Video by Alexander Stockton and Adam Westbrook

Parts of Iran are back online, and videos suppressed by the nations internet shutdown are starting to trickle onto social media. In the Video Op-Ed above, Raha Bahreini sheds light on the eye-opening stories that Irans government did not want you to see.

While internet service has been partly restored, many Iranians still do not have internet access on mobile phones, and government officials there have warned that connectivity may be blocked indefinitely. In a call for evidence of government repression during the blackout, the United States State Department says it has received almost 20,000 messages, videos and photographs.

A hike in fuel prices sparked protests across Iran. Ms. Bahreini exposes and analyzes footage of human rights abuses by Iranian security forces, including shootings into crowds of unarmed protesters. And she warns of what may come next incarceration, torture and forced confessions that will further oppress the Iranian people. If the world does not take a stand, Ms. Bahreini fears, Irans internet blackout may foreshadow the nations darkest days.

Raha Bahreini (@RahaBahreini) is a human rights lawyer and a researcher on Iran for Amnesty International.

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Opinion | What Iran Did Not Want You to See - The New York Times

Iran is experiencing its deadliest political unrest since the Islamic Revolution 40 years ago, with at least 180 people killed and possibly hundreds more as angry protests have been smothered in a government crackdown of unbridled force.

It began two weeks ago with an abrupt increase of at least 50 percent in gasoline prices. Within 72 hours, outraged demonstrators in cities large and small were calling for an end to the Islamic Republics government and the downfall of its leaders.

In many places, security forces responded by opening fire on unarmed protesters, largely unemployed or low-income young men between the ages of 19 and 26, according to witness accounts and videos. In the southwest city of Mahshahr alone, witnesses and medical personnel said, Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps members surrounded, shot and killed 40 to 100 demonstrators mostly unarmed young men in a marsh where they had sought refuge.

The recent use of lethal force against people throughout the country is unprecedented, even for the Islamic Republic and its record of violence, said Omid Memarian, the deputy director at the Center for Human Rights in Iran, a New York-based group.

Altogether, from 180 to 450 people, and possibly more, were killed in four days of intense violence after the gasoline price increase was announced on Nov. 15, with at least 2,000 wounded and 7,000 detained, according to international rights organizations, opposition groups and local journalists.

The last enormous wave of protests in Iran in 2009 after a contested election, which was also met with a deadly crackdown left 72 people dead over a much longer period of about 10 months.

Only now, nearly two weeks after the protests were crushed and largely obscured by an internet blackout in the country that was lifted recently have details corroborating the scope of killings and destruction started to dribble out.

The latest outbursts not only revealed staggering levels of frustration with Irans leaders, but also underscored the serious economic and political challenges facing them, from the Trump administrations onerous sanctions on the country to the growing resentment toward Iran by neighbors in an increasingly unstable Middle East.

The gas price increase, which was announced as most Iranians had gone to bed, came as Iran is struggling to fill a yawning budget gap. The Trump administration sanctions, most notably their tight restrictions on exports of Irans oil, are a big reason for the shortfall. The sanctions are meant to pressure Iran into renegotiating the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and major world powers, which President Trump abandoned, calling it too weak.

Most of the nationwide unrest seemed concentrated in neighborhoods and cities populated by low-income and working-class families, suggesting this was an uprising born in the historically loyal power base of Irans post-revolutionary hierarchy.

Many Iranians, stupefied and embittered, have directed their hostility directly at the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who called the crackdown a justified response to a plot by Irans enemies at home and abroad.

The killings prompted a provocative warning from Mir Hussein Moussavi, an opposition leader and former presidential candidate whose 2009 election loss set off peaceful demonstrations that Ayatollah Khamenei also suppressed by force.

In a statement posted Saturday on an opposition website, Mr. Moussavi, who has been under house arrest since 2011 and seldom speaks publicly, blamed the supreme leader for the killings. He compared them to an infamous 1978 massacre by government forces that led to the downfall of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi a year later, at the hands of the Islamic revolutionaries who now rule the country.

The killers of the year 1978 were the representatives of a nonreligious regime and the agents and shooters of November 2019 are the representatives of a religious government, he said. Then the commander in chief was the shah and today, here, the supreme leader with absolute authority.

The authorities have declined to specify casualties and arrests and have denounced unofficial figures on the national death toll as speculative. But the nations interior minister, Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, has cited widespread unrest around the country.

On state media, he said that protests had erupted in 29 out of 31 provinces and 50 military bases had been attacked, which if true suggested a level of coordination absent in the earlier protests. Irans official media have reported that several members of the security forces were killed and injured during the clashes.

The property damage also included 731 banks, 140 public spaces, nine religious centers, 70 gasoline stations, 307 vehicles, 183 police cars, 1,076 motorcycles and 34 ambulances, the interior minister said.

The worst violence documented so far happened in the city of Mahshahr and its suburbs, with a population of 120,000 people in Irans southwest Khuzestan Province a region with an ethnic Arab majority that has a long history of unrest and opposition to the central government. Mahshahr is adjacent to the nations largest industrial petrochemical complex and serves as a gateway to Bandar Imam, a major port.

The New York Times interviewed six residents of the city, including a protest leader who had witnessed the violence; a reporter based in the city who works for Iranian media, and had investigated the violence but was banned from reporting it; and a nurse at the hospital where casualties were treated.

They each provided similar accounts of how the Revolutionary Guards deployed a large force to Mahshahr on Monday, Nov. 18, to crush the protests. All spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution by the Guards.

For three days, according to these residents, protesters had successfully gained control of most of Mahshahr and its suburbs, blocking the main road to the city and the adjacent industrial petrochemical complex. Irans interior minister confirmed that the protesters had gotten control over Mahshahr and its roads in a televised interview last week, but the Iranian government did not respond to specific questions in recent days about the mass killings in the city.

Local security forces and riot police officers had attempted to disperse the crowd and open the roads, but failed, residents said. Several clashes between protesters and security forces erupted between Saturday evening and Monday morning before the Guards were dispatched there.

When the Guards arrived near the entrance to a suburb, Shahrak Chamran, populated by low-income members of Irans ethnic Arab minority, they immediately shot without warning at dozens of men blocking the intersection, killing several on the spot, according to the residents interviewed by phone.

The residents said the other protesters scrambled to a nearby marsh, and that one of them, apparently armed with an AK-47, fired back. The Guards immediately encircled the men and responded with machine gun fire, killing as many as 100 people, the residents said.

The Guards piled the dead onto the back of a truck and departed, the residents said, and relatives of the wounded then transported them to Memko Hospital.

One of the residents, a 24-year-old unemployed college graduate in chemistry who had helped organize the protests blocking the roads, said he had been less than a mile away from the mass shooting and that his best friend, also 24, and a 32-year-old cousin were among the dead.

He said they both had been shot in the chest and their bodies were returned to the families five days later, only after they had signed paperwork promising not to hold funerals or memorial services and not to give interviews to media.

The young protest organizer said he, too, was shot in the ribs on Nov. 19, the day after the mass shooting, when the Guards stormed with tanks into his neighborhood, Shahrak Taleghani, among the poorest suburbs of Mahshahr.

He said a gun battle erupted for hours between the Guards and ethnic Arab residents, who traditionally keep guns for hunting at home. Iranian state media and witnesses reported that a senior Guards commander had been killed in a Mahshahr clash. Video on Twitter suggests tanks had been deployed there.

A 32-year-old nurse in Mahshahr reached by the phone said she had tended to the wounded at the hospital and that most had sustained gunshot wounds to the head and chest.

She described chaotic scenes at the hospital, with families rushing to bring in the casualties, including a 21-year-old who was to be married but could not be saved. Give me back my son!, the nurse quoted his sobbing mother as saying. Its his wedding in two weeks!

The nurse said security forces stationed at the hospital arrested some of the wounded protesters after their conditions had stabilized. She said some relatives, fearing arrest themselves, dropped wounded loved ones at the hospital and fled, covering their faces.

On Nov. 25, a week after it happened, the citys representative in Parliament, Mohamad Golmordai, vented outrage in a blunt moment of searing antigovernment criticism that was broadcast on Iranian state television and captured in photos and videos uploaded to the internet.

What have you done that the undignified Shah did not do? Mr. Golmordai screamed from the Parliament floor, as a scuffle broke out between him and other lawmakers, including one who grabbed him by the throat.

The local reporter in Mahshahr said the total number of people killed in three days of unrest in the area had reached 130, including those killed in the marsh.

In other cities such as Shiraz and Shahriar, dozens were reported killed in the unrest by security forces who fired on unarmed protesters, according to rights groups and videos posted by witnesses.

This regime has pushed people toward violence, said Yousef Alsarkhi, 29, a political activist from Khuzestan who migrated to the Netherlands four years ago. The more they repress, the more aggressive and angry people get.

Political analysts said the protests appeared to have delivered a severe blow to President Hassan Rouhani, a relative moderate in Irans political spectrum, all but guaranteeing that hard-liners would win upcoming parliamentary elections and the presidency in two years.

The tough response to the protests also appeared to signal a hardening rift between Irans leaders and sizable segments of the population of 83 million.

The governments response was uncompromising, brutal and rapid, said Henry Rome, an Iran analyst at the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy in Washington. Still, he said, the protests also had demonstrated that many Iranians are not afraid to take to the streets.

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With Brutal Crackdown, Iran Is Convulsed by Worst Unrest in 40 Years - The New York Times

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What is the Internet of Things? Your IoT roadmap - Ericsson

Internet users are being taught to think about online security the wrong way, which experts warn might actually make them more vulnerable to hacking and cyberattacks.

Websites that want to demonstrate their secure credentials will usually do so by displaying a padlock sign in the address bar that aims to show the website is usingHTTPS encryption.

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is the more secure version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) used across the web to load pages using hypertext links it's there to transfer information between devices, allowing users to enter and receive information.

SEE: 10 tips for new cybersecurity pros (free PDF)

HTTPS encrypts that information, allowing the transmission of sensitive data such as logging into bank accounts, emails, or anything else involving personal information to be transferred securely. If this information is entered onto a website that is just using standard HTTP, there's the risk that the information can become visible to outsiders, especially as the information is transferred in plain text.

Websites secured with HTTPS display a green padlock in the URL bar to show that the website is secure. The aim of this is to reassure the user that the website is safe and they can enter personal information or bank details when required. Users have often been told that if they see this in the address bar, then the website is legitimate and they can trust it.

However, as security researcher Scott Helme warned in his keynote address at the SANS Institute and National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) Cyber Threat 19 conference in London, this information is potentially misleading, because it isn't difficult for cyber attackers to register HTTPs domains for use inphishing attacksand other hacking campaigns.

But because web users have been told the padlock is a sign of safety, they're potentially vulnerable to falling victims to attacks.

"This is why phishers are using it on phishing sites, because they know that people who use the websites think that means its OK when it's not," said Helme. "The padlock doesn't guarantee safety, it never has, that's just a misunderstanding of the interpretation of what this actually means."

In December 2017, a television advert for Barclays Bank in the UK warned users to check for a green padlock to ensure that the website is genuine. There were complaints that this advice was misleading, because it would be possible for attackers to exploit HTTPS for their own ends.

The complaint was upheld by the Advertising Standards Authority, which concluded that the advice from Barclays was inaccurate because "the padlock measure alone could not ensure safety".

Because it turns out, it's actually relatively easy for a criminal to acquire HTTPS for malicious websites to help them look entirely legitimate. By buying a Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificate, attackers can encrypt traffic on their fake website and make it look legitimate. And because the traffic is encrypted, the browser can be fooled into believing that website is safe.

"Cyber criminals started to use HTTPS and their trust scores can be higher than normal websites, they really care about this stuff," said James Lyne, CTO at SANS Institute.

So by asking the user to notice when something is wrong, it's putting unfair pressure on them, especially, as Helme argued, as it doesn't happen in other aspects of life.

He pointed to cars and how there isn't a warning light that tells the driver everything is OK. That light only comes on when the driver needs to be aware of an issue, there's no light or alert that appears just to show that things are working as expected and that model should also be applied to the internet.

SEE:A winning strategy for cybersecurity(ZDNet special report) |Download the report as a PDF(TechRepublic)

"We should only be bugging the user with new information when there's a problem, not when everything is OK, not when the connection is secure. It should be that all connections are secure and that's the default and a non-encrypted connection is the exception," Helme explained.

"We need to flip the model around, we need encryption to become the default and non-encrypted HTTP to become the exception, the thing that we warn about like the warning light on your car, indicating there is a problem," he added.

Even now, encryption is sometimes discussed as if it's a bonus when using the internet, when it needs to become the standard way of doing things everywhere on the internet, Helme explained.

"We need it to become so ingrained and embedded into everything that we do that it's boring and we don't need to talk about it because it shouldn't be special. Encryption should be the boring default that we don't need to talk about," he said.

The security industry therefore needs to step up and help fix the issue, Helme argued, because by doing this, it takes the responsibility for deciding if a website is safe or not away from the user something that will help make the internet safer for everyone.

"We need to take encryption and make it the default, universal it needs to be everywhere," he said, adding: "The lack of encryption on the web is actually a bug. And what we're doing now isn't adding a new feature for an improvement or a new thing: we're going back and fixing a mistake we made in the beginning."

In the mean time, it's going to remain difficult to convince internet users that something they've been told means that a website can be trusted can't actually be used as an indicator of whether the page is safe or not.

"We've beaten into people that's safe, only go to websites with a padlock. But now it turns out that a cyber criminal can go out and buy a padlock for a dollar. That turns it around, so how do you unwire all of that?" said Paul Chichester, director of operations at the NCSC.

"Cybersecurity is a really challenging discipline to operate in. If you think about driving a car and, over many years of driving, you learn certain things and it doesn't generally change, the practices keep you safe. Nobody tells you not to use the brakes any more," he added.

SEE: 10 great gifts for the hacker in your life

To fix that, the industry needs to improve its messaging, because cybersecurity can be complicated for the average web user and changing advice all the time isn't going to help, especially if people stick to adhering to the first thing they were told like believing the padlock automatically means the website is safe.

"We're pivoting in much shorter periods of time and, even within our community, sharing practices can be tough, particularly when a new practice isn't as simple to convey as the original because those ideas stick," said Lyne. "That's where the average person has lost reasonable expectation it's genuinely hard".

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Cybersecurity: The web has a padlock problem - and your internet safety is at risk - ZDNet