The Internet Helps Iran Silence Activists 232
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Soulskill
from the alternative-views dept.
from the alternative-views dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Over the last couple of weeks, those who believe in the transformative power of technology to battle an oppressive state have pointed to Iran as a test case. However, as Farhad Manjoo writes on Slate, the real conclusion about news now coming out of Iran is that for regimes bent on survival, electronic dissent is easier to suppress than organizing methods of the past. Using a system installed last year, built in part by Nokia and Siemens, the government routes all digital traffic in the country through a single choke point, using the capabilities of deep packet inspection to monitor every e-mail, tweet, blog post, and possibly even every phone call placed in Iran. 'Compare that with East Germany, in which the Stasi managed to tap, at most, about 100,000 phone lines — a gargantuan task that required 2,000 full-time technicians to monitor the calls,' writes Manjoo. The effects of this control have been seen over the past couple days, with only a few harrowing pictures and videos getting through Iran's closed net. For most citizens, posting videos and even tweeting eyewitness accounts remains fraught with peril, and the same tools that activists use can be used by the government to spread disinformation. The government is also using crowdsourcing by posting pictures of protesters and asking citizens for help in identifying the activists. 'If you think about it, that's no surprise,' writes Manjoo. 'Who said that only the good guys get to use the power of the Web to their advantage?'"
You can help. (Score:5, Interesting)
You can help. Get involved by going over to the NedaNet Resources Page [catb.org] and setting up a squid proxy or, better yet, a Tor proxy, to help the Iranian dissidents. This is a real, live underground network, being run by Eric Raymond and some other folks who are remaining anonymous.
Re:US citizens' have their hands tied (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh please, you don't actually think aiding dissidents in a foreign country is legal do ya? The only thing stopping Iran from demanding the extradition of these people is that they are anonymous.. except for Eric S. Raymond, and who wants him in their country?
Re:Encryption VS Deep Packet Inspection (Score:3, Interesting)
If they really are going to try to crack every email , it would be fun to send a highly encrypted email , containg only large amounts of gibberish , to a friend everyday.
Then they would spend hours or days decrypting it , only to see a message , which they think might be a sort of encryption as well.
They might try to construct a real message from it.
Could be fun
The internet never forgets (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't
Sadly some people in Iran, will learn this the hard way. When their security forces finally get around to processing all the blogs, tweets, SMS, emails, usenet posts, youtube videos, facebook entries and other permanent electronic records of comments they may have thought were innocent - or got caught up in the enthusiasm of the moment.
While it may only cost people in "free" countries a job offer or a place at university - these guys could end up paying with their lives.
In this case, the internet may have done more harm than good.
not much different (Score:4, Interesting)
It just struck me how little difference there is between the rulers of Iran and our own.
Here in Germany, they just passed a law to censor the Internet wrt "child porn". A party leader held a speech yesterday essentially telling the citizens that they suck and should participate more in politics (and yet when they do, as with the record signatures petition against the child porn censorship law, they get ignored). Essentially, reminding me of Brecht who once said "If the people aren't to the liking of parliament, why doesn't parliament simply dissolve the people and elect a new one?"
Seems that people in power around the world share the same priorities. Most importantly: Staying in power and having control comes first. Everything else is secondary to that.
Maybe in a thousand years we'll look back at the early 21st century and shake our heads at how those ancient, primitive people could still have believed in government, states and the whole power structures. At least I hope that future generations will find better ways to govern themselves.
Can Iranian Regime MITM all of Iran? (Score:4, Interesting)
Since they have a single choke-point, can the Iranian regime do a Man In The Middle attack on the entire country? They'd have to do something about the certificates that get pre-installed on new computers. (China's powerful enough for that, but not Iran.) I'm not sure they can manage this. However, they can insure that the real certs won't work, and could then distribute "patches" for that. They could also cook up their own "cache" for 3rd party browsers like Firefox and Opera with the bogus certs.
This would let them snoop on all public-key based cryptosystems, like SSL. However, they would need enough processing power to quickly do all of the key negotiation for the entire country in real-time. (I suspect that China can afford resources like that for this purpose, but not Iran.)
Re:US citizens' have their hands tied (Score:3, Interesting)
Legal? Illegal? Remove yourself from such dated concepts.
Whether something is legal does not matter. What matters is what is the possible punishment, what is the chance to get caught, what is the gain.
And here the possible punishment is, essentially, nonexistant. Do you honestly think the US administration (or any administration in the self proclaimed 'free world') would extradit one of their citizens to Iran, for whatever reasons whatsoever? Obama already got some heat from the right wing for being "soft" on terror, if anything it would be a great chance to show he won't bow to the request of the armpit of evil.
Re:What they need (Score:3, Interesting)
That doesn't make much sense. France sent the Continental Congress and the Continental Army money and other support during the American Revolution, all as part of France's scheme to undermine the British Empire. Apparently foreign aid does work in some revolutions.
Re:another way to look at it (Score:3, Interesting)
That's exactly why revocation of the corporate charter should be the primary legal remedy for any provably intentional law-breaking on the part of any corporation. Upon revocation of the corporate charter, let all property of the corporation be sold at public auction and the proceeds divided among its shareholders. This would be a proper counterbalance to the "liability shield" nature of a corporation. Let the fines be reserved for unintentional negligence.
There are many such problems that we could put to rest, if only we really wanted to do it.