Reporting on Iran presents a formidable challenge for journalists. From the rise of the Green Movement protests in 2009 to the Iran war in 2026, open source news-gathering has been fundamental to establishing what is happening in a tightly controlled society. The Islamic regime has repeatedly sought to discredit evidence of widespread internal opposition to its rule, while the U.S. administration has tried to downplay the impact of the Iran war on civilians, such as the killing of at least 175 Iranians, mostly children, in a poorly targeted missile strike on a girls' elementary school.

"Governments, militaries and police forces are prone to making egregious mistakes, particularly in war, and usually that is where our work comes in."

Malachy Browne, Enterprise director, Visual investigations, The New York Times

The New York Times analyzed satellite images and video footage to uncover details of the deadly strike

Some of the earliest examples of open source journalism focused on events in Iran. In 2009, protests erupted on the streets of Tehran over the lack of free and fair elections. A young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, 26, was killed by security forces. The last moments of her life were filmed on video, uploaded to the internet using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to evade detection and censorship, and shared with millions of people throughout the world. Neda became a symbol of resistance to the Iranian regime.

Sara Lejuez, a Stony Brook journalism professor from Iran, worked for Voice of America's Persian news network during the Green Movement protests. She and her colleagues deployed open source investigative techniques (see Chapter 4 on Geolocation) to verify the video of Neda's death.

"We had this video, and we had a moral obligation to a young woman who was shot to death. But we didn't know what had happened - when, where or how."

Sara Lejuez, former producer, Voice of America

Initially, they found posts memorializing a woman called Neda. By looking intently at clues in the video, such as street layouts, car license plates identifying Tehran, and a watch verifying the time of day, they were able to establish when and where her death occurred. Pausing the video frame by frame, they produced a 3-D map of the incident in their studio. Only when they could confirm the name of the victim and pinpoint the location of her death were they able to report on Neda's fate.

The U.S. war with Iran started on February 28, 2026. News audiences quickly became familiar with satellite images of military targets in Iran and geopolitical flashpoints such as the Strait of Hormuz, with maritime sites detailing the movement of oil tankers (see Chapter 3 on Oceans and Skies). Open source tools have become more sophisticated since Neda's death, but the commitment to accurate reporting remains the same.