanRouhani, a cleric who is a relative moderate within Iran’s system. Hisofficials allowed more mobile phone service providers to offer 3G and 4Ginternet, suddenly making sharing photos and images possible. Home internetconnections became faster. The encrypted messaging platform Telegram spreadlike wildfire. Over 40 million Iranians are estimated to use it, foreverything from benign conversations to commerce and political campaigning.

In the recent unrest, protesters used Telegram’s mass-messaging channels toshare information and videos across 75 cities and towns wheredemonstrations erupted. Some showed people openly in the streets shouting,“Death to Khamenei!” It shocked many, especially as such cries could bringa death sentence.

When the government temporarily blocked Telegram as well as Instagram, ithelped smother the protests within days. Notably, however, Telegram’ssilencing quickly brought complaints from businesspeople who use itschannels to promote and sell their goods.

Even after the unrest, Rouhani argued it was futile trying to shut off anindispensable tool of modern life.

“If you want cyberspace to be useful to the community, come forward with asolution using it to promote the culture instead of blocking it,” he said,noting that past Iranian government tried to stop people from listening tothe radio “but this prevention was useless.”

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The danger — and potential — of the internet as a weapon came into focusfor Iran when it faced the world’s first cyberweapon almost a decade ago.

At the height of tensions between Tehran and the West over its nuclearprogram, thousands of centrifuges enriching uranium at Iran’s undergroundNatanz facility suddenly began spinning themselves to death. They had beenhit by the Stuxnet computer virus, widely believed to be an American andIsraeli creation.

Material leaked by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agencycontractor who exposed U.S. government surveillance programs in 2013,suggested Iran at the time was the country where American spies collectedthe most electronic data.

Beginning in 2011, Iran worked to strike back.

Among the most spectacular cyberattacks attributed to Iran is Shamoon, avirus that hit the state-run giant Saudi Arabian Oil Co. and Qatari naturalgas producer RasGas, deleting hard drives and displaying a picture of aburning American flag on computer screens. Saudi Aramco ultimately shutdown its network and destroyed over 30,000 computers. A later iteration ofShamoon in late 2016 caused even more damage.

The U.S. blames Iranian hackers for a denial-of-service attack thatoverwhelmed six major American banks in 2012. U.S. prosecutors in 2016accused hackers believed to be backed by Iran of attacking dozens of banksand a small dam near New York City. They also have been suspected oftargeting the email and social media accounts of Obama administrationofficials.

Analysts and security experts believe many of these hackers likely receivebacking from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, a powerful paramilitary andeconomic force in the country answerable only to Khamenei himself.

The Guard employs more direct means as well, like its wresting away of thepasswords of Rezaian and his wife, recounted in a lawsuit he filed againstthe Guard and Iran in U.S. federal court.

Similarly, it seized control of the Facebook and email accounts ofIranian-American dual national Siamak Namazi, who remains detained in Iranalong with his octogenarian father Baquer. The Guard then pretended to beNamazi in correspondence with U.S. government officials and others, likeNew Yorker journalist Robin Wright, tricking them into opening a file thatgave the hackers access to their computers.

Cyberespionage is even used in Iran’s internal rivalries, with attacks onmembers of the government, particularly officials in Rouhani’s ForeignMinistry, including Zarif, according to a recent report by the CarnegieEndowment for International Peace.

“The targeting of members of government — individuals that have alreadybeen vetted by the regime — reflects the importance of cybersurveillance asa tool of the hard-line security establishment to monitor potential rivalsfor power,” the report said.

Then Iran moved to target the internet itself. – Agencies