The award-winning ex-UNSW student who turned off Iran’s internet
Before he became Iran’s communications minister and was sanctioned for blocking the internet from citizens, Eisa Zarepour studied in Sydney.
He was an award-winning student, hardworking and so low-key that seemingly no one who worked with him in Australia imagined that, within just a few years, he would become known as the man who turned off Iran’s internet.
A decade ago, Eisa Zarepour arrived in Sydney from Iran to complete his PhD at the University of NSW.
Last year, as Iran’s Minister for Information and Communications Technology, he was among the first Iranian government ministers to be sanctioned by the US and the EU (but not Australia), to the surprise of many who knew him here.
“He was a very hardworking and motivated student, and was able to accomplish his tasks with minimal supervision,” recalls Professor Mahbub Hassan, Mr Zarepour’s PhD supervisor.
As professor of computer science and engineering at UNSW, in 2013 he met Mr Zarepour, then 33, when he was admitted to UNSW as a PhD student.
Over the following three years, Mr Zarepour would prove to be one of his top performers, co-authoring some two dozen papers and winning multiple awards.
“He worked on wireless sensor networks that can connect tiny sensor nodes together to form a network of sensors,” says Professor Hassan, whose name also appears on most of Mr Zarepour’s published papers.
“To demonstrate the utility of these sensor networks, he developed some simulation models of example applications, which include models that could detect some diseases in human lungs or improve the efficiency of industrial plants. All his research works were published in public scientific literature.”
Happy, helpful student
Mr Zarepour was a happy student, reliable, responsible and needing minimal supervision to complete difficult tasks. He would willingly help others, and “he liked awards. He would apply for as many awards as possible and work hard to prepare for them”.
In three years in Australia, Mr Zarepour won numerous prizes. In 2014 he jointly earned UNSW People’s Choice Award for Innovator of the Year, for work on nano sensor networks for improving the performance of chemical reactors.
“Energy companies are spending billions of dollars to convert natural gas to clean fuel. But the performance of the process is low,” he says in a video made to mark his win, in which he outlines his plans to harness technology and boost the performance of chemical reactors.
“Using my innovation, I believe we can make it cheaper and more efficient,” he says. “The benefit for countries like Australia is also huge because we can take the low-grade coal to generate fuel.”
In 2015 he earned a postdoctoral writing fellowship and was shortlisted for the UNSW Malcolm Chaikin Prize for best engineering PhD thesis. For his efforts researching “efficient communication protocols for wireless nanoscale sensor networks”, he was presented with his doctorate by the university’s chancellor, David Gonski.
“Following his PhD, Eisa worked with me on a small project as a part-time postdoctoral researcher in late 2015 for a few months,” says UNSW Professor Salil Kanhere, who had no idea of his student’s political aspirations.
“The work resulted in a couple of peer-reviewer papers. As I recall, he returned to Iran at some point in 2016. When he left, he told me he was taking up an academic position in an Iranian university.”
Political rising star
By mid-2016, armed with his Australian doctorate, Mr Zarepour was back home as a postdoctoral research fellow at Sharif University of Technology, and soon assistant professor at Iran University of Science and Technology.
He was also rising through the ranks of Iran’s government. In 2018 he was appointed head of the Statistics and Information Technology Centre of the Judiciary. By 2021, he was Minister of Information and Communications Technology, a position that would quickly earn him a global profile.
The death in September last year of a young Iranian woman, Mahsa “Jina” Amini, after her arrest by morality police for having breached the country’s strict dress codes, led to mass protests, in Iran and then globally.
A story in The Weekend Australian Magazine on Saturday reveals what happened when Australian-Iranians joined those demonstrations.
In an effort to stop protests, the Iranian government introduced national restrictions on social media use and widespread internet blackouts.
As Communications Minister, Mr Zarepour, now 42, was “responsible for the Iranian government’s shameful attempt to block the internet access of millions of Iranians in the hopes of slowing down the protests”, the US Treasury declared in October when it sanctioned him for having censored the ability of Iranian citizens to exercise their freedom of expression and access to media.
“Zarepour, who has called social media platforms vehicles for carrying the messages of protesters, has indicated that the internet clampdown and silencing of voices online will continue as long as protests persist.”
Less than a fortnight later, he was also named by the EU “for his responsibility in the internet shutdown”.
Others on that list, and facing travel bans and an asset freeze, included the heads of Iran’s morality police and law enforcement agency.
Mr Zarepour “played a key role in the Iranian government’s decision to systematically violate the Iranian people’s freedom of opinion and expression by imposing restrictions on internet access during the protests that followed the death of 22-year old Mahsa Amini on 16 September 2022”, the EU declared.
“That action further diminished the already very limited space for civil society actors in Iran … As Minister of Information and Communications Technology, Zarepour is therefore responsible for serious human rights violations.”
The Department of Foreign Affairs has refused to speculate on whether Australia might sanction its former student, while the Department of Home Affairs would not comment on Mr Zarepour’s residency status, given overseas reports that two of his children were born in Australia.
Unmemorable
For many who worked with him here, however, he appears to have left a limited impression, despite his rise through the Iranian government.
“How do you spell his name?” asks Prasant Mohapatra, distinguished professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis.
When they both worked in Australia around a decade ago, Professor Mohapatra and Mr Zarepour co-authored, with three others, a paper on energy consumption and mobile phones.
“He was more on the quieter side. I vaguely remember he was hardworking; this paper was a pretty good-quality paper,” says Professor Mohapatra, who, too, was surprised to hear of Mr Zarepour’s political ascension.
Even Mr Zarepour’s PhD supervisor, Professor Hassan, who worked with him for three years, was taken aback at his rise to the Communications Ministry.
“I’m surprised,” Professor Hassan said. “None of my previous students reached similar positions.”
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