The US Treasury issued directives on Friday easing technology export restrictions imposed on Iran to expand access to Internet services that the government has severely restricted, in light of a week-long wave of demonstrations protesting the death of a young woman while in the custody of the morality police.
Despite the US sanctions on Tehran, the ministry said in a statement that it seeks to increase support for the free use of the Internet in Iran by updating the license, after the government blocked access to the Internet last Wednesday for most of its citizens.
She added that Washington had long made some internet-related exemptions from its sanctions on Iran, but Friday's general license directive seeks to update it.
For his part, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wali Adeemo said, "As brave Iranians take to the streets to protest Mahsa Amini's death, the United States is redoubling its support for the free flow of information to the Iranian people."
America helps
Through these changes, he added, "we are helping the Iranian people to be better prepared to counter the government's efforts to monitor and censor them."
The NetBlocks observatory to monitor internet outages said Thursday that a new mobile internet outage has been recorded in Iran, where access to social media and some content is severely restricted.
The observatory reported a "almost complete" interruption of internet access in the Kurdish region's capital last Monday, linking this to the protests.
The morality police in Tehran had arrested Amini - a Kurdish woman - for wearing "inappropriate clothes", and she fell into a coma during her detention, and the authorities said they would investigate the cause of her death.
The incident sparked widespread popular anger in the political and media circles in Iran, amid conflicting accounts of the causes of death.