The Technology Keeping Information Flowing in Iran 174
Death Metal writes "Iranians seeking to share videos and other eyewitness accounts of the demonstrations that have roiled their country since disputed elections two weeks ago are using an Internet encryption program originally developed by and for the US Navy. Designed a decade ago to secure Internet communications between US ships at sea, The Onion Router, or TOR, has become one of the most important proxies in Iran for gaining access to Web sites such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook." A related story was submitted anonymously about the efforts of hactivists to keep the information flowing inside the data-locked nation.
Just Make Sure You're Not Plaintext (Score:4, Informative)
Support them by becoming a Tor relay
From nedanet [nedanet.org]:
If you are a Linux or *BSD or Mac OS/X user, we have a detailed recipe [slashdot.org] for setting up and registering a Squid proxy for the revolutionaries' use. Update: We are no longer recommending people set up plaintext squid proxies. The Iranian regime appears to be doing deep-packet inspection on all traffic now.
article is so wrong (Score:5, Informative)
the reporter of that article is an idiot.
Onion Routing was invented at the Naval Research Lab, but it had nothing to do with ships.
If the reporter would have done a cursory reading of http://www.onion-router.net/ [onion-router.net], which is the page the creators made, the reporter would not have found any mention of ships on the description or summary of what onion routing is.
Re:Flowing, but still risky (Score:4, Informative)
The resources needed to spy on tor users would be huge. They'd need to log all traffic that goes through their nodes and analyze it all to reconstruct what can be reconstructed. I find it very unlikely that a government would try to do that. The costs would largely overweight the benefits.
Do you have any idea how much tor nodes it would require to be able to log enough data to reconstruct enough communications to incriminate a few people? The computing power that would be necessary to reconstruct the communications?
I think they'd rather cut off the internet than trying to spy on tor...
wait... you say there's no encryption for the data? From the exit node point of view, maybe but the exit node doesn't know the identity of the source of the communication. When tor traffic goes out of your computer, there's a least three layers of encryption. And everybody who knows a bit about tor will tell you: don't use tor to communicate sensitive informations unless you're using encryption over tor.
freedom suckers webpage mentioned in article (Score:1, Informative)
http://warriors-attack.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
Re:The Grotesquely Ugly Truth (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Selective Values (Score:5, Informative)
If you lift your content from Stratfor http://www.stratfor.com - you could at least give credit.
Re:Selective Values (Score:5, Informative)
I am following the issue in Honduras, and honestly, it doesn't appear as cut and dry as it looks. In Iran, at least the situation seems to be a lot more clear. We may not know for certain that the election was rigged, but the timing seems impossible for counting. Additionally, Iran is at best, a very limited democracy overtopped by a religiously motivated dictatorship, so these protests seem to be very compelling.
In Honduras, the president, Zelaya, was attempting to order a referendum which was designated to be illegal by the Supreme Court and the Congress. Supposedly, the military was directed to make the arrest by those bodies.
Of course, under their constitution, I doubt that those branches have that power, but on the other hand, the Hondurans failed to put an impeachment clause in their constitution that they could use. When the Congress and the Supreme Court in the US are against the Executive at that level, he'd have been legally impeached and removed. This does not appear to have been an option for those branches in Honduras and I got the feeling that the police are on the side of the President.
If you believe the opposition, the vote was a lead up to Chavez-esque referendum to remove or change the term limits in the Constitution for the President. While sketchy, this is not illegal in and of itself in many places. However, Honduras apparently also has the interesting constitutional provision that it is even illegal to propose a change to that provision if you are an office holder. One assumes that this is due to their bad experiences with people staying in office too long.
On the other hand, I believe the referendum was only for the purposes of calling a "constitutional assembly" to rewrite the Constitution, so the legal extrapolation they made is possibly not warranted, even if they may well be right about his intentions.
As I said, I am actually surprised that the world is supporting Zelaya as uncritically as they are, but there may be no choice in the matter. In this case, the Hondurans look to have be in a sticky mess constitutionally which no one wants to get involved in. I think that the major issue is that the military was involved, which is certainly bad news, particularly in that part of the world. Its hard for anyone to get behind a military action to remove a legally elected office holder, even if he may be up to something.
However, Zelaya seems to have troubling parallels to Hugo Chavez in his way of dealing with issues, and there are some suggestions that the referendum would not have been entirely without governmental pressure to vote for the provision, which would then be taken as a plebiscite to secure power for the President's entire program, including the removal of term limits. Certainly the Supreme Court and the Congress could be in the wrong here, but I am inclined to distrust Zelaya's motives as well. This may not be an actual coup, even if the military involvement tends to make it look that way.
Or it could be a coup by a corrupt or overreaching Congress and Supreme Court with military involvement.
This sort of ambiguity does not make for good news print, which is why I am unsurprised that it is not being featured. That and the fact that Honduras is not a state supporter or terrorism nor does it appear to have a nuclear program, peaceful or not.
Apples and Oranges (Score:3, Informative)
Because what happened in Honduras was legitimate by their constitution (the president was committing TREASON according to article 4 of their constitution, therefore it was legal for the Honduran Supreme Court to vote to remove him and for the military to execute that). It is not exactly a military coup, because once the president was removed, the next in line was legally put in his place to serve out the remainder of the term until elections next year.
So, in Iran, you have a corrupt government trying to steal the election from the people and implement their own de facto dictatorship. The people are standing up against that. In Honduras, you have a president defying the law and committing treason by trying to set up a way for himself to become a dictator, and then being legally removed from power by the government he was trying to betray. Very different situations.
Re:Selective Values (Score:5, Informative)
Probably because the guy who has been ousted was trying to defy the constitution, defy the courts and sacked military heads who wouldn't assist him in doing so.
Effectively what is happening in Honduras is an example of what should ideally happen if a leader attempts to become a dictator (i.e. he gets removed), whilst Iran is an example of what shouldn't happen (i.e. the people get violently supressed).
The Honduras result is really a good one, he was trying to copy Chavez, the difference is he didn't have the support to do so. It's probably worth realising that copying Chavez isn't a good thing because Chavez is really no better than Ahmadinejad. Ignoring the fact they're best of friends it's probably worth noting that Chavez, like Ahmadinejad, has supressed opposition using militia etc. so again, seeing someone who wanted to follow this path ousted through a country's legal and constitutional procedures is probably a good thing.
Re:Government setting up TOR nodes? (Score:4, Informative)
So, according to that description I believe that the iranian government would only stand a chance of being able to monitor traffic if the entire network was comprised of tainted tor nodes provided by the state of Iran. So even under that scenario Iran's job would become a bit harder if suddenly more people started contributing to the tor project. At least that's my non-security expert take on that. Nonetheless I'm getting my tor node up and running.
Re:Selective Values (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20090622_iranian_election_and_revolution_test [stratfor.com] is the actual article, if folks would rather read the non-plagiarized version.
Re:Side benefits? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Zmodem? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The Grotesquely Ugly Truth (Score:1, Informative)
About 30% of Iran's GDP goes into the hands of the army and Basji militiamen (the ones on the motorcycles). These militia men will fight tooth and nail to preserve their lifestyle.
It doesn't matter what the vast majority of Iranians want. The military has too much to lose. This is a very different situation than in Poland where the army members were also suffering. When ordered to fire into the crowd, they refused to do it.
Re:The Grotesquely Ugly Truth (Score:5, Informative)
Also, learn at least the basics of modern history...
After the Kremlin exited Eastern Europe, the peoples of each nation in Eastern Europe rapidly established a genuine democracy and a free market. Except for Romania (where its people killed their dictator), there was no violence.
Red Army went away only after many years of struggle. There was bloodshed practically in every Soviet satellite country.
In Iran (and many other failed states), no external force is imposing the current brutal government on the Iranians. The folks running the government are Iranian. The president is Iranian. The secret police are Iranian. The thugs who will torture and kill democracy advocates are Iranian.
Except for presence of external force (which was present for large part of modern Iran), all this was true in former soviet republics.
If the democracy advocates attempt to establish a genuine democracy in Iran, violence will occur. Why? A large percentage of the population supports the brutal government and will kill the democracy advocates.
Let us not merely condemn the Iranian government. We must condemn Iranian culture. Its product is the authoritarian state.
When democracy advocates attempted to establish a genuine democracies in soviet republics,for many years violence was the result. Even though majority of population supported the changes. The state of affairs had nothing to do with local culture. Minority that held power was enough.
We should not intervene in the current crisis in Iran. If the overwhelming majority of Iranians (like the overwhelming majority of Poles) truly support democracy, human rights, and peace with Israel, then a liberal Western democracy will arise -- without any violence. Right now, the overwhelming majority clearly oppose the creation of a liberal Western democracy. The Iranians love a brutal Islamic theocracy.
You know nothing about the struggle of Poland for democracy. There was violence, people died, change didn't come for many years.
And actually it might have come much sooner if, for example, Western Allies didn't handle Eastern Europe on a plate to Stalin. Or didn't let military aggresion on Czechoslovakia in the 60's. And so on... If there was some kind of intervention
Not feasible (Score:3, Informative)
Facts: -There are about 1800 Tor nodes running right now, and about 900 of those are exit nodes. (http://torstatus.kgprog.com/)
-Any entity performing cross-correlation attacks on Tor isn't going to have a very good chance of compromising a given circuit unless they control a very significant portion (say, a third or more) of the Tor network.
-There are tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of clients using Tor, and Iran only accounts for about 3000 of them. (https://blog.torproject.org/blog/measuring-tor-and-iran)
-By default, Tor will not construct circuits with two nodes that share
-Iran's assigned IP address blocks include 75 or so distinct
So to even have a chance of being effective, Iran needs to come up with at least 600 geographically distinct Tor nodes. Any nodes inside Iran are going to be almost entirely ineffective, because deep packet inspection means that all traffic into and out of Iran is slowed to a crawl. Iran also needs to write the code to do cross-correlation attacks. Iran then needs to deal with a ton of data they don't care about from users not in Iran (and there are a lot more people using Tor who aren't in Iran than people who are). It would take a lot of smart people distributed around the world to pull this off, and for very little gain.
Compromising Tor? That's pretty difficult. Blocking it, when all internet connections are being routed through a single place? Not so difficult.
questions on setting up a TOR relay (Score:4, Informative)
Obviously I want to support the cause of having anonymity on the internet, but I am not really sure that this price of not being able to use internet properly myself is a price I am willing to pay. What can be done about this?
The second problem comes from another point of view. What can I do, as a TOR relay operator, to protect myself from potentially getting harassed by law enforcement non-stop?
Re:Selective Values (Score:1, Informative)
What's going down in Honduras is *good* democracy. It's basically a hurried impeachment.
President Zelaya wanted a referendum to change the constitution to allow himself to run for re-election. Legislatures said no. Courts said no. Zelaya insisted. Zelaya tried to get the military to arrange this referendum. Defense Minister said no. Zelaya sacked Defense Minister and started talking directly to generals to arrange the referendum. The Generals had some back-room meetings with judges and legislatures and all agree Zelaya is way way way out of line. Still in the back-room, everyone agrees it's best to get a couple of soldiers to put him on am airplane and send him to Costa Rica. On the same day, congress votes to institute the constitutionally next-in-line to be president for the remainder of the term. Elections will be held this November.
It's an excellent example of how the three-legged table of democracy works. When one of the powers becomes unfit to serve, the other two powers can should and must team up to reinstate sanity. In this case, legislative and judicial powers teaming up to remove an executive that was trying to take the first step towards establishing a Venezuela-style dictatorship.
Good for Honduras.
Another Iranian Here Agrees (Score:4, Informative)