Iran powerless to stop revolution by proxy
By Alec Robinson
Posted 2 hours 4 minutes ago Updated 1 hour 8 minutes ago
Protests, violent clashes and government crackdowns are now regular events (AFP: Ali Safari )
Related Story: Gunfire rings out during Tehran protests
Related Story: War and peace
Six months on from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed election victory, reports of gunfire and beatings are still coming out of Tehran almost weekly.
In the past 24 hours there have been reports shots have been fired in Tehran, as security forces have yet again clashed with student protesters.
In an attempt to prevent the protesters from getting organised, the government has been shutting down communication lines, but it seems to be making little difference.
Before Iran's disputed elections this year, publicly criticising the leaders of the country was almost impossible, but there was a chink in the Government's armour that's now being exploited.
Despite the deliberate daily intimidation, of police vans and armed guards constantly lurking the streets, the Iranians were already perfecting ways of getting their message out.
Now that protests, violent clashes and government crackdowns are regular events, those methods are helping the young Iranians organise protests and fight on the propaganda front.
Early hints of quiet opposition
"You can find me on Facebook," a man called Mehdi told me last year. I'd met him in the desert town of Yazd in central Iran and, in the typically hospitable nature of all Persians, he'd helped me translate the Farsi writing on my bus ticket.
"I thought those [social networking] sites were banned in Iran?" I said.
"Yes, but you can still view it through a proxy site. It means the government cannot see that you are looking at a banned site."
I asked him to show me what he meant, so we went to his work and he fired up a computer.
Mehdi showed me a number of different Internet sites where you view a site within the site - hiding what you're really looking at.
He even confidently typed "Iran's nuclear installation sites" into a search engine within a fake websites and up popped a satellite map of reported nuclear sites. I found out that the young Persians also use these sites to download illegal Farsi rap which is critical of the President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (I am not critical of this monral man and his thuggish clerics, i state that the good and honest millions of Iranian people need to rid Iran of this form of lice and the only way to do this is to fight, back the US and an Isreali attack and communicate via the web on social networking sites and I am only willing to publish from Australia from the safety of my own home any material that they want to get out on Twitter and my blog - www.twitter.com/JohnSunol follow me to get up dates all of the time.)
All over Iran, students are using these proxy websites and servers to send images of the protests to the outside world and keep in touch with one another.
Early this morning I spoke to a 21-year-old Tehran University student, Ashraf.
Ashraf confirmed the reports that the government has shut down the mobile phone network and blocked access to political sites and satellite television.
Satellite TV was already illegal in Iran, but in another daily act of defiance most rooftops have makeshift dishes propped up by bricks. Police occasionally raid homes and apartment blocks, confiscate the dishes and fine the owners, who then go out and put up a new one and keep watching.
Ashraf says the government has now found ways of blocking the satellite signals.
He says now all the channels, including BBC Persia, the US-sponsored Voice of America, and others including Arabic movie channels, just don't work any more. So the only option is to watch state-controlled media.
Songs of protest
The blocks on mobile phones and political websites have not stopped Ashraf and others like him from seeking free information online. He and others have also been editing together images of the protests and uploading them to the internet, complete with rousing Persian soundtracks.
One of these clips is set to a song called Rahe Rahayie, or Salvation Way. Loosely translated, the lyrics run: "Our country is good, the weakness of our enemy is good and it's good to lose our life for freedom."
This is exactly the kind of dissident message the Iranian government wants to shut down, but there's a problem.
While we were speaking, Ashraf showed me another way they get around the blocks on political websites. We both logged onto an online networking and file-sharing site.
"Here. Open this link," said Ashraf as he transferred me the address of a website in support of the Opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi.
"It's all in Farsi," I said. "What should I be looking for?"
"Nevermind. Just click on the sharing icon next to my name. Can you see it? Now select the 'share full-screen' option."
I clicked on the option and Ashraf was able to view my computer screen and navigate through the site, reading messages for Opposition supporters.
Ashraf was using my computer in Sydney to find out information about what was going on in his country, but which the Iranian government had blocked.
In July, New York-based internet expert Professor Clay Shirky told the ABC's Foreign Correspondent program that shutting down infrastructure like the internet could not be sustained by the Iranian government.
"What this class of dissidents has done is not just discomfort the government locally," he said. "It's given them a kind of political auto-immune disease in which they have to attack their own infrastructure to shut the dissent down.
"But that class of attack can't be sustained for weeks, much less months. No advanced economy can survive the wholesale shutdown of its communications function and survive over the long haul."
That prediction by Professor Shirky has proven to be the chink in Mr Ahmadinejad's armour.
By targeting the political websites the government avoids a "wholesale shutdown" of the country's internet access.
At the same time it allows the protesters to get around the bans, even if it means using a computer in Sydney to find out what's happening in Tehran
By Alec Robinson
Posted 2 hours 4 minutes ago Updated 1 hour 8 minutes ago
Protests, violent clashes and government crackdowns are now regular events (AFP: Ali Safari )
Related Story: Gunfire rings out during Tehran protests
Related Story: War and peace
Six months on from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed election victory, reports of gunfire and beatings are still coming out of Tehran almost weekly.
In the past 24 hours there have been reports shots have been fired in Tehran, as security forces have yet again clashed with student protesters.
In an attempt to prevent the protesters from getting organised, the government has been shutting down communication lines, but it seems to be making little difference.
Before Iran's disputed elections this year, publicly criticising the leaders of the country was almost impossible, but there was a chink in the Government's armour that's now being exploited.
Despite the deliberate daily intimidation, of police vans and armed guards constantly lurking the streets, the Iranians were already perfecting ways of getting their message out.
Now that protests, violent clashes and government crackdowns are regular events, those methods are helping the young Iranians organise protests and fight on the propaganda front.
Early hints of quiet opposition
"You can find me on Facebook," a man called Mehdi told me last year. I'd met him in the desert town of Yazd in central Iran and, in the typically hospitable nature of all Persians, he'd helped me translate the Farsi writing on my bus ticket.
"I thought those [social networking] sites were banned in Iran?" I said.
"Yes, but you can still view it through a proxy site. It means the government cannot see that you are looking at a banned site."
I asked him to show me what he meant, so we went to his work and he fired up a computer.
Mehdi showed me a number of different Internet sites where you view a site within the site - hiding what you're really looking at.
He even confidently typed "Iran's nuclear installation sites" into a search engine within a fake websites and up popped a satellite map of reported nuclear sites. I found out that the young Persians also use these sites to download illegal Farsi rap which is critical of the President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (I am not critical of this monral man and his thuggish clerics, i state that the good and honest millions of Iranian people need to rid Iran of this form of lice and the only way to do this is to fight, back the US and an Isreali attack and communicate via the web on social networking sites and I am only willing to publish from Australia from the safety of my own home any material that they want to get out on Twitter and my blog - www.twitter.com/JohnSunol follow me to get up dates all of the time.)
All over Iran, students are using these proxy websites and servers to send images of the protests to the outside world and keep in touch with one another.
Early this morning I spoke to a 21-year-old Tehran University student, Ashraf.
Ashraf confirmed the reports that the government has shut down the mobile phone network and blocked access to political sites and satellite television.
Satellite TV was already illegal in Iran, but in another daily act of defiance most rooftops have makeshift dishes propped up by bricks. Police occasionally raid homes and apartment blocks, confiscate the dishes and fine the owners, who then go out and put up a new one and keep watching.
Ashraf says the government has now found ways of blocking the satellite signals.
He says now all the channels, including BBC Persia, the US-sponsored Voice of America, and others including Arabic movie channels, just don't work any more. So the only option is to watch state-controlled media.
Songs of protest
The blocks on mobile phones and political websites have not stopped Ashraf and others like him from seeking free information online. He and others have also been editing together images of the protests and uploading them to the internet, complete with rousing Persian soundtracks.
One of these clips is set to a song called Rahe Rahayie, or Salvation Way. Loosely translated, the lyrics run: "Our country is good, the weakness of our enemy is good and it's good to lose our life for freedom."
This is exactly the kind of dissident message the Iranian government wants to shut down, but there's a problem.
While we were speaking, Ashraf showed me another way they get around the blocks on political websites. We both logged onto an online networking and file-sharing site.
"Here. Open this link," said Ashraf as he transferred me the address of a website in support of the Opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi.
"It's all in Farsi," I said. "What should I be looking for?"
"Nevermind. Just click on the sharing icon next to my name. Can you see it? Now select the 'share full-screen' option."
I clicked on the option and Ashraf was able to view my computer screen and navigate through the site, reading messages for Opposition supporters.
Ashraf was using my computer in Sydney to find out information about what was going on in his country, but which the Iranian government had blocked.
In July, New York-based internet expert Professor Clay Shirky told the ABC's Foreign Correspondent program that shutting down infrastructure like the internet could not be sustained by the Iranian government.
"What this class of dissidents has done is not just discomfort the government locally," he said. "It's given them a kind of political auto-immune disease in which they have to attack their own infrastructure to shut the dissent down.
"But that class of attack can't be sustained for weeks, much less months. No advanced economy can survive the wholesale shutdown of its communications function and survive over the long haul."
That prediction by Professor Shirky has proven to be the chink in Mr Ahmadinejad's armour.
By targeting the political websites the government avoids a "wholesale shutdown" of the country's internet access.
At the same time it allows the protesters to get around the bans, even if it means using a computer in Sydney to find out what's happening in Tehran
John Christopher sunols comments
Iran is in Total lock down and the government wants to Ban people within Iran knowing or seeing what is going on outside. Much similar to the rise of Communism under Stalin and then Communist china in 1948 under Chairman Moa at the end of the Communist revolution, which saw the defeat of the KMT or Chinese nationalist Party under Chen Li Check and the rise of Red China.
but
with modern communication people like me can put things on the social media and spread the news from the safety of my own home in Australia where the Iranian thugs that are under the incumbent president and criminal Mullahs can not touch or harm me to stop me
If you want to see more I will add it to my computer and my twitter regularly
0403 143 877
NB: anyone wanting anything put across the world and they are from a repressive regime similar to in Iran, please follow me on twitter where you can and e-mail me the message - i will check it out so that it is not spam and then if all is OK publish it on my blog
and my twitter
which runs through my web account
or
0403 143 877
(Note I fight for communication of Oppressed people, and especialy the oppressed church, thus I will use twitter and my blog with google from the safety of my own home in Newcastle Australia to diseminate inforamation for all, much similar to the free radio broadcasts and satellight communication of the last century.)
