TNB Tech Minute: U.S. Smuggled Thousands of Starlink Terminals Into Iran
WSJ Tech News Briefing
The Wall Street Journal
4.3 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 12 February 2026
⏱️ 4 minutes
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| 0:31.3 | Here's your afternoon, TNB Tech Minute for Thursday, February 12th. I'm Danny Lewis for the Wall Street Journal. |
| 0:38.8 | We exclusively report that the Trump administration covertly sent thousands of Elon Musk's Starlink |
| 0:43.5 | terminals into Iran after the regime's brutal crackdown on demonstrations last month. U.S. officials |
| 0:48.7 | say about 6,000 of the satellite internet kits were smuggled into the country in an effort to |
| 0:52.9 | keep dissidents online after Iranian authorities stifled internet access. It's the first time the U.S. has directly |
| 0:59.1 | sent Starlink into Iran, where owning one of the terminals is illegal. The U.S. has denied |
| 1:04.2 | any connection to the uprising, and the White House declined to comment. The Russian government is |
| 1:09.1 | accelerating its campaign to shift Russians away from |
| 1:11.7 | Western-based messaging platforms outside of its control, starting with blocking access to WhatsApp. |
| 1:17.5 | The Kremlin confirmed that it is restricting access to META's messaging app and is also throttling |
| 1:22.4 | telegram. It is said that companies that own platforms operating inside Russia are violating Russian law by refusing to comply with a range of restrictions. |
| 1:30.8 | Tech experts say Moscow is hoping to push users to a state-controlled messenger app that offers no encryption. |
| 1:36.7 | WhatsApp said it would do whatever it can to keep 100 million users inside Russia connected. |
| 1:41.5 | Telegram's founder said Russia was forcing its citizens to switch to an app, |
| 1:45.1 | quote, built for surveillance and political censorship. And SoftBank says it took on $27 billion in new |
| 1:52.7 | debt at the end of 2025 in order to pay for its investment in Open AI. The Japanese investment |
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