The Iranian Woman Who Smuggled Drone Footage Out to the World — and What Happened to Her

A young Iranian woman used encrypted apps to share footage of strikes on factories with diaspora journalists. Here is her story and the risk she took to document history.

The footage arrived in the inbox of an Iranian diaspora journalist in Berlin at 4:17 a.m. local time on March 25. It showed, from a mobile phone held at a window above a busy street in Isfahan, thick smoke rising from what appeared to be an industrial facility approximately three kilometers away. The smoke column was consistent with a large fire at a steel or cement production facility. Iranian state media had not yet reported any incident in Isfahan that night.

The woman who sent it — identified here only by her diaspora journalist contact as 'Neda,' a name she asked to use — had been documenting industrial damage in Isfahan since the US-Israeli campaign began on February 28, using the encrypted messaging application Signal to send material to trusted contacts outside Iran who could publish without identifying her location or identity.

She is 26 years old. She works in a professional capacity that requires her to be in central Isfahan on most days. She had, before February 28, never thought of herself as a journalist or activist. 'I was just someone who could see something that other people couldn't see, and who had a phone,' she told the Berlin journalist through Signal, in a conversation conducted over three days in late March.

The internet blackout that Iranian authorities activated after the early March strikes specifically targeted the platforms most commonly used to share footage — Instagram, Telegram public channels, WhatsApp — while leaving Signal and encrypted alternatives more functional, apparently on the calculation that the more technically demanding encrypted channels would be used by fewer people. The calculation was partly right and partly wrong: fewer people use Signal, but the people who do tend to be the ones most determined to document and share.

Neda is aware of what she is risking. She has been arrested once before, briefly, in 2022 during the protests that followed Mahsa Amini's death. 'That time, I was on the street,' she said. 'This time, I'm at a window in my apartment.' She has calculated that the distinction matters for her legal exposure. She may or may not be right.