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.
All this time... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sheesh, all this time folks were talking about TOR I thought they were being lazy and shortening Torrent. I learn something new every day!
Hmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
You almost have to wonder if this scares the crap out of the powers that be. That something they created could, in theory, be something that fuels their eventual downfall, (assuming things ever got really bad....)
Accessing a TOR server is enough to get killed? (Score:3, Interesting)
Side benefits? (Score:3, Interesting)
I use Tor regularly and it's really slow. Not unusable, but really slow.
If I understand this correctly (and I'm not at all sure I do, so feel free to correct me), the more people who set up and use Tor the more quickly traffic can propagate. So if the situation in Iran is causing lots of people, both in and outside of Iran, to use Tor, then the whole thing should speed up, right?
So is that why when I visited a few miscellaneous .onion sites last nite, they were far more responsive than usual?
I imagine the Supreme Leader would be pissed if he understood. :-)
Selective Values (Score:3, Interesting)
How come the election in Iran provokes such a passionate response from the US (which is not bad) and a call to support them, put proxies, blablabla, but a real military coup in an american country much next to the US doesn't provoke Sh1t? Have you heard of it at least?
Don't follow the imposed agenda people, trust your judgment. And apply it equally for everybody, not just the ones that your leaders want you to hate.
The Grotesquely Ugly Truth (Score:0, Interesting)
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Iranians created this horrible society. It is none of our business unless they attempt to develop nuclear weapons. We in the West are morally justified in destroying the nuclear-weapons facilities.
Note that, 40 years ago, Vietnam suffered a worse fate (than the Iranians) at the hands of the Americans. They doused large areas of Vietnam with agent orange, poisoning both the land and the people. Yet, the Vietnamese do not channel their energies into seeking revenge (by, e. g., building a nuclear bomb) against the West. Rather, the Vietnamese are diligently modernizing their society. They will reach 1st-world status long before the Iranians.
Cultures are different. Vietnamese culture and Iranian culture are different. The Iranians bear 100% of the blame for the existence of a tyrannical government in Iran. We should condemn Iranian culture and its people.
Zmodem? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Flowing, but still risky (Score:1, Interesting)
You're wrong. Tor does encrypt node-to-node traffic. It does not encrypt the exit node traffic though because that's what is actually accessing stuff on the Internet. So yeah, if you go to a an unencrypted web site then the Tor exit node you are using can see your traffic.
In theory they wouldn't know who the source was unless that information is in the plain-text data. In practice, if they happen to also be running your Tor connection point then they can run a statistical analysis attack and figure out who the source is. That is really the main problem with Tor. There are a lot of "unfriendly" entry and exit nodes and if you happen to get a pair run by the same entity then they can see what you're doing (which is even worse than not running Tor at all).
Re:Selective Values (Score:3, Interesting)
Revolutions fail when no one joins the initial segment, meaning the initial demonstrators are the ones who find themselves socially isolated. When the demonstrations do not spread to other cities, the demonstrations either peter out or the regime brings in the security and military forces -- who remain loyal to the regime and frequently personally hostile to the demonstrators -- and use force to suppress the rising to the extent necessary. This is what happened in Tiananmen Square in China: The students who rose up were not joined by others. Military forces who were not only loyal to the regime but hostile to the students were brought in, and the students were crushed.
This is also what happened in Iran this week. The global media, obsessively focused on the initial demonstrators -- who were supporters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's opponents -- failed to notice that while large, the demonstrations primarily consisted of the same type of people demonstrating. Amid the breathless reporting on the demonstrations, reporters failed to notice that the uprising was not spreading to other classes and to other areas. In constantly interviewing English-speaking demonstrators, they failed to note just how many of the demonstrators spoke English and had smartphones. The media thus did not recognize these as the signs of a failing revolution.
Later, when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke Friday and called out the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, they failed to understand that the troops -- definitely not drawn from what we might call the "Twittering classes," would remain loyal to the regime for ideological and social reasons. The troops had about as much sympathy for the demonstrators as a small-town boy from Alabama might have for a Harvard postdoc. Failing to understand the social tensions in Iran, the reporters deluded themselves into thinking they were witnessing a general uprising. But this was not St. Petersburg in 1917 or Bucharest in 1989 -- it was Tiananmen Square.
Re:Government setting up TOR nodes? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Trouble hosting honest elections" isn't an accident and it isn't due to incompetence, it is due to the desire and ability to rig the system to win.
If they can do that, what makes you think they can't set up TOR nodes? (potential infrastructure limitations aside).
But don't think for a moment that a government that is out to win at any cost won't do whatever it takes to quash those that attempt to stand up to them. Also don't believe for a moment that they can't fund/hire or already have the technology and know how to setup simple nodes. It isn't too far of a stretch to believe they already have talented IT folk on their payroll.
Long story short, they aren't in power because they are dumb.
Re:The Grotesquely Ugly Truth (Score:4, Interesting)
While I agree with a lot of what you have to say, I have to ask, do you think the people in N. Korea are happy with their lot in life?
I hate to sound alarmist (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Support Them (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
P.S: Sorry for crossposting, I initially intended to reply to the parent post, but managed to post my reply into the wrong part of the discussion.
Re:The Grotesquely Ugly Truth (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Grotesquely Ugly Truth (Score:2, Interesting)
The Iranians love a brutal Islamic theocracy.
Unless your name is "The Iranians," I don't understand how you can speak in such broad terms and not be modded as a troll.
The Iranians created this horrible society. It is none of our business [...]
We should condemn Iranian culture and its people.
So, it's not our business until it's time to weigh in our thoughts? All I can say is that with that kind of attitude, I hope you too are stereotyped to be the same as everyone else in your country when it begins to collapse and everyone says, "Well, they made their own mess. Let's just condemn them all for now and take action against them if we feel threatened." I hope you don't wonder where the compassion is when you are suffering.
Read some books, watch a few movies, maybe even go to Iran. Then tell me the same things you've said here without knowing you're lying. Nobody deserves to be oppressed or "condemned" for actions they cannot control.
And for fuck's sake, please don't title your unsubstantiated bullshit as "The Grotesquely Ugly Truth".
Re:Support Them (Score:2, Interesting)
You can simply operate a TOR relay configured to not be an exit node. Replace your exit policy in the configuration file by :
ExitPolicy reject *:*
You will still help the global TOR network, because you're sharing bandwith as an entry and intermediary node; and you won't risk anything because no "illegal content" will exit from your node to the public internet. Half of tor nodes are not exit nodes.