WHAT TIPPED YOU OFF?

[spectre]

http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/what-tipped-you-off/
[PHOTO + VIDEO]

WORD OF MOUTH : SCREAMING ‘GOD IS GREAT’ TO EACH OTHER IN THE DARK
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKLiQOLB790
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWKIjtTcrhY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C69NvFGxZQE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84wzJ0Rs2wQ
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=ALLAH%20O%20AKBAR%20TEHRAN%20site%3Ayoutube.com
[for strongest effect play them all at once]

BEST PRACTICES : SECURE COMMUNICATIONS IN REPRESSIVE ENVIRONMENTS
http://irevolution.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/digital-security/
http://iran.sharearchy.com/how_to_help_technical.html

KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DEALING WITH
http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/world/iran/index.html
http://www.metafilter.com/82495/A-brief-history-of-modern-Iran

AND THIS: TAQIYYA, KITMAN, KHOD'EH, TAAROF
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Iran+and+deception+modalities:+the+reach+of+taqiyya,+kitman,+khod'eh...-a0155873239
Iran's Political Culture Of Righteous Deception

THIS IS WHAT THEOCRACY LOOKS LIKE
IRANIAN ELECTION FAKED OUTRIGHT [ONGOING]
#IranElection #gr88 #CNNFail viaTwitter
http://iran.twazzup.com/
http://www.iran101.blogspot.com/
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=iranelection
http://www.demotix.com/search/context/location/Iran
http://almost.at/#Iran

PHOTO
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/06/irans_disputed_election.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mousavi1388
http://picfog.com/search/iranelection
http://tehranlive.org/

VIDEO
http://www.youtube.com/iraniannews
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=7A80EC9F4C083901
http://www.citizentube.com/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8117054.stm

TORRENTS
http://giagro.wordpress.com/torrents/

EXTORTING SILENCE : PARENTS OF SLAIN BOY
CHARGED $3000 'BULLET FEE' TO GET HIS BODY BACK
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124571865270639351.html
Son's Death Has Iranian Family Asking Why
BY Farnaz Fassihi / June 23, 2009

Tehran—The family, clad in black, stood at the curb of the road
sobbing. A middle-aged mother slapped her cheeks, letting out piercing
wails. The father, a frail man who worked as a doorman at a clinic in
central Tehran, wept quietly with his head bowed. Minutes before, an
ambulance had arrived from Tehran's morgue carrying the body of their
only son, 19-year-old Kaveh Alipour. On Saturday, amid the most
violent clashes between security forces and protesters, Mr. Alipour
was shot in the head as he stood at an intersection in downtown
Tehran. He was returning from acting class and a week shy of becoming
a groom, his family said.

The details of his death remain unclear. He had been alone. Neighbors
and relatives think that he got trapped in the crossfire. He wasn't
politically active and hadn't taken part in the turmoil that has
rocked Iran for over a week, they said. "He was a very polite, shy
young man," said Mohamad, a neighbor who has known him since
childhood. When Mr. Alipour didn't return home that night, his parents
began to worry. All day, they had heard gunshots ringing in the
distance. His father, Yousef, first called his fiancée and friends. No
one had heard from him.

At the crack of dawn, his father began searching at police stations,
then hospitals and then the morgue. Upon learning of his son's death,
the elder Mr. Alipour was told the family had to pay an equivalent of
$3,000 as a "bullet fee"—a fee for the bullet used by security forces—
before taking the body back, relatives said.

Mr. Alipour told officials that his entire possessions wouldn't amount
to $3,000, arguing they should waive the fee because he is a veteran
of the Iran-Iraq war. According to relatives, morgue officials finally
agreed, but demanded that the family do no funeral or burial in
Tehran. Kaveh Alipour's body was quietly transported to the city of
Rasht, where there is family.

Everyone in the neighborhood knows the Alipour family. In addition to
their slain son, they have two daughters. Shopkeepers and businesses
pasted a photocopied picture of Mr. Alipour on their walls and
windows. In the picture, the young man is shown wearing a dark suit
with gray stripes. His black hair is combed neatly to a side and he
has a half-smile. "He was so full of life. He had so many dreams,"
said Arsalan, a taxi driver who has known the family for 10 years.
"What did he die for?"

ACID ATTACKS
http://twitter.com/johnperrybarlow
"RT @LaraABCNews: from trusted source, eyewitness at protests: the
acid attacks were real, dumped on protesters from above."

NEDA SOLTAN'S FAMILY THROWN OUT OF HOUSE, NO FUNERAL ALLOWED
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/24/neda-soltan-iran-family-forced-out
Neda Soltan's family 'forced out of home' by Iranian authorities

The Iranian authorities have ordered the family of Neda Agha Soltan
out of their Tehran home after shocking images of her death were
circulated around the world. Neighbours said that her family no longer
lives in the four-floor apartment building on Meshkini Street, in
eastern Tehran, having been forced to move since she was killed. The
police did not hand the body back to her family, her funeral was
cancelled, she was buried without letting her family know and the
government banned mourning ceremonies at mosques, the neighbours said.
"We just know that they [the family] were forced to leave their flat,"
a neighbour said. The Guardian was unable to contact the family
directly to confirm if they had been forced to leave.

The government is also accusing protesters of killing Soltan,
describing her as a martyr of the Basij militia. Javan, a pro-
government newspaper, has gone so far as to blame the recently
expelled BBC correspondent, Jon Leyne, of hiring "thugs" to shoot her
so he could make a documentary film. Soltan was shot dead on Saturday
evening near the scene of clashes between pro-government militias and
demonstrators, turning her into a symbol of the Iranian protest
movement. Barack Obama spoke of the "searing image" of Soltan's dying
moments at his press conference yesterday.

Amid scenes of grief in the Soltan household with her father and
mother screaming, neighbours not only from their building but from
others in the area streamed out to protest at her death. But the
police moved in quickly to quell any public displays of grief. They
arrived as soon as they found out that a friend of Soltan had come to
the family flat. In accordance with Persian tradition, the family had
put up a mourning announcement and attached a black banner to the
building.

But the police took them down, refusing to allow the family to show
any signs of mourning. The next day they were ordered to move out.
Since then, neighbours have received suspicious calls warning them not
to discuss her death with anyone and not to make any protest. A
tearful middle-aged woman who was an immediate neighbour said her
family had not slept for days because of the oppressive presence of
the Basij militia, out in force in the area harassing people since
Soltan's death.

The area in front of Soltan's house was empty today. There was no sign
of black cloths, banners or mourning. Secret police patrolled the
street. "We are trembling," one neighbour said. "We are still afraid.
We haven't had a peaceful time in the last days, let alone her family.
Nobody was allowed to console her family, they were alone, they were
under arrest and their daughter was just killed. I can't imagine how
painful it was for them. Her friends came to console her family but
the police didn't let them in and forced them to disperse and arrested
some of them. Neda's family were not even given a quite moment to
grieve."

Another man said many would have turned up to show their sympathy had
it not been for the police. "In Iran, when someone dies, neighbours
visit the family and will not let them stay alone for weeks but Neda's
family was forced to be alone, otherwise the whole of Iran would
gather here," he said. "The government is terrible, they are even
accusing pro-Mousavi people of killing Neda and have just written in
their websites that Neda is a Basiji (government militia) martyr.
That's ridiculous – if that's true why don't they let her family hold
any funeral or ceremonies? Since the election, you are not able to
trust one word from the government." A shopkeeper said he had often
met Soltan, who used to come to his store. "She was a kind, innocent
girl. She treated me well and I appreciated her behaviour. I was
surprised when I found out that she was killed by the riot police. I
knew she was a student as she mentioned that she was going to
university. She always had a nice peaceful smile and now she has been
sacrificed for the government's vote-rigging in the presidential
election."

MASS GRAVES
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8113552.stm
Grave spaces at Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery reportedly set aside for
those killed in Tehran clashes

"Her fiance, Caspian Makan, told BBC Persian TV about the
circumstances of Neda's death: "She was near the area, a few streets
away, from where the main protests were taking place, near the Amir-
Abad area. She was with her music teacher, sitting in a car and stuck
in traffic. She was feeling very tired and very hot. She got out of
the car for just for a few minutes. And that's when it all happened.
That's when she was shot dead. Eyewitnesses and video footage of the
shooting clearly show that probably Basij paramilitaries in civilian
clothing deliberately targeted her. Eyewitnesses said they clearly
targeted her and she was shot in the chest. She passed away within a
few minutes. People tried to take her to the nearest hospital, the
Shariati hospital. But it was too late.

We worked so hard to get the authorities to release her body. She was
taken to a morgue outside Tehran. The officials from the morgue asked
if they could use parts of her corpse for body transplants for medical
patients. They didn't specify what exactly they intended to do. Her
family agreed because they wanted to bury her as soon as possible. We
buried her in the Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery in southern Tehran. They
asked us to bury her in this section where it seemed the authorities
had set aside spaces for graves for those killed during the violent
clashes in Tehran last week.

On Monday afternoon, we had planned to hold a memorial service at the
mosque. But the authorities there and the paramilitary group, the
Basij, wouldn't allow it because they were worried it would attract
unwanted attention and they didn't want anymore trouble. The
authorities are aware that everybody in Iran and throughout the whole
world knows about her story. So that's why they didn't want a memorial
service. They were afraid that lots people could turn up at the event.
So as things stand now, we are not allowed to hold any gatherings to
remember Neda."

DOCTOR ESCAPES
http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2009/06/24/the-doctor/
"(Late Sunday I watch Neda’s video. I suspect that I recognize Arash
Hejazi, but I prefer not to believe in what I am seeing. I send him
and email)

Sunday 21 June 2009 | Dear Arash
I need to know where you stand, if things that I am seeing/reading are
true. Then I can myself take a position - depending on your advice, of
course. love, Paulo

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 | Subject: your country | Dearest Paulo,
I am now in Tehran. The video of Neda’s murder was taken by my friend,
and you can recognize me in the video. I was the doctor who tried to
save her and failed. She died in my arms. I am writing with tears in
my eyes. Please don’t mention my name. I’ll contact you with more
details soon. Love, Arash

(At this point, I decide to put the video in my blog. For the rest of
the day, I try to contact him. At one point, someone answers his phone
as a “CNN journalist”. I start to become worried)

Monday 22 June 2009 | Dear Arash
so far, no news from you. After I published the video in my blog, it
seems that it spread worldwide, including posts in NY Times, Guardian,
National Review, etc. Therefore, my main concern now is about you. You
NEED to answer this email, saying that you are all right
and the name of the person where we spend the New Year’s Eve in 2001
together, just to be sure that it is you really who is answering this
email. I don’t buy this CNN person answering your mobile.
If you don’t do that, I may leak your name to the press, in order to
protect you - visibility is the only protection at this point. I know
this because I am a former prisoner of conscience. If you do that,
unless instructed otherwise by you, I will stop the pressure for the
moment. My main concern now is you and your family. love, Paulo
P.S. - there are several trusted friends in blind copy here.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009 | Dearest Paulo
I am alright for now. I am not staying at home. I don’t know about
CNN. The friend’s name was Frederick. Love Arash

Tuesday, June 23, 2009 | Dearest Paulo
Trying to leave the country tomorrow morning. If I don’t arrive in
London at 2 pm., something has happened to me. Till then, wait.
My wife and my son are in (edited). Their phone (edited) Her email
(edited) Please wait till tomorrow. If something happens to me, please
take care of (name of wife) and (name of son), they are there, alone,
and have no one else in the world. Much love, it was an honor having
you as a friend. Arash

(At this point, a Brazilian journalist, Luis Antonio Ryff, who
traveled to Iran to cover my visit, recognizes Arash in the video, and
writes me to double-check. I confirm, but I ask him to keep his name
secret until today. Ryff agrees – even knowing that this would be a
major scoop for him. I would like to thank him here, for his dignity)

Wednesday 24 June 2009 : Arash landed in London "

IRAN OPPOSITION GROUPS
http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/world/iran/links.htm

TAKE-DOWN OF 'WANTED' WEBSITE
http://sites.google.com/site/gerdabdeath/index
http://cyberwar4iran.blogspot.com/
http://pastebay.com/24982
Primary Target: gerdab.ir hosting protestor images
"Iran's government is putting pictures of targeted protestors on the
web for the Basij to identify and harass, arrest, or worse. These
individuals could be jailed, or worse, dead by tomorrow. This website
needs to die."

PROXY FIGHT
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=proxy%2C&geo=IR&date=5%2F2009%202m&cmpt=q
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/06/activists-launch-hack-attacks-on-tehran-regime/
Activists Launch Hack Attacks on Tehran Regime
"Pro-democracy activists on the web are asking supporters to use
relatively simple hacking tools to flood the regime’s propaganda sites
with junk traffic. “NOTE to HACKERS - attack www.farhang.gov.ir - pls
try to hack all iran gov wesites [sic]. very difficult for us,” Tweets
one activist. The impact of these distributed denial of service (DDOS)
attacks isn’t clear. But official online outlets like leader.ir,
ahmadinejad.ir, and iribnews.ir are currently inaccessible. “There are
calls to use an even more sophisticated tool called BWraep, which
seems to exhaust the target website out of bandwidth by creating bogus
requests for serving images,” notes Open Society Institute fellow
Evgeny Morozov. In both Iran and abroad, the cyberstrikes are being
praised as a way to hit back against a regime that so blatantly
engaged in voter fraud. But some observers warn that the network
strikes could backfire — hurting the very protesters they’re meant to
assist. Michael Roston is concerned that “it helps to excuse the
Iranian regime’s own cyberwarfare.” Text-messaging networks and key
opposition websites mysteriously went dark just before the election.
Morozov worries that it “gives [the] hard-line government another
reason to suspect ‘foreign intervention‘ — albeit via computer
networks — into Iranian politics.” Iran has one of the world’s most
vibrant social media communities. That’s helping those of us outside
Iran follow along as this revolution is being YouTubed, blogged, and
Tweeted. But Iran’s network infrastructure there is relatively
centralized. Which makes Internet access there inherently unstable.
Programmer Robert Synott worries that if outside protesters pour too
much DDOS traffic into Iran, carriers there “will simply pull the plug
to protect the rest of their network.” For the moment, however, those
connections are still live. And activists are using them to mobilize
mass protests in Tehran. Opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi has
just appeared. Tens of thousands of protesters are chanting “‘No fear,
No fear, we are with each other.’” Meanwhile, universities are
recovering from assaults by pro-regime goons. Students were bloodied.
Memory cards and software were swiped by police. Computers were
smashed."

PROXY WAR JUST AS DANGEROUS
http://blog.austinheap.com/2009/06/22/state-of-the-iran-proxies/
https://www.xroxy.com/proxylist.php?port=&type=Distorting&ssl=nossl&country=IR&latency=&reliability=&sort=ssl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security
http://www.openssl.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_cache

* URGENT WARNING ABOUT USING PROXY SERVERS IN IRAN *
USE OF PROXY SERVERS BY IRANIANS IS EXTREMELY UNSAFE
[from open letter by Isaac Levy, security researcher, IT professional,
cyberwarfare analyst -
we believe this information is correct, but we are not in Iran; please
check for yourself]
BUT IF IT'S BAD AS THAT: SSL WORKS ON ANY PORT - MAKE SURE IT SAYS
HTTPS
"People in Iran please tell every person you know: EVERYONE use SSL
proxy servers starting tomorrow on all internet traffic, or please
stop using proxies! In spite of everyone's best intentions, when used
in limited numbers as they are right now, it's likely that internet
proxies are simply automating an opposition arrest list (or death
list) for the regime. Please understand that Iran's network-control is
state of the art, and Iranian security can inspect ALL traffic easily
in an automated fashion, through its centralized choke point. It's
likely that anyone using a proxy is quickly spotted and tracked.
Proxies are an effective way to get information out, but the use of
proxies will not be safe unless EVERY SINGLE PERSON in Iran uses one.
EVERYONE.

SSL/TLS (https) can be about 4 to 5 times the packet size in
transmission, which makes the bandwidth throttling of the Iranian
Security forces more difficult (the Iranian internet is painfully,
selectively, slow since it was shut down). If everyone were to use it,
for all communications, then all traffic would look the same, and
dissidents could not be so easily singled out. This is sometimes
called 'faking the weather.' We must recommend either EVERYONE uses
SSL proxies, in order to protect each other, or NO ONE does. IT/
Networking professionals will recognize the tactics in commonplace IPS
or IDS systems. Iran is clearly using payload inspection and filtering
systems- both for blocking, and collecting information. This is done
easily, since (without SSL) none of the material being sent is
encrypted. Security professionals will understand that scaling
firewalls to a national size is a solved problem. Cisco's Netflow is
used in network gear throughout the world to record network traffic,
and common new style 'deep packet inspection' network products are
capable of extremely efficient real-time network processing and data
collection.

The longer you wait the more proxy users will be arrested. Tell your
grandmothers, tell everyone you know: find a safe SSL proxy, learn to
use it, and only use SSL/TLS proxies from now on. They are not
difficult to use. If everyone does this, Iran will have an unfiltered
internet; to block it the Iranian government would be forced to turn
off their WHOLE internet connection (again). Also remember, anonymous
proxies can be hijacked: SSL provides validation that you're talking
to the right person.

In Summation: Without maximum use in Iran of these SSL/TLS proxy
technologies, in spite of best intentions, and with incredible
efficiency, the outside internet community is most likely helping to
automate an Iranian dissident death/arrest list. I can not overstate
this. Everyone in Iran please start using ssl proxies immediately.
today. now.

Once more, put simply?
On the outside, https proxies (SSL/TLS) for encryption and server
validation* are absolutely necessary. Please set them up. (*
validation to defend against Iran Security Forces performing man-in-
the-middle attacks) On the inside, EVERY Iranian citizen must use SSL
web proxies. If both of these things are not done, the best intentions
of the internet community will only help automate death lists for
citizens using the internet to protest the faked election, and
document the violence and repression that has followed. If both of
these things (inside and outside the country) ARE done, Iranians
regain cheap and fast internal unblocked internet communications, as
well as a very robust communications line to the outside world. Again,
EVERYONE has to do it. Both sides. Iranian grandmothers must
understand that they all must learn to do this, to protect Iranian
opposition protesters. It is easy and you only have to do it once.

Inside Iran, look for things like this:
http://proxy.org/ssl_proxies.shtml
http://www.anonymousproxylists.net/FreshAnonymousProxyLists/Free%20SSL%20Proxy%20List.html
Outside of Iran, Tech Specs, 2 parts:
1 )SSL Capable proxy servers:
Squid
Apache 2.x (enable mod_ssl, mod_proxy)
Apache 1.x, (enable mod_ssl, mod_proxy)
Tinyproxy
2) Cheap, valid SSL certificates:
(Critical to avoid Iran Security mitm attacks!)
https://www.godaddy.com/
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/02/000241

CONTACT
Isaac Levy
email : isaac [at] diversaform [dot] com

RECOMMENDED FURTHER ENCRYPTION : TOR [NOW IN FARSI]
http://www.torproject.org/index.html.fa
http://torir.org/
The More People Use It, The Stronger It Gets
"Tor is well known and respected as the best most efficient most
anonymous proxy service. The Onion Routing makes the user almost
completely untraceable."

TOR BRIDGES
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/06/help-protesters-iran-run-tor-relays-bridges
https://www.torproject.org/bridges
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39616925,00.htm
https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-dc-09/Marlinspike/BlackHat-DC-09-Marlinspike-Defeating-SSL.pdf
from Moxie Marlinspike:
"I'm not following the tech situation in Iran very closely, but it
seems like activists within Iran who are trying to share information
and coordinate actions should be using TOR rather than just SSL
proxies. TOR can probably provide the most robust defense against
attempts at censoring information, allowing Iranians to use social
networking tools, as well as providing (at least) network-level
anonymity.

The problems with SSL proxies are:
1) There are reports that port 443 is blocked. You could run an SSL
proxy on another port, but most are on 443 right now. TOR bridges,
however, are available on a wide range of ports.
2) Every time a list of SSL proxies is published, the government can
just blacklist them all. While the government could ban direct access
to the entire TOR directory, TOR bridges make it difficult for them to
restrict TOR traffic outright.
3) Simple SSL proxies are more vulnerable to any number of attacks.
For instance, it's often not possible to determine who's running the
proxy (the government or not?), and while this is also true for any
individual TOR node, no individual TOR node simultaneously knows both
the client's identity as well as the site they're visiting. TOR is
also more resilient to timing attacks and other MITM attacks on SSL
traffic."

CROWD-SOURCED AMATEUR BOTNET AS CIVIL RIGHTS ACTION
http://www.pagereboot.com/
http://arielsilverstone.com/category/iran/
http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/iranian-protests-becoming-crowd-sourced-cyber-war-sorts
Iranian Protests Becoming Crowd-Sourced Cyber War
BY Kit Eaton / Jun 17, 2009

"The really interesting thing about these attacks are not that they're
going on--DDoS attacks after elections apparently isn't a new
phenomenon--but how they're being carried out. Rather than using
simple code, with automated viral botnets and the like, these efforts
are largely being driven by hand. There are a number of simple scripts
going around that can be downloaded and which continually re-load the
target Web sites in a browser window. It's a simpler system, being
coordinated by word of mouth, Twitter and other means, but it appears
to be effective--all the target sites are offline, or have bandwidth
issues.

And the subtlety that this is a crowd-sourced form of cyber war, or
cyber revolution, rather than an anonymous automated network of
infected PCs, shouldn't go unnoticed. The new technological
infrastructure is giving people a way to protest and act in ways that
wouldn't have been possible before. While the morality of DDoS attacks
remains a grey area, it's nevertheless a fascinating V for Vendetta-
style effect in action."

DDOS
http://asert.arbornetworks.com/2009/06/iran-ddos-activity-chatter-tools-and-traffic-rates/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddos#Distributed_attack
http://www.nartv.org/2009/06/16/iran-ddos/
http://www.nartv.org/2009/06/20/iran-ddos-2/

TO UNKNOWN EFFECT
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/06/web-attacks-expand-in-irans-cyber-battle/
Web Attacks Expand in Iran’s Cyber Battle (Updated)
BY Noah Shachtman / June 16, 2009

More and more of Iran’s pro-government websites are under assault, as
opposition forces launch web attacks on the Tehran regime’s online
propaganda arms. What started out as an attempt to overload a small
set of official sites has now expanded, network security consultant
Dancho Danchev notes. News outlets like Raja News are being attacked,
too. The semi-official Fars News site is currently unavailable. “We
turned our collective power and outrage into a serious weapon that we
could use at our will, without ever having to feel the consequences.
We practiced distributed, citizen-based warfare,” writes Matthew
Burton, a former U.S. intelligence analyst who joined in the online
assaults, thanks to a “push-button tool that would, upon your click,
immediately start bombarding 10 Web sites with requests.” But the
tactic of launching these distributed denial of service, or DDOS,
attacks remains hugely controversial. The author of one-web based
tool, “Page Rebooter,” used by opposition supporters to send massive
amounts of traffic to Iranian government sites, temporarily shut the
service down, citing his discomfort with using the tool “to attack
other websites.” Then, a few hours later, he turned on the service
again, after his employers agreed to cover the costs of the additional
traffic. WhereIsMyVote.info is opening up 16 Page Reboot windows
simultaneously, to flood an array of government pages at once.

Other online supporters of the so-called “Green Revolution” worry
about the ethics of a democracy-promotion movement inhibitting their
foes’ free speech. A third group is concerned that the DDOS strikes
could eat up the limited amount of bandwidth available inside Iran —
bandwidth being used by the opposition to spread its message by
Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. “Quit with the DDOS attacks — they’re
just slowing down Iranian traffic and making it more difficult for the
protesters to Tweet,” says one online activist.

But Burton — who helped bring Web 2.0 tools to the American spy
community — isn’t so sure. “Giving a citizenry the ability to turn the
tables on its own government is, I think, what governance is all
about. The public’s ability to strike back is something that every
government should be reminded of from time to time.” Yet he admits to
feeling “conflicted.” about participating in the strikes, he suddenly
stopped. “I don’t know why, but it just felt…creepy. I was frightened
by how easy it was to sow chaos from afar, safe and sound in my
apartment, where I would never have to experience–or even know–the
results of my actions.”

PREPAREDNESS
http://www.renesys.com/blog/2009/06/strange-changes-in-iranian-int.shtml
http://www.renesys.com/blog/2009/06/iran-and-the-internet-uneasy-s.shtml
http://www.renesys.com/blog/2009/06/the-proxy-fight-for-iranian-de.shtml
The Proxy Fight for Iranian Democracy
BY James Cowie / June 22, 2009

If you put 65 million people in a locked room, they're going to find
all the exits pretty quickly, and maybe make a few of their own. In
the case of Iran's crippled-but-still-connected Internet, that means
finding a continuous supply of proxy servers that allow continued
access to unfiltered international web content like Twitter, Gmail,
and the BBC. A proxy server is a simple bit of software that you run
on your computer. It effectively lets you share your computer with
anonymous strangers as a "repeater" for content that they aren't
allowed to fetch themselves. For example, an Iranian web browser might
be manually configured to use your computer (identified by an IP
address and a port number) as a Web proxy. When your anonymous friend
reads twitter.com, or posts a tweet, the request goes via your
computer, instead of to Twitter's web server directly. Except for a
little delay, and the fact that your friend gets to see what the
uncensored Internet looks like from New York or London or São Paolo
instead of Tabriz or Qom, surfing through a proxy is pretty much like
surfing without one. As you might imagine, open web proxies are
valuable commodities in places where it's forbidden, possibly
dangerous, to surf the Internet. Iran's opposition movement has been
vigorously trading lists of open proxies over the past week. And as
you might further imagine, the Iranian government censors have worked
overtime to identify these proxies and add them to the daily
blacklists.

As an experiment, we geolocated a list of about 2,000 web proxies
(unique IP addresses and port numbers) that were shared on Twitter and
other web sites over the course of the last week, to see if we could
discern patterns in the places that are hosting them. Most of these
are no longer reachable from inside Iran, of course, precisely because
they were made public. The USA and Western Europe were well-
represented, but so were China, India, Russia, Romania, Bulgaria,
Vietnam, ... 87 countries in all, a pretty impressive breadth of
representation, considering the relatively small size of this sample.
(You can also see about a dozen Iranian IP addresses represented in
the set. Not surprisingly, all but one of these belong to networks
originated by DCI, the government-run service provider who operates
the modern-day Internet equivalent of the Alamūt Castle.)

In a geographic visualization of the proxies, drawn in Google Earth,
each of the colored arcs represents a single open web proxy; they are
"fountaining" out of a cable landing or Internet traffic exchange
point that makes approximate sense for their Iranian Internet routing.
For example, all of the web proxies in Europe are drawn from the
Marseilles termination of the Sea-Me-We-4 cable. The web proxies in
Turkey are drawn in light blue, radiating from Ankara, where the Iran-
Turkey gas pipeline passes through on its way from Bazargan. Those
unusual Iranian proxies emerge from Tehran, and so forth. If we rotate
the globe, you can see how the countries of Asia are doing their part
to keep the bits flowing in Iran. India, China, South Korea, Taiwan,
Vietnam, and Japan are all visible sources of web proxy activity.

I'd like to be able to say that these maps are a measure of the
strength of the democratic impulse and volunteer spirit in all the
countries of the world. But that might be a stretch. You see, looked
at another way, an open proxy is a security hole, something you might
find in a machine that's been compromised, or at the very least, badly
administered. Security purists think of them as the "unlocked gun
cabinet" of the Internet — a resource for anyone who wants to abuse a
website, commit fraud, cover their tracks. Some of the proxies in this
dataset are undoubtedly fresh, created by people who want to keep the
Internet alive for the Iranian people. But many of these proxies have
probably been around for months or years, mapped out by those that map
out such things. We did see a few organizers try to explain the
concept of an ACL (Access Control List) to all the new proud parents
of open proxies. If you are diligent, it is possible to restrict the
anonymous users of your new proxy to just the Iranians, or even just
the Iranian non-government networks, if you have a good enough list of
the IP address blocks (network prefixes) in question. But I expect
that the complexity of configuring anything tighter than an "open
access" proxy is going to prove too high a barrier to entry for most
people who might volunteer to run one.

For one thing, we know how hard this is. Renesys has pretty good lists
of per-country networks and their transit patterns, based on our
analysis of the global routing tables, and trust me, they take some
work to maintain. And even given good maps of Iran's address space to
work from, ACLs are notoriously hard to test, if you don't have
Iranian friends who can try your server from inside the protest zone
and report back to you with problems. Most people aren't going to
bother, and that's probably okay. Freedom is messy. There'll be time
for security later. Perhaps the strangest thing of all, given how
diverse and active and vocal the proxy server farmers have been, is
that by and large, it isn't working. The rate with which new proxies
are being created has slumped over the last few days. It's getting
harder and harder to propagate new proxies to the people who need
them, as the government consolidates its hold on the filtering
mechanisms. Any new proxy addresses that are posted to Twitter, or
emailed, will be blocked very quickly.

People we talk to inside Iran say that almost no proxies are usable
any more. Freegate, a Chinese anti-censorship application that makes
use of networks of open proxies, has proven popular in Iran. But this
week, it, too, has been experiencing problems. Many popular
applications, like Yahoo! Messenger, have stopped working. The
authorities are said to be using power interruptions as a cyberweapon,
causing brief outages during rallies that cause computers to reboot,
just as people are trying to upload images and video. The net result,
as Arbor's excellent analysis shows, has been a drastic reduction in
inbound traffic on filtered ports since the election.

If there's a lesson here for the rest of the world, perhaps it's this:
Install a few proxy instances on machines you control. Learn how to
lock them down properly. Swap them with your friends overseas who live
in places where the Internet is fragile. Set up your tunnels and test
them. And don't wait until the tanks are in the streets to figure this
out, because by that point, you may have already lost the proxy war.

BRUTAL LEARNING CURVE
http://www.theroadtothehorizon.org/2009/06/who-is-on-twitter-from-iran.html
http://travellerwithin.blogspot.com/2009/06/on-disclosing-sources-in-iran.html
http://several.amplify.com/2009/06/20/why-rt-iran-or-rt-from-iran-doesnt-do-what-you-think-it-does/

MEANWHILE : WORLD OF WARCRAFT STILL UNFILTERED, ALSO XBOX
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/06/21/127229/Researchers-Find-Gaps-In-Iranian-Filtering
"With all the turmoil and internet censorship in Iran making it
difficult to get an accurate picture of what's going, security
researchers have found a way to locate gaps in Iran's filtering by
analyzing traffic exiting Iran. The short version is that SSH,
torrents and Flash are high priorities for blocking, while game
protocols like WoW and Xbox traffic are being ignored, even though
they also allow communication. Hopefully, this data will help people
think of new ways to bypass filtering and speak freely, even though
average Iranians have worse things to worry about than internet
censorship, now that the reformists have been declared anti-Islamic by
the Supreme Leader. Given the circumstances, that declaration has been
called 'basically a death sentence' for those who continue
protesting."

Reader CaroKann sends in a related story at the Washington Post about
an analysis of the vote totals in the Iranian election (similar to,
but different from the one we discussed earlier) in which the authors
say the election results have a one in two-hundred chance of being
legitimate.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/06/16/2137203/Statistical-Suspicions-In-Irans-Election

HOW GOOD'S YOUR DATA?
http://asert.arbornetworks.com/2009/06/iranian-traffic-engineering/
Iranian Traffic Engineering
BY Craig Labovitz / June 17th, 2009

The outcome of the Iranian elections now hangs in the balance and
perhaps, also on the availability of the Internet (or at least Twitter
and Facebook according to the US State Department). Based on
significant Internet engineering changes over the last week, the
Iranian government seems to agree… While other countries (e.g. Burma
in 2007) completely unplugged the country during political unrest,
Iran has taken a decidedly different tact.

Before going further, I should note that we have no direct insight
into Iranian political machinations nor telecommunications policy. But
the 100 ISPs participating in the Internet Observatory provide some
interesting hints on how the Iranian government may hope to control
Internet access. The state owned Data communication Company of Iran
(or DCI) acts as the gateway for all Internet traffic entering or
leaving the country. Historically, Iranian Internet access has enjoyed
some level of freedom despite government filtering and monitoring of
web sites.

In normal times, DCI carries roughly 5 Gbps of traffic (with a
reported capacity of 12 Gbps) through 6 upstream regional and global
Internet providers. For the region, this represents an average level
of Internet infrastructure (for purposes of perspective, a mid size
ISP in Michigan carries roughly the same level of traffic).

Then the Iranian Internet stopped. One the day after the elections on
June 13th at 1:30pm GMT (9:30am EDT and 6:00pm Tehran / IRDT), Iran
dropped off the Internet. All six regional and global providers
connecting Iran to the rest of the world saw a near complete loss of
traffic. The below graph shows Iranian Internet traffic through Iran’s
six upstream providers.

{Note: All data comes from analysis of Internet Observatory anonymous
ASPath traffic statistics from which we infer upstream ISP traffic.
Also a few caveats — Iranian traffic is such a small part of global
Internet traffic levels that the Observatory data is fairly noisy. We
used a number of standard statistical approaches to normalize the
sampled dataset.}

As noted earlier, Iran normally sees around 5 Gbps of traffic with
typical diurnal and weekly curves (though Iran sees dips both on
Iranian weekend of Thurs / Friday as well as during western Sat / Sun
weekends). From the view of the Observatory, most Internet traffic to
Iran goes through Reliance (formerly Flag) Telecom, the major Asia
Pacific region underseas cable operator. Singtel, a major pan-Asian
provider and Türk Telekom also provide significant transit.

Initially, DCI severed most of the major transit connections into
Iran. Within a few hours, a trickle of traffic returned across
TeliaSonera, Reliance and SignTel — all well under 1 Gbps. As of
6:30am GMT June 16, traffic levels returned to roughly 70% of normal
with Reliance traffic climbing by more than a Gigabit. So what is
happening to Iranian traffic? I can only speculate. But DCI’s Internet
changes suggest piecemeal migration of traffic flows. Typically off
the shelf / inexpensive Internet proxy and filtering appliances can
support 1 Gbps or lower. If DCI needed to support higher throughput
(say, all Iranian Internet traffic), then redirecting subsets of
traffic as the filtering infrastructure comes online would make sense.

Unlike Burma, Iran has significant commercial and technological
relationships with the rest of the world. In other words, the
government cannot turn off the Internet without impacting business and
perhaps generating further social unrest. In all, this represents a
delicate balance for the Iranian government and a test case for the
Internet to impact democratic change. Events are still unfolding in
Iran, but some reports are saying the Internet has already won.

INTERNET FILTERING IN DEPTH
http://opennet.net/research/profiles/iran
http://opennet.net/about-filtering
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/opennet08tools.pdf
http://opennet.net/sites/opennet.net/files/Deibert_03_Ch02_029-056.pdf
http://www.govcom.org/maps/censorship/gco_tab_iran.pdf
http://www.genderit.org/upload/ad6d215b74e2a8613f0cf5416c9f3865/A_Report_on_Internet_Access_in_Iran_2_.pdf

PARENTAL CONTROLS
http://futureoftheinternet.org/could-iran-shut-down-twitter
Could Iran Shut Down Twitter?
BY Jonathan Zittrain / June 15th, 2009

Iran has been able to impose a finely grained Internet filtering
regime, not having to deal with the sheer volume of traffic that, say,
China has. It’s able to treat its Internet-using public the way a
school can filter what its kids see on their PCs. All Internet traffic
is routed through a server farm that applies the filtering. (The
government used to run U.S. company Secure Computing’s (since acquired
by McAfee) SmartFilter software. Secure Computing denied selling the
software to Iran; see Wikipedia’s summary. Today Iran runs its own
home-grown filtering software.)

So it’d be trivial for the Iranian government to block access to
Twitter as it could to any particular Web site, and it could even
block access to some Twitter users’ feeds there while leaving others
open, by simply configuring its filters to allow some Twitter urls
through while filtering others. But Twitter isn’t just any particular
Web site. It’s an atom designed to be built into other molecules. More
than most, Twitter allows multiple paths in and out for data. Its open
APIs make it trivially easy for any other Web service provider to
insert a stream of tweets in or to capture what comes out. Thus
Twitterfall can provide a waterfall of tweets — all viewable by going
there instead of to Twitter. Anyone using at Twitterfall can tweet
from there as well. You can hook up your Facebook status in either
direction, so that when you tweet it automatically updates your
Facebook status — or the other way around.

The very fact that Twitter itself is half-baked, coupled with its
designers’ willingness to let anyone build on top of it to finish
baking it (I suppose it helps not to have any apparent business model
that relies on drawing people to the actual Twitter Web site), is what
makes it so powerful. There’s no easy signature for a tweet-in-
progress if its shorn of a direct connection to the servers at
twitter.com. And with so many ways to get those tweets there and back
without the user needing twitter.com, it’s far more naturally
censorship resistant than most other Web sites. Less really is more.
Publius points out that Iran could simply cut off all Internet access,
or at least all access for most people there. Maybe it’ll come to
that.

BLOCKED SITE CHECK
http://www.herdict.org/web/explore/country/IR
http://www.herdict.org/web/participate/download
http://www.herdict.org/blog/
http://www.herdict.org/web/
"Have you ever come across a web site that you could not access and
wondered,"Am I the only one?" Herdict Web aggregates reports of
inaccessible sites, allowing users to compare data to see if
inaccessibility is a shared problem. By crowdsourcing data from around
the world, we can document accessibility for any web site, anywhere."

CHARTING IRAN'S FILTERED TRAFFIC
http://asert.arbornetworks.com/2009/06/a-deeper-look-at-the-iranian-firewall/
A Deeper Look at The Iranian Firewall
BY Craig Labovitz

In the previous blog post about the Iranian firewall, we explored
macro level Iranian traffic engineering changes (showing that Iran cut
all communication after the election and then slowly added back
Internet connectivity over the course of several days). Like many
other news reports and bloggers, we also speculated on Iran’s intent —
how was the government manipulating Internet traffic and why?

Thanks to the cooperation of several ISPs in the region and Internet
Observatory data, we can now do a bit better than speculate — we have
pieced together a rough picture of what the Iranian government’s
Internet firewall appears to be doing. The data shows that DCI, the
Iranian state run telecommunications agency, has selectively blocked
or rate-limited targeted Internet applications (either by payload
inspection or ports).

I’ll step through several of these applications.

On average, Internet traffic is dominated by web pages (roughly 40-50%
of all Internet traffic). And the vast majority of this web traffic
(unless you happen to be Google or Facebook) goes into ISPs and the
millions of associated end users (as opposed to traffic going out of a
country or ISP). Iran is no exception.

The below graph shows web traffic (TCP port 80) into Iran over the
days before and immediately after the election. Though the graph
clearly shows a brief post-election outage followed by a decrease in
web traffic, the Iranian web traffic was comparatively unaffected by
Iran filter changes. Based on reports of Iran’s pre-existing Internet
filtering capabilities, I’d speculate DCI did not require significant
additional web filtering infrastructure.

In contrast, the next graph shows streaming video traffic (Adobe
Flash) going into and out of Iran. Note the significant increase of
video traffic immediately preceding the election (presumably
reflecting high levels of Iranian interest in outside news sources).
All video traffic immediately stops on the Saturday following the
election (June 13th at 6:00pm Tehran / IRDT) and unlike the web, never
returns to pre-election levels.

The next graph on Iranian applications filters shows email into and
out of the country. Again note the run up in email traffic immediately
preceding the election (especially outbound mails). And then? The data
suggests DCI began blocking some outgoing email even before the
election completed. Following the election, email returned at reduced
levels (again, presumably because DCI had filtering infrastructure in
place).

Finally, a look at the top applications now blocked by the DCI firewall
(s). The chart shows average percentage decrease in application
traffic in the days before and after the election. As discussed
earlier, the Iranian firewalls appear to be selectively impacting
application traffic. I’ll note that ssh (a secure communication
protocol) tops the list followed by video streaming and file sharing.

While the rapidly evolving Iranian firewall has blocked web, video and
most forms of interactive communication, not all Internet applications
appear impacted. Interestingly, game protocols like xbox and World of
Warcraft show little evidence of government manipulation.

Perhaps games provide a possible source of covert channels (e.g.
“Bring your elves to the castle on the island of Azeroth and we’ll
plan the next Ahmadinejad protest rally?”)

CHOKE POINT
http://www.herdict.org/web/explore/country/IR
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/guest/23691/
Why Twitter Doesn't Mean the End of Iranian Censorship
BY Hal Roberts / June 16, 2009

Amid post-election protests in Iran, the government has apparently
increased its filtering of sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, that
host potentially offensive (to the government) content--and even
reportedly turned off for a short period the Internet connection to
the rest of the world. A question simple to ask--but difficult to
answer--is whether Iranians are successfully bypassing the filtering
through proxies or other filtering circumvention tools.

Academic research has established for years that the government of
Iran closely filters its Internet connections, blocking sites that it
does not like (mostly pornographic ones, but political and religious
sites as well). The government of Iran can do this easily because
virtually all traffic flows through a single government-controlled
ISP. (In fact, Iran for years used McAfee SmartFilter, a product of a
U.S. company, to perform this filtering, but it uses its own homegrown
filtering tools now.)

Some users combat this filtering by employing proxies, routing their
traffic through a machine outside of Iran so that the Iran filter sees
only traffic to that proxy, effectively exchanging Iran's control of
the network for the proxy's control of its network. Iran responds by
blocking these proxies as it finds them, and these proxy users respond
by continually looking for new, unblocked proxies or by using tools
like UltraSurf that do the work of filtering out government
interference themselves.

Data about proxy use is naturally hard to find (the point is to hide
the users' usage), but our best data indicate that interest in using
proxies has increased substantially over the past year and has doubled
in the past week. But such use is confined to a small portion of
Iranian Internet users; it's in the low single percentage points.
Google searches for "proxy," for instance, remain orders of magnitude
less popular than searches for "election." Likewise, a steady flow of
information about the protests has come out of Twitter, but the number
of Iranian users actually Twittering seems to be a tiny portion of
Iranians. As far as we can tell, the Iranian government has done a
pretty good job of blocking its citizens' Web requests to sites that
it does not want them to see, including during the current crisis.

But new technologies make the battle over filtering harder to judge.
Even though the government has reportedly blocked Twitter.com, a
defining attribute of Twitter is that it is an open system in that it
allows a wide diversity of external tools and sites to read from and
write to its service through its programming interface. Jonathan
Zittrain and John Palfrey point out that as content is divorced from
delivery through such open systems, blocking, for example, Twitter-as-
a-network-system much harder than simply blocking Twitter the site,
since there are dozens of tools and sites that directly read and write
the Twitter data stream.

And as with other recent global crises, the widespread use of
distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks has made it possible to
filter a site by flooding it with so much data that it can no longer
respond to legitimate users, rendering proxies useless for those
sites. The tools to launch DDoS attacks, including simple Twitter
campaigns to overload a list of sites, have become easily available,
so both pro-government and protest actors have directed these attacks
at each other's sites.

But the technical issue of whether a given site returns a response for
a given set of people captures only one small part of the larger
problem of determining who controls the flows of information on the
Internet and through media and social networks in general. A fuller
approach to the problem is to think about those flows of information
and how they are being filtered, by social and political as well as
technical means. We should ask, for example, whether the information
from the core group of proxy/Twitter users is filtering out to the
wider Iranian and global communities, how it is flowing to and through
those communities, and what effect the information is having as it
filters out. The answers to those questions are impossible to
determine in real time from the outside, given the chaos and confusion
of the situation. As with the protests, time and perspective will
tell.
{As a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard
University, Hal Roberts performs primary research into global Internet
filtering.}

CALL FOR BOYCOTT
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/nokia-siemens-boycott/

DEEP PACKET INSPECTION
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124562668777335653.html
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/wsj-nokia-and-siemens-help-iran-spy-on-internet-users/
WSJ: Nokia, Siemens Help Iran Spy on Internet Users
BY Kim Zetter E / June 22, 2009

According to a somewhat confusing Wall Street Journal story, Iran has
adopted NSA-like techniques and installed equipment on its national
telecommunication network last year that allows it to spy on the
online activities and correspondence — including the content of e-mail
and VoIP phone calls — of its internet users. Nokia Siemens Networks,
a joint venture between Germany’s Siemens and Finland’s Nokia,
installed the monitoring equipment late last year in Iran’s government-
controlled telecom network, Telecommunication Infrastructure Co., but
authorities only recently engaged its full capabilities in response to
recent protests that have broken out in the country over its
presidential election.

The equipment allows the state to conduct deep-packet inspection,
which sifts through data as it flows through a network searching for
keywords in the content of e-mail and voice transmissions. According
to the Journal, Iran seems to be doing this for the entire country
from a single choke point. “Seems,” because although the Journal
states that Nokia Siemens installed the equipment and that signs
indicate the country is conducting deep-packet inspection, the paper
also says “it couldn’t be determined whether the equipment from Nokia
Siemens Networks is used specifically for deep packet inspection.”

Although the Journal has published questionable “spying” stories in
the past, we’re willing to go with them on this one. It’s previously
been reported that Iran was blocking access to some web sites for
people inside the country as protesters took to the streets and the
internet to dispute the results of the country’s recent presidential
election. But sources told the Journal that the government’s
activities have gone beyond censorship to massive spying. They say the
deep-packet inspection, which deconstructs data in transit then
reconstructs it, could be responsible for network activity in Iran
having recently slowed to less than a tenth of its regular speed. The
slowdown could be caused by the inspection at a single point, rather
than at numerous network points, as China reportedly does it. A
brochure promoting the equipment sold to Iran says the technology
allows for “the monitoring and interception of all types of voice and
data communication on all networks.”

A spokesman for Nokia Siemens Networks defended the sale of the
equipment to Iran suggesting that the company provided the technology
with the idea that it would be used for “lawful intercept,” such as
combating terrorism, child pornography, drug trafficking and other
criminal activity. Equipment installed for law enforcement purposes,
however, can easily be used for spying as well. “If you sell networks,
you also, intrinsically, sell the capability to intercept any
communication that runs over them,” the spokesman told the Journal. He
added that the company “does have a choice about whether to do
business in any country” but said, “We believe providing people,
wherever they are, with the ability to communicate is preferable to
leaving them without the choice to be heard.” In March, the company
sold off its monitoring technology to a German investment firm.

DOMESTIC CONCERN
http://www.openinternetcoalition.org/files/OIC_DPI_Iran_062909.pdf
http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20090629_3881.php
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/deep-packet-inspection/
Deep-Packet Inspection in U.S. Scrutinized Following Iran Surveillance
BY Kim Zetter / June 29, 2009

Following a report last week that Iran is spying on domestic internet
users with western-supplied technology, advocacy groups are pressuring
federal lawmakers to scrutinize the use of the same technology in the
U.S. The Open Internet Coalition sent a letter to all members of the
House and Senate urging them to launch hearings aimed at examining and
possibly regulating the so-called deep-packet inspection technology.
Two senators also announced plans to introduce a bill that would bar
foreign companies that sell IT technology to Iran from obtaining U.S.
government contracts, legislation that is clearly aimed at the two
European companies that reportedly sold the equipment to Iran. The
Wall Street Journal reported last week that Nokia Siemens Networks, a
joint venture between Germany’s Siemens and Finland’s Nokia, recently
gave Iran deep-packet inspection equipment that would allow the
government to spy on internet users. According to the Journal, Iranian
officials have used deep-packet surveillance to snoop on the content
of e-mail, VoIP calls and other online communication as well as track
users’ other online activity, such as uploading videos to YouTube.
Iranian officials are said to be using it to monitor activists engaged
in protests over the country’s recent disputed presidential election,
though the Journal said it couldn’t confirm whether Iran was using the
Nokia Siemens Networks equipment for this purpose or equipment from
another maker. Nokia Siemens has denied that it provided Iran with
such technology.

But similar technology is being installed at ISPs in the U.S. It
spurred extensive controversy last year when Charter Communications,
one of the country’s largest ISPs, announced that it planned to use
deep-packet inspection to spy on broadband customers to help
advertisers deliver targeted ads. The plan sparked a backlash and
heated congressional hearings. Publicity about the issue died down,
however, after Charter retreated from its plan, and Congress moved on
to other matters. But deep-packet inspection didn’t go away. ISPs
insist they need it to help combat spam and malware. But the
technology is ripe for abuse, not only by ISPs but also by the U.S.
government, which could force providers to retain and hand over data
they collect about users.

In its letter to lawmakers urging them to investigate the technology,
the Open Internet Coalition delicately avoided placing the U.S.
government in the same category as Iran by not mentioning possible
U.S. government abuses of the technology. “We do not believe U.S.
network owners intend to interfere with political communications in
the way the Iranian government is doing, but the control technologies
they are deploying on the internet carry the same enormous power,” the
Coalition writes. “And, whether an inspection system is used to
disrupt political speech or achieve commercial purposes, both require
the same level of total surveillance of all communications between end-
users and the internet.”

At a House subcommittee hearing this year to examine the technology,
Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) also expressed alarm. “The thought that
a network operator could track a user’s every move on the Internet,
record the details of every search and read every e-mail or attached
document is alarming,” he said. With regard to the sale of the
technology to Iran, Sens. Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) and Lindsey
Graham (R-South Carolina) attempted to address the Nokie Siemens issue
with a bill that would prevent foreign companies selling sensitive
technology to Iran from either obtaining new government contracts or
renewing existing ones, unless they halt their exports to Iran.
According to NextGov, Nokia did more than $10 million in business with
the U.S. government between 2000 and 2008; Siemens has nearly 2,000
U.S. government contracts and obtained $250 million in U.S. government
contracts this year alone. Nokia Siemens Networks currently has more
than $5 million in U.S. government contracts. Neither Schumer nor
Graham mentioned how such a law would be enforced if foreign companies
used proxies to sell their products to Iran to circumvent the
regulation.

The U.S. government embargo against U.S. companies selling to Iran is
one of the tightest. The embargo currently prevents any U.S.
individual or company from obtaining a license to sell goods and
technologies to Iran that could be used for, among other things,
missile proliferation purposes, chemical and biological warfare
proliferation, human rights and crime control. The embargo, however,
has done little to prevent Iran from obtaining U.S. technology anyway.
In the meantime, consumers called for a boycott of Nokia and Siemens
products. And Hands Across the Mideast Support Alliance (HAMSA) has
organized a writing campaign urging users to send a protest letter to
Nokia. According to the organization’s site, nearly 4,000 people have
acknowledged sending the letter so far.

THE 'LIPSTICK REVOLUTION'
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2008/09/activists-face-obstacles-online-in-winning-womens-rights-in-iran260.html
http://blogs.abcnews.com/womenomics/2009/06/women-rising-in-iran.html
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Politics/International/story?id=7880379
Iranian Women Take To The Streets, Demand Equal Rights, Economic
Opportunities
BY Martha Raddatz and Susan Rucci / June 19, 2009

The huge rallies this week in Iran, the largest seen since the 1979
Islamic Revolution, have included thousands of women, who have taken
to the streets to oppose the government of President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad. Some are dubbing itthe "lipstick revolution." A week
after the contested election that declared incumbent President
Ahmadinejad the winner, protests over alleged voting fraud still
continue strong.

Women, old and young, are visible at every rally -- chanting,
shouting, defiantly flashing V for Victory signs, carrying placards
protesting the election results, defying the police and, in some
cases, facing brutal retaliation. Others say the presence of so many
woman is only the tip of the iceberg. "This movement is not about
wearing lipstick and throwing their veil off," Kelly Nikinejad, editor
of Tehranbureau.com, told ABC News. "It's so much deeper than that."
Many Iranian women want what they have desired for so long -- equal
rights. Women make up an important part of Iran's population. They
constitute 65 percent of all university students, but only 12 percent
of women are in the workforce. Additionally, under the current law,
women do not have equal divorce, child custody or inheritance rights.
Last year, Ahmadinejad's government tried to push a "family protection
law" through parliament. The law would ease restrictions on polygamy
and taxing mehriyeh, the traditional payment a husband gives a wife
upon marriage, angering many.

In this election, women, who have been on the forefront of many a
political movement in the country including the 1979 Revolution, threw
their weight boldly behind Mir Hossein Mousavi, the reformist
candidate who enjoys overwhelming support but according to election
results, was defeated by a wide margin by Ahmadinejad, leading the
opposition and their supporters to cry foul. "They are very brave,"
Nikinejad said. "They go and they get beat up every day and they come
back and they say I hurt, I hurt there, and then the next day they go
back and they get pepper sprayed, beaten up, it's amazing." The bold
support for Mousavi does not mean that Ahmadinejad does not have a
female base. In fact, many women showed up at his rallies as well and
strongly believe that he would solve their problems -- from housing to
health care. But to many Iranian women frustrated about their lives,
Mousavi's message of change and hope and equal rights struck a deep
chord.

Iranian Women Demand Equal Rights
And they saw hope not only in Mousavi, but also in his wife, Zahra
Rahnavard, a reflection of themselves. Rahnavard became the first
Iranian women to openly campaign with her husband. "She was the image
of change in Iran," Nikinejad said. "She's a very educated woman. She
has two PhDs. She's authored 20 books." Mousavi and his wife called
for more economic and social rights for women. "Changing this
mentality and picture [of women] can be very helpful because if we
step toward improving the situation of our women then we have
progressed along the path of elimination of discrimination," Mousavi
said at a rally last week. "Women will be educated and trained so that
they can be employed," he said at another event.

His wife has also spoken out openly against Ahmadinejad's government.
"Today, we feel that an atmosphere of freedom of speech, press and
thought, which we are all interested in and have confidence in, is
absent. We feel that we do not possess an independent and great
economy because of the wrong policies and adventurous behavior at a
national and international level, and because of unilateral decisions
without consultation with experts," Rahnavard said at a political
rally. "Now is the time we feel that we must be present on the scene."
Over the last few years, women once fearful in many of parts of the
world are finding the courage to speak out. In 2002, in Bangladesh
thousands of women marched demanding equal rights, and earlier this
year 300 Afghan women protested a Taliban law that allowed marital
rape. But the big question that remains to be answered is whether
these courageous acts witnessed around the world will make a
difference in Iran.

JUST BEFORE ELECTION, SMS GETS SHUT OFF
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WU-cxEEJ-E
http://www.breakingtweets.com/2009/06/11/sms-system-down-in-iran-just-hours-before-election/
"The SMS (Short Message Service) system in Iran has been taken down,
just hours before polls open for Friday’s presidential election. The
Ghalam News report, translated from Persian, says that the popular
network “was cut off throughout the country.” The action occurred just
before midnight local time, less than nine hours before the start of
elections. “All walks of life from all over the country” are
discovering that “messages on different cell phone networks will not
send.” The disruption in communication occurred after reformist
candidates have been increasingly using Twitter and text messaging to
rally support, per the Wall Street Journal. Approximatey 110 millions
SMS messages have been sent per day leading up to the election,
according to The Tehran Times."

SYSADMINS DETAINED
http://www.boingboing.net/2004/08/24/iran-web-censorship-.html
"Persian blogger Hossein Derakshan says Iranian officials recently
detained several staff and web technicians who worked on banned
reformist websites, in order to gain control of the sites. They have
now reportedly taken control of the servers, shut them down, and
deleted all of their content."

THROTTLING DISSENT
http://opennet.net/research/profiles/iran
http://www.renesys.com/blog/2009/06/strange-changes-in-iranian-int.shtml
http://opennet.net/blog/2009/06/cracking-down-digital-communication-and-political-organizing-iran
http://opennet.net/research/profiles/iran
"The Islamic Republic of Iran continues to expand and consolidate its
technical filtering system, which is among the most extensive in the
world. A centralized system for Internet filtering has been
implemented that augments the filtering conducted at the Internet
service provider (ISP) level. Iran now employs domestically produced
technology for identifying and blocking objectionable Web sites,
reducing its reliance on Western filtering technologies. The
regulatory agencies in Iran charged with policing the Internet
continue to expand. The Revolutionary Guard has begun to play an
active role in enforcing Internet content standards."

PRESS BLACKOUT
http://www.rsf.org/An-election-without-free-flow-of.html
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hpy1TiemIsKmu6FEgv42JU5swSxw
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSEVA639005?rpc=60
Iran cancels foreign media accreditation

STORMTROOPERS UNLEASHED
http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2009/06/14/75922.html
http://evideo.alarabiya.net/ShowClip.aspx?clipid=2009.06.14.05.25.24.078
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSj4i6pSgSA

MASS ARRESTS
http://www.iranhumanrights.org/2009/06/increasingrepression/
"A purge of reform-oriented individuals….” / 17 June 2009

PROXY WARS (cont.)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,626412,00.html
http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/world/iran/proxy-groups.htm

RURAL OUT-OF-TOWN RIOT POLICE BEING PUT UP IN HOTELS
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2009/jun/24/iran-crisis
Newspaper Roozonline has an interview (in Persian) with one of the
young plainclothes militiamen who have been beating protesters. The
Guardian's Robert Tait sends this synopsis: "The man, who has come
from a small town in the eastern province of Khorasan and has never
been in Tehran before, says he is being paid 2m rial (£122) to assault
protestors with a heavy wooden stave. He says the money is the main
incentive as it will enable him to get married and may even enable him
to afford more than one wife. Leadership of the volunteers has been
provided by a man known only as "Hajji", who has instructed his men to
"beat the counter-revolutionaries so hard that they won't be able to
stand up". The volunteers, most of them from far-flung provinces such
as Khuzestan, Arak and Mazandaran, are being kept in hostel
accommodation, reportedly in east Tehran. Other volunteers, he says,
have been brought from Lebanon, where the Iranian regime has strong
allies in the Hezbollah movement. They are said to be more highly-paid
than their Iranian counterparts and are put up in hotels. The last
piece of information seems to confirm the suspicion of many Iranians
that foreign security personnel are being used to suppress the
demonstrators. For all his talk of the legal process, this interview
provides a key insight into where Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, believes the true source of his legitimacy rests."

HIZBULLAH AND HAMAS FLOWN IN?
http://lebasshakhsi.blogspot.com/
https://sites.google.com/site/tatsumairanupdate/
Suppression of Dissent - The Players

Currently, there are two or three, maybe four, groups who are
suppressing the students on the ground that you'll read about
throughout this thread:
1. The Basij
2. Ansar Hizbullah (which I will refer to as Ansar)
3. Lebanese Hizbullah (Unconfirmed rumour but either a probable or a
persistent one. Der Spiegel, based on a Voice of America report, says
that 5,000 Hizbullah fighters are currently in Iran masquerading as
riot police, confirming the independent reports. Iran Press News has
posted two photographs of men they claim are Hizbullah and Hamas
mercenaries. Many different independent reports and video point that
way. Even in the last days other independent twitter feeds have
declared witnessing thugs beating on people while shouting in Arabic;
I will refer to them as Hizbullah)
4. Lebanese Hamas (unconfirmed and doubtful. This rumour has been
cropping up, with some of the most twitter feeds saying they had
visual confirmation of Lebanese Hamas fighters along with Lebanese
Hizbullah member. You should definitely take with a grain of salt, but
it has been mentioned often enough, by sources generally always right,
that it deserves of a mention here. Iran Press TV also claims to have
posted a picture of Hamas mercenaries. I will refer to them as Hamas)

- The Basij are your regular paramilitary organization. They are the
armed hand of the clerics. The Basij are a legal group, officially a
student union, and are legally under direct orders of the
Revolutionary Guard. Their main raison d'être is to quell dissent.
They are the ones who go and crack skulls, force people to participate
in pro-regime demonstrations, and generally try to stop any
demonstrations from even starting. They are located throughout the
country, in every mosque, every university, every social club you can
think of. They function in a way very similar to the brownshirts.

They were the ones who first started the crackdown after the election,
but it wasn't enough. While they are violent and repressive, they are
still Persian and attacking fellow citizens. A beating is one thing,
mass killings another.

- Another group was working with them, whose members are even more
extreme, is Ansar. There is a lot of cross-membership between the
Basij and Ansar, though not all are members of the other group and
vice-versa. The vast majority of Ansar are Persians (either Basij or
ex-military), though a lot of Arab recruits come from Lebanon and
train with them under supervision of the Revolutionary Guard. They are
not functioning under a legal umbrella, they are considered a
vigilante group, but they pledge loyalty directly to the Supreme
Leader and most people believe that they are under his control. They
are currently helping the Basij to control the riots, but due to the
fact that they are Persians and in lower numbers than the Basij, they
are not that active.

- The Lebanese Hizbullah is a direct offshoot (and under direct
control) of the Iranian Hizbullah (itself under direct control of the
Supreme Leader) and cooperates closely with Ansar though Ansar
occupies itself only with Iran's domestic policies, while Hizbullah
occupies itself only with Iran's foreign policy unless there is a
crisis like right now. However, Hizbullah has been called to stop
violent riots in Iran in the past.

(The following paragraph includes some speculation based on reports
from ground zero, it is no confirmed, this is what was reported early
on by various twitter feeds considered credible, so do not take this
as anything but unconfirmed rumours) Hizbullah flew in a lot of their
members in Iran, most likely a good deal even before the elections in
case there were trouble. They are the ones who speak Arabs and are
unleashing the biggest level of violence on the Persians so far.
Another wave arrived recently and there is chatter that yet another
wave of Hizbullah reinforcements are coming in from Lebanon as we
speak. According to Iranians on the ground, they are the ones riding
motorcycles, beating men women and children indiscriminately and
firing live ammunitions at students.

- The Lebanese Hamas is a branch of Hamas set-up in Lebanon. Like
Hamas in Gaza, Hamas in Lebanon is directly under the orders of the
Hamas council of Damascus known as Majlis al-Shurah. While it is
surprising to hear that they might be involved, and as I said take
these reports with a grain of salt until we get more confirmations, it
is not illogical either. Iran has become the main benefactor of Hamas
in the last years, branching out from only supporting Islamic Jihad.
They now provide Hamas with the bulk of their budget, with advanced
weaponry and training by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Not only
does Hamas own them a lot, but if the Republic falls, Hamas finds
itself in dire trouble. It is very likely that, at the call of Iran,
the Majlis al-Shura would have decided to send fighters from their
Lebanese Hamas branch along with Hizbullah fighters if it was
requested of them.

Other Players
The Police - Iran's police force is not dissimilar to your run-of-the-
mill law enforcement apparatus in other dictatorships, with the
difference that they are not generally as brutal and repressive. This
is because the Basij are generally in charge of these activities,
meaning that Iranian policemen generally concentrate more on the law
and order aspect of Iranian daily life.

Today, it is thought that the Iranian police numbers close to 60,000
members, in contrast with up to a million Basij members. This is one
of the reasons why we hear much more about the plainclothes militia
than we do about the police right now, the other being that the Basij
and Ansar are much more willing to violently assault their fellow
citizens than even the regular police force. This is not as much a
testament to the decency of your average police officers as much as a
damning report of what the Basij and Ansar thugs are like.

There are also subdivisions and extra-legal forces attached to the
police force. The major subdivision would be the riot police (So-
called Unit 110) who are actually much more violent than regular
police officers, but also in much, much smaller numbers. There is also
VEVAK, the secret police. Very little is known and confirmed about
them, except their extreme tactics include murder, kidnapping and
torture.

The Army
In Iran, there are actually two armies. They are divided between
Artesh and Pasdaran. Artesh is the regular Military apparatus of the
Republic. Their numbers, including reservists, go up to a million
members, but only half of them have received anything more than very
basic training. As it is often the case in police states, there is
very little known and confirmed about the structure of the Army
itself. They were created prior to the Iranian Revolution, in fact
this army has existed in one form or another, and is a continuation,
for more than 2,500 years. This is not as impressive as it sounds,
however, as they often underwent drastic changes, there is no real
links between the current incarnations, and the top echelons were most
often purged when new rulers took power. In fact, in the last 100
years, those purges happened between two or three times, depending on
the count, the last time centered around the time of the Islamic
revolution, when most generals were forced to flee, killed, or killed
while in exile.

Artesh took the brunt of the military casualties during the Iran-Iraq
war, the army is considered to very nationalist and not extremely
religious, which explains why they have declared their neutrality and
refusal to repress the situation, as they see their purpose to defend
the Iranian population. Everyone agrees they will be the ultimate key
to this Revolution when they finally decide to take a side, or
alternatively force the Pasdaran to stay on the sidelines with them.

Pasdaran, also known as Iranian Revolutionary Guard
The Iranian Ground forces (I will focus on them, as the Navy and Air
force are currently irrelevant, will update if the situation changes)
have been estimated between 100,000 and 130,000 units total. As
always, truth most likely resides somewhere in the middle. They are,
much like the Basij and Ansar, subservient directly to the Supreme
Leader, and ideologically created in the spirit of defending the
Islamic Revolution ideals and Republic, not Iran per se. They also
control the Basij.

They are a child of the revolution, and they are more geared toward
guerilla warfare than they are for military engagements. They are also
the force responsible for training the various terrorist groups
financed and supported by the Iranian government. They are fanatically
devoted to the Republic through intense indoctrination.

The elite troops are called Quds. They are considered the elite of the
elite, but they only number between 2000-6000, although rumours say
that they are twice or three time as big. They are, however, rumours
and quite unlikely. Ultimately, the Revolutionary Council and the
Supreme Leader will call on them if they think they are on the verge
of losing power, however it is unlikely that the army will just stay
on the sidelines if this happens.

The Grand Ayatollahs
The Grand Ayatollahs are Shiite clerics who first attained the
position of Ayatollahs and then, through their knowledge of Islamic
Jurisprudence, attained a supreme position and are regarded as the
most important voice in Shia Islam today. They revolve around the holy
Shiite city of Qom, though some live outside Iran.

THERE'S IRONY + THERE'S ORWELL:
BASIJ-E MOSTAZAFAN, THE 'MOBILIZATION OF THE OPPRESSED'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basij
http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/world/iran/basij.htm
Niruyeh Moghavemat Basij / Mobilisation Resistance Force

The Pasdaran was given the mandate of organizing a large people's
militia, the Basij, in 1980. Islamic Revolution Guards (Vezarat-e
Sepah Pasdaran-e Enqelab-e Islamic) is in charge of the paramilitary
national Mobilization of the Oppressed (Baseej-e Mostazafan)
Organisation. It is from Basij ranks that volunteers were drawn to
launch "human wave" attacks against the Iraqis, particularly around
Basra.

The precise size of the Basij is an open question. Basij membership
comprises mainly boys, old men, and those who recently finished their
military service. Article 151 of the Constitution says the government
is obligated to provide military-training facilities for everyone in
the country, in accordance with the precepts of Islam under which all
individuals should have the ability to take up arms in defense of
their country

Iranian officials frequently cite a figure of 20 million, but this
appears to be an exaggeration based on revolutionary leader Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini's November 1979 decree creating the Basij. Khomeini
said at the time that "a country with 20 million youths must have 20
million riflemen or a military with 20 million soldiers; such a
country will never be destroyed." In a 1985 Iranian News Agency
report, Hojjatoleslam Rahmani, head of the Basij forces of the
Pasdaran, was quoted as stating that there were close to 3 million
volunteers in the paramilitary force receiving training in some 11,000
centers.

General Yahya Rahim-Safavi, the commander of the IRGC, predicted that
in the Third Five-Year Development Plan (2000-04) the number of
Basijis will expand to 15 million (9 million men, 6 million women) to
better counter potential domestic and foreign threats. While
apparently falling short of the goal outlined in the plan, Basij
commander Brigadier General Mohammad Hejazi estimated the number of
Basij personnel at 10.3 million in March 2004 and 11 million in March
2005. Basij commander General Mohammad Hejazi said on 14 September
2005 that the Basij has more than 11 million members across the
country.

Other estimates place the force at 400,000. There are about 90,000
active-duty Basij members who are full-time uniformed personnel; they
are joined by up to 300,000 reservists. The Basij can mobilize up to 1
million men. This includes members of the University Basij, Student
Basij, and the former tribal levies incorporated into the Basij (aka
Tribal Basij). Middle-school-aged members of the Student Basij are
called Seekers (Puyandegan), and high-school members are called the
Vanguard (Pishgaman).

The Niruyeh Moghavemat Basij - the Mobilisation Resistance Force - was
the strong right arm of Ayatollah Khomeini. Its volunteers were
martyred in their tens of thousands in the Iran-Iraq war, and were
given the role of moral police at home. The supreme leader's equally
conservative successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been careful not
to let any of Iran's overlapping security forces fall under the
control of his elected rival.

Ashura Brigades were reportedly created in 1993 after anti-government
riots erupted in various Iranian cities. In 1998 they consisted of
17,000 Islamic militia men and women, and were composed of elements of
the Revolutionary Guards and the Baseej volunteer militia.

The Basij, or Baseej paramilitary volunteer forces, come under the
control of the Revolutionary Guards. They have been active in
monitoring the activities of citizens, enforcing the hijab and
arresting women for violating the dress code, and seizing 'indecent'
material and satellite dish antennae. In May 1999 the Minister of
Islamic Culture and Guidance stated in public remarks that the
Government might support an easing of the satellite ban. However,
Supreme Leader Khamenei, who makes the ultimate determination on
issues that involve radio and television broadcasting, quickly
criticised any potential change as amounting to “surrender” to Western
culture, effectively ending any further debate of the idea. The
“Special Basijis” are not permitted to participate in political
parties or groups, although other members of the Basij can belong to
political associations if they are not on a Basij mission and do not
use the name or resources of the Basij for the association. Basijis
can participate in specialist or trade associations.

Hezbollahi “partisans of God” consist of religious zealots who
consider themselves as preservers of the Revolution. They have been
active in harassing government critics and intellectuals, have
firebombed bookstores and disrupted meetings. They are said to gather
at the invitation of the state-affiliated media and generally act
without meaningful police restraint or fear of persecution.

President Mohammad Khatami told the cabinet on 22 November 2000 that
"the Basij is a progressive force which seeks to play a better role in
maintaining religious faith among its allies, and acquiring greater
knowledge and skills." The deputy commander of the Islamic Revolution
Guards Corps, Brigadier-General Mohammad Baqer Zolqadr, made comments
in a similar vein at the annual Basij Supreme Association for
Political Studies and Analysis gathering. He told the audience that
the Basij pursued military activities in the first decade after the
revolution because the main threat facing Iran at the time was a
military one. Now, Zolqadr explained, the Basij will become "involved
anywhere if the country's security, goals, or national interests are
threatened." A statement issued by the Basij Center at the Science and
Technology University on 23 November 2000 explained how this will be
accomplished : "The Basij Resistance Force is equipped with the most
modern and up-to-date weapons and is undergoing the most advanced
training. It is making such achievements that if the enemy finds out
it will tremble and have a heart attack." The Basij demonstrated what
it would do in case that faile during 23 November 2000 civil defense
exercises, when armed Basijis took up positions in the streets and
along strategic locations.

The Basij Resistance Force appeared to be undergoing something of a
revival under the administration of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. This
could be connected with the organization's alleged role in securing
votes for Ahmadinejad during the presidential campaign and on election
day. Ahmadinejad appointed Hojatoleslam Heidar Moslehi, the supreme
leader's representative to the Basij, as an adviser in mid-August
2005. But the revival -- along with changes in the paramilitary
organization's senior leadership -- could also be connected with
preparations for possible civil unrest. In late September 2005, the
Basij staged a series of urban defense exercises across the country.
General Mirahmadi, the first deputy commander of the Basij, announced
in Tehran that the creation of 2,000 Ashura battalions within the
Basij will enhance Iran's defensive capabilities. Ashura units have
riot-control responsibilities.

ANTI-BASIJ SELF-DEFENSE TACTICS, AS EXPLAINED BY IRANIAN SWAT COP
http://www.iranian.com/main/node/69429
Street Survival Guide / 23-Jun-2009

"This is a document that a friend of mine who is an Iranian-American
police officer has put together. He is the member of the SWAT team and
he's an expert on anti riot tactics. he has been watching and studying
the videos and the tactics that basij has been using and he put the
document together. It would be great to spread this document and pass
it on to the kids in Iran. It might save their lives." -- "SB"

"Here are some simple ways of defending yourself when attacked by
Basij or Security forces:

Anti riot attacks
Once caught by security forces, the best way to break free is by
swinging relentlessly in all directions. Keep in mind that security
forces have to hold on to you, which means they only can use one hand
to deflect the blows. Brass Knuckle is extremely effective when trying
to break loose from the grip of security forces. Wooden brass knuckle
is strong and simple to make. The image above is a sample of a basic
wooden brass knuckle that can be made with a piece of wood, a cutter
and a drill. It should not take more than 30 minutes to make a wooden
brass knuckle. Wooden brass knuckle is extremely strong, light weight
and versatile. Make sure that the top edges are sharp and round.

Motorcycle attacks
Iranian Basij motorcycle units use attack and retrieve tactics which
is meant to create fear more than anything else. The same tactic was
used by US police forces on horsebacks when confronting the civil
right protestors. The advantage of utilizing motorcycles in urban
environment is obvious: motorcycles can go places that cars can’t.
However, motorcycles have disadvantages which can handicap the force
that uses them.

The most effective way of disabling motorcycles is using tire spikes.
Though made of carbon cratnor material, the Basij motorcycle tires
cannot withstand multiple punctures. The easiest way to spike Basiji’s
tires is by using a simple tire spike system called Iron Caltrop. This
simple device can be made in a matter of minutes by wrapping two
pieces of nail together in a 65 degree angle. By dropping a handful of
Iron Caltrop on the ground, you can deflate the tires of Basijis’
motorcycles in a matter of minutes. If you ride, you know how
difficult it is to steer a motorcycle with two flat tires.

Tear gas
A fabric socked in vinegar can very well protect you against tear gas.
Cover your nose and mouth with the fabric and keep plenty of water
around to wash your eyes if you come in direct contact with tear gas.
Urban Legend: burning tires will reduce the effect of tear gas. Not
true, it actually increases the effect and it smells bad too.

Batons
Riot police is trained to use batons. They understand that it’s easy
to hit a stationary target and much easier to hit a target that is
running away. Hitting somebody with baton is a matter of timing. The
worst thing you can do is to run away from baton whirling security
guards because it allows them to time the strike perfectly. The most
effective way to counter a security guard with baton is to throw off
his timing by going directly at him. That’s right. Run away and turn
and go directly at him. When you go directly at the guard and close
the distance, you completely screw up his timing. A boxer cannot hit a
person that is standing 2 inches away from his face. That’s why boxer
bounce around. A baton whirling guard is just like a boxer, he needs
to time his strikes. By going directly at the guard and closing
distance you mess-up his timing and might even be able to take him
down.

Riot formation
Basij and police security guardsmen perform best when crowd disperses
and becomes separated. The worst scenario for the riot police is when
the crowd is together and inseparable. South Korean labor protestors
in the 90s were the best organized units in history of rioting.
Thousands of them held on to each other (locked arms) and no matter
what, they did not let go. It made it impossible for the riot police
to disperse them.

Just a few tips. Please translate and send it back to the youth in
Iran. This can save their lives."

STREET SURVIVAL GUIDE
http://twitter.com/lettersoftheliv
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/06/the-survivalist-guide-to-protesting.html
The Survivalist Guide To Protesting / 25 Jun 2009

"A twitterer named lettersoftheliv has published an exhaustive series
of tweets as a how-to guide for non-violent demonstrations.

Here's how to protect yourself from tear gas:
Do not pick up/throw back tear gas canisters- will severely burn your
hands.
Vinegar soaked bandana helps you breath with tear gas. Contaminates
fast, have extra.
Most tear gas injuries come from PANIC/chaos,not the chemicals:Ppl
lose heads.Effects intense but very short-term.
Stay calm and yell “WALK, WALK” as you walk away from tear gas/pepper
spray attack- spread calm.
Do not wear contact lens- pepper spray can linger and damage your
eyes.

How to protect yourself during a basij assault:
Go limp-When rigid,easy to pick up & move.If limp weight,hard to pick
up & move (Always tuck your head by looking at your belly)
link arms, stay in large groups, never touch a basiji, consider Sit
Down when attacked (depending on plan/setting/ and Weapon)
If grp sits dwn & police grab at 1 to beat, that 1 should scoot back &
ppl behind open up & pull thru to back.Ppl in front close gap.
If sit in grp&1 beaten w/batons,Ppl drape selves over target:spread
hits over 3 ppl's butts, not 1 prsn's head.Cover head & torso
"No-Hit Strategy"-attacked ppl hv instinct 2 hit back:Never let ppl
rcv more than 2 hits b4 swarming as group 2 protect.
Swarm/Surround agitators who are becoming violent so they cannot
escalate the situation.
If police push u n grp,unsafe 2 push back:escalates situation.All
cross ankles & sit in place.Impossible 2 push seated group.
At times you deem appropriate, sing or chant- do things to keep groups
spirit strong- this is unbelievably important.
Stay alert, “Ignore” harassment- ignore yelling, throwing objects, etc
Do not react emotionally- Do not engage baiting
Most powerful weapon you wield is SHAME- from your own religious/
cultural context, choose symbolic NV acts.
Always scan for escape routes, easiest exits.

General preparation:
Know and trust ppl u are protesting with- don't mix NV and violent
protesters
Be prepared – with talking points, chants, alternative plans, exit
strategy, contingency plans, supplies, etc
Practice/Roleplay NV de-escalation & tolerating/surviving/escaping
"basiji" in GROUPS. Discuss-strengths,weaknesses
Share “if I get arrested” info-emergency contacts/needs
Assign jobs- scout, scene assessment, food, map, exits, etc. Have 1
person off-site know where you are.
appoint teams of people 4 tasks- a team 2 scout & swarm agitators,
keep deescalated (assume agitators r plants)
Avoid alcohol, drugs and caffeine- dehydrating. Don't use anything
that will impair judgement.
Stay hydrated- use oral rehydration solution:1 ts salt,8 ts sugar,1
liter clean drinking water:Stir.
If no bathroom available use privacy circle, group stands in circle
around person, faces outward.

What to wear (or not to wear):
Wear a waterproof, nonabsorbent outer layer if possible. Cover your
arms and legs.
Wear 2 pairs of underwear. If you get arrested, you have 1 to wear and
1 to wash.
Dress in layers, appropriately for weather.
WOMEN- Don't wear tampons- wear pads (can't remove if arrested or
trapped, toxic shock syndrome)"

PARTIAL LIST OF DEAD AND DETAINED
http://www.iranhumanrights.org/2009/06/list/

TEHRAN UNIVERSITY FACULTY RESIGNS
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/06/tehran-universitys-faculty-resigns-en-masse.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/17/iran-election-protests-arrests1

DEATH PENALTY FOR BLOGGERS?
http://committeetoprotectbloggers.org/category/iran/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/iranian_deth_penalty_for_bloggers.php

TRANSLATION PROJECTS
http://translate4iran.org/
http://translate4iran.wikispaces.com/

'THE STREET' - KHIABAN NEWS LEAFLET
http://moniroravanipor.com/images/stories//xyaban1.pdf
http://irangcc.wordpress.com/2009/06/21/translating-the-street-newspaper-circulating-among-iran-protesters/
"Writings. Eyewitness accounts. Send your own articles to us at xyaban
[at] gmail [dot] com
For subscriptions email khyaboon [at] gmail [dot] com
Long live popular sovereignty! Long live resistance to the Coup
D’état! Death to dictatorship!
The Street - Issue 1 – 29 Khordad 1388 (June 19, 2009)

Aiming to negate students’ impact on the current developments:
University dormitories ordered closed
Iran in a bloodbath
Workers of [car maker] Iran Khodro on Strike
Tens of thousands protesters march from Tupkhaneh Square to Haft Tir
In the provinces, coup-makers practice violent oppression

Media and the streets. A bloody page in Iran’s modern history seems to
be turning in the events we are witnessing. In past days and nights,
Tehran and many Iranian cities have not stayed calm as peoples’
burning rage has thrown daily life into flux. The people in the
streets are playing a game of cat and mouse with violent thugs; youth
are in revolt, and the elderly rack their memories for re-learned
lessons of the calamitous events of the 1979 revolution to pass on to
the young.

Again, after thirty years, people are leaving the doors of their homes
open [to give refuge] to courageous youth, and we hear from many how
great people are, and how quickly they can change. Over the past days’
witness to events, we were different people, different slogans. During
the campaign until election day, the huge crowds of people that had
taken to the street with the green wave were spirited, the bliss of
unawareness reigning over them. Yet since the results were announced,
the situation changed and people became angry, and sought the crest of
the wave to propel them beyond the ignorance, repression and hundreds
of lies. During recent days and nights, the tide has again turned.

Like Azar of 1953 [CIA-backed anti-Mossadegh coup] and Tir of 1999
[reformist protests and regime crackdown], and – according to many
present at the time – even like the protests of the revolutionary
years and 1963 [clergy-led anti-shah protests]!!! Yes, we are seeing
the naked face of repression. We see the green wave of reformism in
its entire expanse, as it brings us into a shared arena with the
existing system

Killing us and calls for calm have only made the situation more acute.
Now we have more questions; more than just issues with vote counting.
We want a different voice. We do not want to be sacrificed to
corruption and graft again, for the nth time, so that our interests
are ignored. We do not want a slaughterhouse that would set society
back thirty years. We do not want a repeat of the fraud of 1979. We do
not have any media but the world has gotten smaller so we no longer
experience one thing on the streets yet read something different in
world media. We do not want the next generation to be ignorant about
what happened on the streets of Tehran, Esfahan, Tabriz, Shiraz,
Mashhad, Ahvaz, Kermanshah, and the rest of the cities, large and
small. We will represent a new voice in this power play: the voice of
the people crying out in the streets. The people who have no delusions
about colors and who demand change."

TRANSLATED
http://irangcc.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/translation-from-khiaban-issue-5-“street-combat-techniques”/#more-499
http://irangcc.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/khiaban-78-baharestan-protest-account-and-more/
Khiaban Issue 7

Bullet in Baharestan
According to human rights and democracy activists in Iran, after 12
this afternoon, on Wednesday 3 Tir, all the access points to
Baharestan Square were closed and no underground trains were stopping
at Baharestan station. More special forces and anti-riot forces and
even police had surrounded the Parliament building with their cars and
motorcycles and ordered closed all the stores located on Baharestan
Square, even stores along secondary roads terminating at the square.
They threatened to burn down any stores that did not close. Despite
strict control of all the approaches, a large crowd had reached the
square by about 4:30 and was standing in silence. The security forces
had warned them not to gather and to disperse. A number of people had
black armbands on and a small number were holding proclamation signs
above their heads. Those with signs were attacks by guard forces and
civilian dressed forces. At about 4:40 guard and anti-riot forces
surrounded the crowd gathered in the square and sprayed teargas to
scatter the people, while the slogans ‘death to the dictator, people’
and ‘don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, we are all together’ could be
heard. The people trying to enter the square from surrounding streets
were the target of baton attacks, and a number were also arrested. The
arrested were herded with batons to cars and beaten with batons inside
the cars. As the pressure from the crowd trying to enter the square
steadily built, several shots were fired in the air to break up the
people. But as pressure built more, they began firing directly into
the people, and cries of ‘we will protest, we will protest’ and ‘they
killed my brother’ rose from the crowd. For nearly an hour the sound
of gunfire could be heard on Baharestan Square and the surrounding
streets. Every time a group of people would escape to surrounding
streets under pressure from guard forces, they were chased down by men
on motorcycles and assaulted with batons – moving the clash to
surrounding streets. According to reports, a number were killed in the
clashes, and 30 people were arrested and more than 50 wounded. As of
yesterday, Basiji and guard forces positioned at the head of all the
streets are stopping the people, especially, the young people, and
searching photos and film taken on their mobile phones. They are even
stopping and searching cars.

Baharestan Has Awoken
As expected, Baharestan was surrounded by security forces. They were
continuously dispersing the people, and the people gathering in
another corner. Everyone was expecting – and there were murmurings –
that Mousavi would arrive, but no one saw him. They had stopped the
people and prevented them from moving towards the Parliament building.
Against the protests of people trying to reach their homes on that
side, a security official was yelling: ‘We know that none of your
houses are on that side.’ The security officials were openly filming
the people. One point worth mentioning is the weak presence of Basiji
or plain clothes security forces compared to the police forces. More
anti-riot guard forces were intending to intimidate the people. They
were dragging their batons against the barricades or striking them
against their shields to produce a frightening noise. They are
charging several people. The crowd is large, and the protests more
crowded than usual. They are still openly threatening ‘If you go, the
Special Forces will come and you will be beaten!!!!!!!!!’ They cleared
out the pedestrian bridge in a savage way. Men on motorcycles were
moving through the protesters and threatening them with batons. But
the crowd, as if they had no fear, was constantly signaling to each
other ‘don’t run, we are ordinary passersby.’ They released some
teargas. There was an odd apprehension among the security forces. Even
with violence it took about an hour to disperse the crowd. The sound
of gunshots arose. There were clashes at several locations where the
police quickly hauled people off to jail while beating and jeering at
them. There were searching the bags of black-clad boys, searching for
a pretext or green gangs. I heard that they killed a person. The
Baharestan subway station was closed – up to Sa’adi. Helicopters were
constantly hovering above the crowd. The plain clothes police were not
intervening a lot, and they were noticeably few, but there were armed,
plain clothed individuals among the crowd, and it was not difficult to
identify them. Once or twice during the clashes they also struck
onlookers. They shoved the crowd and dispersed them to the surrounding
streets.

Civility of Religion
They have threatened families of the slain victims – agreeing to
deliver the bodies of love ones only on condition that they sign away
their right to file complaints against the assailants and police
force. They are extorting 5 to 14 million from families as payment for
delivering the bodies of their love ones slain in clashes over the
last 10 days.

EMANCIPATION
http://www.thecommentfactory.com/will-the-cat-above-the-precipice-fall-down-slavoj-zizek-on-iran-2259
Will the cat above the precipice fall down?
BY Slavoj Zizek / June 25, 2009

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, its
dissolution as a rule follows two steps. Before its actual collapse, a
mysterious rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the
game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that
the regime loses its legitimacy, its exercise of power itself is
perceived as an impotent panic reaction. We all know the classic scene
from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking,
ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to
fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its
authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to
fall, it only has to be reminded to look down…

In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution,
Ryszard Kapuscinski located the precise moment of this rupture: at a
Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a
policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman simply
withdrew; in a couple of hours, all Tehran knew about this incident,
and although there were street fights going on for weeks, everyone
somehow knew the game is over. Is something similar going on now?

There are many versions of the events in Tehran. Some see in the
protests the culmination of the pro-Western “reform movement” along
the lines of the “orange” revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, etc. – a
secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution. They support the protests
as the first step towards a new liberal-democratic secular Iran freed
of Muslim fundamentalism. They are counteracted by skeptics who think
that Ahmadinejad really won: he is the voice of the majority, while
the support of Mousavi comes from the middle classes and their gilded
youth. In short: let’s drop the illusions and face the fact that, in
Ahmadinejad, Iran has a president it deserves. Then there are those
who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the cleric establishment with
merely cosmetic differences from Ahmadinejad: Mousavi also wants to
continue the atomic energy program, he is against recognizing Israel,
plus he enjoyed the full support of Khomeini as a prime minister in
the years of the war with Iraq.

Finally, the saddest of them all are the Leftist supporters of
Ahmadinejad: what is really at stake for them is Iranian independence.
Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country’s independence,
exposed elite corruption and used oil wealth to boost the incomes of
the poor majority – this is, so we are told, the true Ahmadinejad
beneath the Western-media image of a holocaust-denying fanatic.
According to this view, what is effectively going on now in Iran is a
repetition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh – a West-financed coup
against the legitimate president. This view not only ignores facts:
the high electoral participation – up from the usual 55% to 85% - can
only be explained as a protest vote. It also displays its blindness
for a genuine demonstration of popular will, patronizingly assuming
that, for the backward Iranians, Ahmadinejad is good enough - they are
not yet sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular Left.

Opposed as they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests
along the axis of Islamic hardliners versus pro-Western liberal
reformists, which is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi:
is he a Western-backed reformer who wants more personal freedom and
market economy, or a member of the cleric establishment whose eventual
victory would not affect in any serious way the nature of the regime?
Such extreme oscillations demonstrate that they all miss the true
nature of the protests.

The green color adopted by the Mousavi supporters, the cries of “Allah
akbar!” that resonate from the roofs of Tehran in the evening
darkness, clearly indicate that they see their activity as the
repetition of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, as the return to its
roots, the undoing of the revolution’s later corruption. This return
to the roots is not only programmatic; it concerns even more the mode
of activity of the crowds: the emphatic unity of the people, their all-
encompassing solidarity, creative self-organization, improvising of
the ways to articulate protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity and
discipline, like the ominous march of thousands in complete silence.
We are dealing with a genuine popular uprising of the deceived
partisans of the Khomeini revolution.

There are a couple of crucial consequences to be drawn from this
insight. First, Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor, but
a genuine corrupted Islamo-Fascist populist, a kind of Iranian
Berlusconi whose mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power
politics is causing unease even among the majority of ayatollahs. His
demagogic distributing of crumbs to the poor should not deceive us:
behind him are not only organs of police repression and a very
Westernized PR apparatus, but also a strong new rich class, the result
of the regime’s corruption (Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is not a
working class militia, but a mega-corporation, the strongest center of
wealth in the country).

Second, one should draw a clear difference between the two main
candidates opposed to Ahmadinejad, Mehdi Karroubi and Mousavi.
Karroubi effectively is a reformist, basically proposing the Iranian
version of identity politics, promising favors to all particular
groups. Mousavi is something entirely different: his name stands for
the genuine resuscitation of the popular dream which sustained the
Khomeini revolution. Even if this dream was a utopia, one should
recognize in it the genuine utopia of the revolution itself. What this
means is that the 1979 Khomeini revolution cannot be reduced to a hard
line Islamist takeover – it was much more. Now is the time to remember
the incredible effervescence of the first year after the revolution,
with the breath-taking explosion of political and social creativity,
organizational experiments and debates among students and ordinary
people. The very fact that this explosion had to be stifled
demonstrates that the Khomeini revolution was an authentic political
event, a momentary opening that unleashed unheard-of forces of social
transformation, a moment in which “everything seemed possible.” What
followed was a gradual closing through the take-over of political
control by the Islam establishment. To put it in Freudian terms,
today’s protest movement is the “return of the repressed” of the
Khomeini revolution.

And, last but not least, what this means is that there is a genuine
liberating potential in Islam – to find a “good” Islam, one doesn’t
have to go back to the 10th century, we have it right here, in front
of our eyes.

The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will
contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the
precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same
regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others.
Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we
are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame
of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western
fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the
capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West
are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our
own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others
are waiting in line.

STATECRAFT OR STAGECRAFT? - MOUSAVI'S LETTER
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/443348
http://tehranbureau.com/2009/06/13/mousavi-letter/

AYATOLLAH MONTAZERI LETTER
http://kojayi.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/ayatollah-montazeris-letter/
“The measure of a nation is its vote.” - Ayatollah Khomeini

ELECTION THEFT MEMO
President of the Committee of Election Monitoring : Election is
Invalid
http://www.peykeiran.com/Content.aspx?ID=2104
http://niacblog.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/election-liveblogging-saturday/
http://mowj.ir/ShowNews.php?7217
http://niacblog.wordpress.com/page/2/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/andishehnouraee/3635977616/
from Iran Interior Ministry (Authenticity NOT VERIFIED)
"The chart that follows informs Khamenei of the vote's "real" results.
It says 42 million votes were cast with with Mousavi getting
19,075,623 votes, Mehdi Karroubi getting 13,387,104 votes, Ahmadinejad
finishing a distant third with 5,698,417 votes, and Mohsen Rezaee
getting 3,754,218."

THE ASSEMBLY OF EXPERTS CAN STILL PULL RANK
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UG7e0OYDt0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_of_Experts

QOM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/15/rafsanjani-iran-elections
Rafsanjani: shark or kingmaker?
BY Simon Tisdall / 15 June 2009

More intriguing are similarly unsubstantiated claims that Rafsanjani
is in the holy city of Qom, where he once studied and where he has
strong links to a moderate clerical body, the Association of Combatant
Clergy. Rafsanjani was said to be assessing whether he has sufficient
votes in the 86-member Assembly of Experts to dismiss Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, the Supreme Leader and Ahmadinejad's chief patron. Under
Iran's constitution, only the assembly has the power to do this.

The super-rich Rafsanjani, his family, and his supporters in the
reformist Kargozaran party make no bones about helping finance and
direct Mir Hossein Mousavi's campaign to topple Ahmadinejad, whom they
despise. But with Mousavi ostensibly beaten, the developing post-
election struggle now pits Rafsanjani against Khamenei rather than the
president – who is widely seen as a mouthpiece for the hardline
fundamentalism typified by the Supreme Leader. Although he is supposed
to stay above the fray, Khamenei endorsed Ahmadinejad this time, just
as in the second round of the 2005 election.

Rafsanjani has made no secret of his belief that foreign and economic
policies pursued during the past four years under Khamenei's guidance
have seriously damaged the Islamic Republic. His frustrations came to
a head last week after Ahmadinejad was allowed to publicly accuse him
of corruption. In an angry letter he lambasted Khamenei for failing to
uphold the country's dignity. In what was in effect an unprecedented
challenge to Khamenei's authority, he implied the Supreme Leader,
normally above criticism, was negligent, partial, and possibly
involved in plans to steal the election.

"I am expecting you to resolve this position in order to extinguish
the fire, whose smoke can be seen in the atmosphere, and to foil
dangerous plots," Rafsanjani wrote. "If the system cannot or does not
want to confront such ugly and sin-infected phenomena as insults, lies
and false allegations, how can we consider ourselves followers of the
sacred Islamic system?"

Rafsanjani remains unpopular with many Iranians who believe the
corruption claims and blame him for a murderous, covert campaign to
silence dissidents at home and abroad during his 1989-97 presidency.
Those latter allegations earned him another nickname: the "grey
eminence". At the same time he is respected as one of the Islamic
revolution's founding fathers and a close associate of its first
leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As a result he can count on some
powerful friends if he decides to try to shame Khamenei into allowing
an election re-run or standing down.

Apart from his clerical allies in Qom, prominent establishment
conservatives such as Ali Akbar Velayati and Ali Akbar Nateq-Nuri have
criticised Ahmadinejad. So, too, has Ali Larijani, the influential
Majlis (parliament) speaker and former national security chief. The
mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, is another potential ally,
as are the former president Mohammad Khatami, Mousavi, the other
defeated presidential candidates, and their millions of thwarted
supporters.

If mobilised, his would comprise an elite coalition operating inside
the hierarchy of the Islamic Republic, rather than from outside on the
streets. It would not be a democratic movement; but it would be a
dagger held to Khamenei's breast. Not for nothing is the Machiavellian
Rafsanjani, pistachio nut millionaire, pragmatist and ruthless
political survivor, known by yet another nickname: the "kingmaker".
Iran awaits his next move.

HOW TO STEAL AN ELECTION
http://www.juancole.com/2009/06/stealing-iranian-election.html
Top Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential Election Was
Stolen

1. It is claimed that Ahmadinejad won the city of Tabriz with 57%. His
main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is an Azeri from Azerbaijan
province, of which Tabriz is the capital. Mousavi, according to such
polls as exist in Iran and widespread anecdotal evidence, did better
in cities and is popular in Azerbaijan. Certainly, his rallies there
were very well attended. So for an Azeri urban center to go so heavily
for Ahmadinejad just makes no sense. In past elections, Azeris voted
disproportionately for even minor presidential candidates who hailed
from that province.
2. Ahmadinejad is claimed to have taken Tehran by over 50%. Again, he
is not popular in the cities, even, as he claims, in the poor
neighborhoods, in part because his policies have produced high
inflation and high unemployment. That he should have won Tehran is so
unlikely as to raise real questions about these numbers. [Ahmadinejad
is widely thought only to have won Tehran in 2005 because the pro-
reform groups were discouraged and stayed home rather than voting.)
3. It is claimed that cleric Mehdi Karoubi, the other reformist
candidate, received 320,000 votes, and that he did poorly in Iran's
western provinces, even losing in Luristan. He is a Lur and is popular
in the west, including in Kurdistan. Karoubi received 17 percent of
the vote in the first round of presidential elections in 2005. While
it is possible that his support has substantially declined since then,
it is hard to believe that he would get less than one percent of the
vote. Moreover, he should have at least done well in the west, which
he did not.
4. Mohsen Rezaie, who polled very badly and seems not to have been at
all popular, is alleged to have received 670,000 votes, twice as much
as Karoubi.
5. Ahmadinejad's numbers were fairly standard across Iran's provinces.
In past elections there have been substantial ethnic and provincial
variations.
6. The Electoral Commission is supposed to wait three days before
certifying the results of the election, at which point they are to
inform Khamenei of the results, and he signs off on the process. The
three-day delay is intended to allow charges of irregularities to be
adjudicated. In this case, Khamenei immediately approved the alleged
results.

I am aware of the difficulties of catching history on the run. Some
explanation may emerge for Ahmadinejad's upset that does not involve
fraud. For instance, it is possible that he has gotten the credit for
spreading around a lot of oil money in the form of favors to his
constituencies, but somehow managed to escape the blame for the
resultant high inflation. But just as a first reaction, this post-
election situation looks to me like a crime scene. And here is how I
would reconstruct the crime. As the real numbers started coming into
the Interior Ministry late on Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was
winning. Mousavi's spokesman abroad, filmmaker Mohsen Makhbalbaf,
alleges that the ministry even contacted Mousavi's camp and said it
would begin preparing the population for this victory. The ministry
must have informed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has had a feud
with Mousavi for over 30 years, who found this outcome unsupportable.
And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so confident of an
Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for what to do
if he looked as though he would lose. They therefore sent blanket
instructions to the Electoral Commission to falsify the vote counts.
This clumsy cover-up then produced the incredible result of an
Ahmadinejad landlside in Tabriz and Isfahan and Tehran. The reason for
which Rezaie and Karoubi had to be assigned such implausibly low
totals was to make sure Ahmadinejad got over 51% of the vote and thus
avoid a run-off between him and Mousavi next Friday, which would have
given the Mousavi camp a chance to attempt to rally the public and
forestall further tampering with the election. This scenario accounts
for all known anomalies and is consistent with what we know of the
major players."

SUGGESTIONS OF DATA MANIPULATION
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/another-iranian-oddity.html
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wmebane/
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/06/more-statistical-analysis.html
"Professor Mebane has updated his analysis to incorporate 2005 second
round district-level data. In 2005 some opposition politicians called
for a boycott of the election. The surge in turnout in 2009 is widely
interpreted as meaning that many who boycotted in 2005 decided to vote
in 2009. Hence towns that have high ratios should have lower
proportions of the vote for Ahmadinejad (the coefficient should be
negative). He then tested this hypothesis using an over-dispersed
binomial model, finding that it worked well for most districts.
Suspiciously however, whenever this data significantly deviated from
his model, it was in Ahmadinejad's favor."

OFFICIAL: IN 50 CITIES TURNOUT WAS OVER 100%
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/98711.htm?sectionid=351020101
Guardian Council: Over 100% voted in 50 cities / 21 Jun 2009

Iran's Guardian Council has suggested that the number of votes
collected in 50 cities surpass the number of people eligible to cast
ballot in those areas. The council's Spokesman Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei,
who was speaking on the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB)
Channel 2 on Sunday, made the remarks in response to complaints filed
by Mohsen Rezaei -- a defeated candidate in the June 12 Presidential
election. "Statistics provided by the candidates, who claim more than
100% of those eligible have cast their ballot in 80-170 cities are not
accurate -- the incident has happened in only 50 cities," Kadkhodaei
said. Kadkhodaei further explained that the voter turnout of above
100% in some cities is a normal phenomenon because there is no legal
limitation for people to vote for the presidential elections in
another city or province to which people often travel or commute.
According to the Guardian Council spokesman, summering areas and
places like district one and three in Tehran are not separable. The
spokesman, however, said that the vote tally affected by such issues
could be over 3 million and would not noticably affect the outcome of
the election.

He, however, added that the council could, at the request of the
candidates, re-count the affected ballot boxes, and determine "
whether the possible change in the tally is decisive in the election
results," reported Khabaronline. Three of the four candidates
contesting in last Friday's presidential election cried foul, once the
Interior Ministry announced the results - according to which incumbent
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner with almost two-
thirds of the vote. Rezaei, along with Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi
Karroubi, reported more than 646 'irregularities' in the electoral
process and submitted their complaints to the body responsible for
overseeing the election -- the Guardian Council.

BAD MATH
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/20/AR2009062000004.html
The Devil Is in the Digits
BY Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco / June 20, 2009

Since the declaration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's landslide victory in
Iran's presidential election, accusations of fraud have swelled.
Against expectations from pollsters and pundits alike, Ahmadinejad did
surprisingly well in urban areas, including Tehran -- where he is
thought to be highly unpopular -- and even Tabriz, the capital city of
opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi's native East Azarbaijan
province.

Others have pointed to the surprisingly poor performance of Mehdi
Karroubi, another reform candidate, and particularly in his home
province of Lorestan, where conservative candidates fared poorly in
2005, but where Ahmadinejad allegedly captured 71 percent of the vote.
Eyebrows have been raised further by the relative consistency in
Ahmadinejad's vote share across Iran's provinces, in spite of wide
provincial variation in past elections.

These pieces of the story point in the direction of fraud, to be sure.
They have led experts to speculate that the election results released
by Iran's Ministry of the Interior had been altered behind closed
doors. But we don't have to rely on suggestive evidence alone. We can
use statistics more systematically to show that this is likely what
happened. Here's how.

We'll concentrate on vote counts -- the number of votes received by
different candidates in different provinces -- and in particular the
last and second-to-last digits of these numbers. For example, if a
candidate received 14,579 votes in a province (Mr. Karroubi's actual
vote count in Isfahan), we'll focus on digits 7 and 9.

This may seem strange, because these digits usually don't change who
wins. In fact, last digits in a fair election don't tell us anything
about the candidates, the make-up of the electorate or the context of
the election. They are random noise in the sense that a fair vote
count is as likely to end in 1 as it is to end in 2, 3, 4, or any
other numeral. But that's exactly why they can serve as a litmus test
for election fraud. For example, an election in which a majority of
provincial vote counts ended in 5 would surely raise red flags.

Why would fraudulent numbers look any different? The reason is that
humans are bad at making up numbers. Cognitive psychologists have
found that study participants in lab experiments asked to write
sequences of random digits will tend to select some digits more
frequently than others.

So what can we make of Iran's election results? We used the results
released by the Ministry of the Interior and published on the web site
of Press TV, a news channel funded by Iran's government. The ministry
provided data for 29 provinces, and we examined the number of votes
each of the four main candidates -- Ahmadinejad, Mousavi, Karroubi and
Mohsen Rezai -- is reported to have received in each of the provinces
-- a total of 116 numbers.

The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in
the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at
the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran's provincial
results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4
percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from
the average -- a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop
to 4 percent or less in another -- are extremely unlikely. Fewer than
four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.

As a point of comparison, we can analyze the state-by-state vote
counts for John McCain and Barack Obama in last year's U.S.
presidential election. The frequencies of last digits in these
election returns never rise above 14 percent or fall below 6 percent,
a pattern we would expect to see in seventy out of a hundred fair
elections.

But that's not all. Psychologists have also found that humans have
trouble generating non-adjacent digits (such as 64 or 17, as opposed
to 23) as frequently as one would expect in a sequence of random
numbers. To check for deviations of this type, we examined the pairs
of last and second-to-last digits in Iran's vote counts. On average,
if the results had not been manipulated, 70 percent of these pairs
should consist of distinct, non-adjacent digits.

Not so in the data from Iran: Only 62 percent of the pairs contain non-
adjacent digits. This may not sound so different from 70 percent, but
the probability that a fair election would produce a difference this
large is less than 4.2 percent. And while our first test -- variation
in last-digit frequencies -- suggests that Rezai's vote counts are the
most irregular, the lack of non-adjacent digits is most striking in
the results reported for Ahmadinejad.

Each of these two tests provides strong evidence that the numbers
released by Iran's Ministry of the Interior were manipulated. But
taken together, they leave very little room for reasonable doubt. The
probability that a fair election would produce both too few non-
adjacent digits and the suspicious deviations in last-digit
frequencies described earlier is less than .005. In other words, a bet
that the numbers are clean is a one in two-hundred long shot.
{Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco, Ph.D. candidates in political
science at Columbia University, will be assistant professors in New
York University's Wilf Family Department of Politics this fall.}

WHAT TO DO?
http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/world/iran/links.htm

FAKING THE WEATHER, AND OTHER STRATEGIES
http://www.theundergroundnation.com/iran/
How to Confuse Iranian Censors on Twitter

Very briefly, preceding the recent elections in Iran, many leftists
had been organizing protests and what not via facebook and other
social networks. However, Iranian censors quickly jumped on this trend
and blocked facebook’s site from the entire country. Following the
elections, protests ensued and were organized and publicized on
Twitter, which the luddite bureaucracy failed to block in time.
Iranian censors are now combing the twitter network for dissidents in
a Stasi like fashion. In retaliation, people around the world have
tried to throw a wrench in their efforts:

1. Change Your Time zone and Home City:
Click Twitter Settings in the top right, change your Home City to
Tehran and your time zone to GMT +3:30 Tehran Time. It’s likely that
the first method of filtering will relate to the location of the user.
If we flood twitter with accounts that all appear to be from Tehran,
we build a bigger data cloud that the censors have to sift through in
their search for Iranian dissidents. This is not full proof, but will
likely buy them some time in the same way that searching “John Smith”
on face book will yield a frustratingly large selection of people to
search through.

2. Change the Name Associated with your Twitter Account
Click Twitter Settings and change your birth name to something
Iranian. You can find a list of Iranian names here:
http://tehran.stanford.edu/Information/Iranian_names.html . Should the
censors end up on your account, your American (or whatever) name will
be a likely clue that you aren’t worth their time.

3. Repost Content
Follow someone posting from Iran and repost their material. Content is
the ultimate tell tale of who is and isn’t a dissident in this
situation. By reposting someone else’s content censors be forced to
look at the timestamp of the tweet to decipher who is the original
writer. Ideally, your follow up tweet would be so close to the initial
posting time that the two become indiscriminate. You can also go a
step further and, if they have uploaded a photo, save the file and re
upload it via your account (merely linking to their account is liable
to clue the censors in). Edit: Be careful in reposting, there have
been reports of false accounts going up to provide misinformation to
the prostestors. More info here: http://emsenn.com/iran.php . Do not
repost things verbatim, paraphrase. Also, when retweeting to not use
the original posters name.

4. Maintain the ‘false data cloud’
Even in the event that Iran blocks twitter as they did Facebook, it is
likely that the censors will still have access to the site, and will
continue to comb it. Sustaining your efforts could serve to further
delay the censors. Obviously, none of these methods are full proof.
The idea is to buy any of the said dissidents time to hide, evacuate
or so on… "If only for an instant, we will unite what you have
divided. Our calls will be heard from shore to shore, through borders,
races, classes and languages, For we bear a torch that burns one
hundred thousand years strong, we carry the flame of revolution.”

AS PER STATE DEPT REQUEST
http://blog.twitter.com/2009/06/down-time-rescheduled.html
Down Time Rescheduled / June 15, 2009
"A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued
operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host
had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at
NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an
important communication tool in Iran. Tonight's planned maintenance
has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran)."

THE SYRIAN RAVE SCENE, + SIMILAR AREAS OF RESEARCH
http://www.state.gov/s/p/115458.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqksHJfOECI
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/147625/january-15-2008/jared-cohen
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2007/11/05/071105ta_talk_lichtenstein
http://www.mediabistro.com/baynewser/twitter/profile_the_kid_at_the_state_department_who_figured_out_the_iranians_should_be_allowed_to_keep_tweeting_119136.asp
The Kid at State Who Figured Out the Iranians Should Be Allowed to
Keep Tweeting / Jun 17 2009

Imagine our surprise, then, when we learned that, instead, it was a 27-
year-old whiz kid whose job is to advise the State Department on how
to use social media to promote U.S. interests the Middle East. And
imagine our further surprise when we learned this young gentleman
wasn't one of Barack Obama's social media geniuses, but instead was a
Condi Rice pick hired specifically to advise the State Department on
young people in the Middle East and how to "counter-radicalize" them.
According to the New York Times, it was Jared Cohen, a member of the
Policy Planning Staff, who contacted Twitter on Monday, inquiring
about their plan to perform maintenance in what would be the middle of
the day, Iran time. Following that contact, Twitter decided to
postpone their maintenance so that it would take place in the middle
of the night Iran-time, even though that meant it would be the middle
of the day U.S. time. The Times noted that the move marked "the
recognition by the United States government that an Internet blogging
service that did not exist four years ago has the potential to change
history in an ancient Islamic country." So we wondered, who was this
young guy with this remarkable insight?

Cohen was only 24 when he was hired into the Policy Planning Staff
back in 2006. He'd received an undergraduate degree from Stanford and
a master's degree from Oxford, where he'd been on a Rhodes
Scholarship. Oh, and he'd also talked his way into a visa for Iran
(according to a December 2007 New Yorker profile), where he met young
people his own age who threw underground house parties and made
alcohol in bathtubs. "Iranian young people are one of the most pro-
American populations in the Middle East," Cohen told the New Yorker.
"They just don't know who to gravitate around, so young people
gravitate around each other." Cohen compiled his observations from
that trip—and others to Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq—into a book released
by Penguin, titled Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among
the Youth of the Middle East (selected, by the way, as one of Kirkus
Review's "Best Books of 2007").

The Times describes Cohen's job today as "working with Twitter,
YouTube, Facebook and other services to harness their reach for
diplomatic initiatives in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere." In May,
Cohen, whom CNN chose as one of its "Young People Who Rock," organized
a trip to Iraq for Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and other new media
executives "to discuss how to rebuild the country's information
network and to sell the virtues of Twitter," as the Times put it.
According to Federal News Radio, Dorsey has now been working with
mobile companies in the Middle East "to establish a short code so that
Iraqis can get on Twitter without actually having to have access to
the internet." "I'm a strong believer in the fact that access drives
innovation," Cohen told Federal News Radio. "In order for young people
to have their innovative minds tapped into, they need to have access
to the tools to do it, and I believe that cellphones and the internet
will bring that." Given Cohen's background, it's not surprising that
he was the one to make the call on (and to) Twitter. It's also an
interesting indication about how these young kids, with their social
media, might actually understand a thing or two about how the world
works and how to get it to move in the direction you want it to go.

#CNNFAIL
http://cnnfail.com/

LIST OF DISINFORMATION AGENTS ON TWITTER
http://twitspam.org/?p=1403
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/06/18/irans_fake_twitter_feeds

"Since Twitter started getting coverage for its role in the goings-on
in Iran, commentators have expressed concern over which Twitter feeds
are fake, and whether Twitter could be used to spread disinformation.
The unofficial Twitter watchdog Twitspam has a list of "fake Iran
election tweeters," and their feeds make for fascinating examples of
reverse propaganda in action.

Their techniques have different approaches and levels of subtelty.
Some simply make up silly stories, like one user's claim
"BREAKINGNEWS: Ahmedinejads plane take off from Russia 2 hours ago &
lost over BlackSea! Does he know how to swim? confrmation?" or
another's insistence that "Mussavi concedes, pleads halt to protest."
Others take a more egotistical approach, such as this user generously
volunteering to become the leader: "Saturday - small groups organized
by "ERAN SPAHBOD RUSTAM" will attack government buildings and
basij.women,children stay home." Finally, some Tweeters, in their rush
to spread violence, seem rather unclear as to correct grammatical
usage of Arabic words: "Get a mask and gloves - lets intifada tonight
on the streets of Teheran - My group will barricade one street. Make
your group 2. kick ass"

The most pernicious fake Twitter user, though, has been Persian_Guy,
who's not only provided fake news ( "Mussavi overheard: 'We don't need
a black man's help, that's humiliating, at least not arab.'") and
calls for violence (""non-Iranian Arabs waving Hamas/Hezbollah flags
around the protests. Kill Arabs now, they are scums!"), but has even
brought Twitter into the fake narrative. According to this user,
"Twitter's staff are ecstatic by what's happening in Iran, "We're so
glad there's chaos in Iran, finally Twitter is 'useful.'"" Somehow, I
doubt that will endear him to his fellow Tweeters."

BATTLE NARRATIVE
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-06-16/how-irans-hackers-killed-big-brother/
How Iran's Hackers Killed Big Brother
BY Douglas Rushkoff / 6.16.09

"Perhaps the best indication for Americans that something important is
going on in Iran right now is the fact that Twitter has delayed a
scheduled downtime for maintenance in order for Iranians and others
involved in the post-election digital melee to keep at it. For anyone
lacking a Twitter feed and thus missing the intense virtual crossfire,
what's happening is nothing short of a test of Internet users' ability
to challenge not only a regime's power over an election, but over the
network itself. The effort alone constitutes a victory. Unlike the
United States, where Facebook friends, Meetup groups, and other online
innovations successfully elected a candidate who (at least initially)
lacked top-down support, the Iranian power structure has less
compunction about snuffing digital democracy. Incumbent Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad is widely believed to have shut down Iranian access to
Facebook as soon as it was clear his opponent's supporters were using
the social network to organize rallies and motivate voters. Not that
Mousavi's 36,000 Facebook friends at that point would have led to the
undeniable landslide the opposition leader would have needed to
actually win—but the heavy-handed gesture hinted at what was to come.
It was the opening salvo in a digital war with global implications,
and a blueprint for the democratizing influence of the Internet.

Now that Ahmadinejad has claimed victory, the blogosphere,
Twitterverse, and the rest of the social-networking sphere is on
virtual fire. Tens of thousands of messages per minute condemning the
results as fraud are passing to and from Iran, as angry Iranians and
sympathetic outsiders exchange datapoints, analysis, and on-the-ground
coordinates. While only a small minority of these posts are from
people actually organizing protests, rooting out provocateurs, or
sending aid to victims of violence, it's too easy to discount the more
virtual interactions as trivial. Ahmadinejad sure hasn't. His regime
is working hard to stifle protest without completely unplugging Iran's
telecommunications infrastructure. Their tactics: limit cell service
to in-country only, shut off text messaging, block transmissions to
and from Facebook, and even shut down access to Friendfeed, a
messaging aggregator extremely popular in Iran. They're also
identifying and then blocking messages from offending users and Web
sites.

Iran's Internet-savvy youth have fought back, however, exploiting
"proxy servers" to make their messages appear to be coming from
different sources, and exchanging the digital addresses of the ever-
changing list of servers still capable of transmitting packets. Iran's
government counterattacked with a blockade, closing off the four
Internet access routes it controlled, leaving just one pipe through
Turkey for messages to breach it. One particularly aggressive
opposition group responded by facilitating a "denial of service"
attack on the Iranian government's servers. All over the Internet,
users of all nations can get easy instructions for how to install a
small program that "pings" the offending servers so frequently that
they crash, unable to handle the incoming requests. Of course, the
problem with this strategy is that it also overloads the few,
compromised pipelines into and out of the country."

USEFUL?
http://archive.org

DIY SUBTITLING TOOL
http://www.overstream.net/

GOOGLE QUICKLY LEARNS PERSIAN
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-translates-persian.html
http://translate.google.com/?sl=fa&tl=en#

CYBERWAR FOR BEGINNERS
http://reinikainen.co.uk/2009/06/iranelection-cyberwar-guide-for-beginners/
"The purpose of this guide is to help you participate constructively
in the Iranian election protests through twitter.
1.Do NOT publicise proxy IP’s over twitter, and especially not using
the #iranelection hashtag. Security forces are monitoring this
hashtag, and the moment they identify a proxy IP they will block it in
Iran. If you are creating new proxies for the Iranian bloggers, DM
them to @stopAhmadi or @iran09 and they will distributed them
discretely to bloggers in Iran.
2. Hashtags, the only two legitimate hashtags being used by bloggers
in Iran are #iranelection and #gr88, other hashtag ideas run the risk
of diluting the conversation.
3. Keep you bull$hit filter up! Security forces are now setting up
twitter accounts to spread disinformation by posing as Iranian
protesters. Please don’t retweet impetuosly, try to confirm
information with reliable sources before retweeting. The legitimate
sources are not hard to find and follow.
4. Help cover the bloggers: change your twitter settings so that your
location is TEHRAN and your time zone is GMT +3.30. Security forces
are hunting for bloggers using location and timezone searches. If we
all become ‘Iranians’ it becomes much harder to find them.
5. Don’t blow their cover! If you discover a genuine source, please
don’t publicise their name or location on a website. These bloggers
are in REAL danger. Spread the word discretely through your own
networks but don’t signpost them to the security forces. People are
dying there, for real, please keep that in mind.
6. Denial of Service attacks. If you don’t know what you are doing,
stay out of this game. Only target those sites the legitimate Iranian
bloggers are designating. Be aware that these attacks can have
detrimental effects to the network the protesters are relying on. Keep
monitoring their traffic to note when you should turn the taps on or
off.
7. Do spread the (legitimate) word, it works! When the bloggers asked
for twitter maintenance to be postponed using the #nomaintenance tag,
it had the desired effect. As long as we spread good information,
provide moral support to the protesters, and take our lead from the
legitimate bloggers, we can make a constructive contribution.
Please remember that this is about the future of the Iranian people,
while it might be exciting to get caught up in the flow of
participating in a new meme, do not lose sight of what this is really
about."

ANONYMOUS
http://anonnet.org/webirc/iran
http://www.whyweprotest.net/en/
http://iran.whyweprotest.net/showthread.php?t=29
Secure Connection Tools
"This site was made by people - 'hacktivists' - who are imbued with a
set of skills related to Internet Technology, who saw what the Iranian
government was doing to it's people to suppress it's messages for
democracy and it's hope for a free and fair electoral process. So,
what I guess you could say is that computer nerds around the world saw
what was unfolding and thought "We should help these people, we have
the ability and the tools ...why not help them?""

HOW TO SETUP A PROXY FOR IRAN CITIZENS
http://dev.austinheap.com/iran/squid-iran-ideal.txt
http://proxyheap.austinheap.com/phase1.php
http://proxyheap.austinheap.com/checker.php
http://blog.austinheap.com/2009/06/15/how-to-setup-a-proxy-for-iran-citizens/
From Austin Heap, who setup the instructions: "Please don’t run this
on a machine that you’re worried about or is used for production
sites; and take basic security precautions, ie: moving ftp off the
default port, using a firewall package, etc."

http://iran.whyweprotest.net/forumdisplay.php?f=38
http://iran.whyweprotest.net/forumdisplay.php?f=35
http://iran.whyweprotest.net/forumdisplay.php?f=16

PROXY SERVER AS WEAPON
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/17/MN75188C6K.DTL
S.F. techie helps stir Iranian protests
BY Matthew B. Stannard / June 17, 2009

Little about Austin Heap's first online venture, a site hosting free
episodes of the cartoon "South Park," suggested he would one day use
his computer skills to challenge a government. But for the past few
days, Heap, an IT director in San Francisco, has been on the virtual
front lines of the crisis in Iran, helping people there protest the
presidential election, which opponents of the incumbent regime
maintain was fraudulent. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have
taken to the streets since Saturday, organizing and sharing news on
sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The Iranian government,
in response, has blocked those sites, along with mobile phone service
and other communications tools. But Iran has the highest number of
bloggers per capita in the world, said Abbas Milani, director of the
Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University, and they were
undeterred. "People used Twitter, and people used their cell phones
and used all kinds of mechanisms."

Heap, 25, has never followed Iranian news much. But as reports of the
election began dominating Twitter - but not, he believed, American
mainstream news - Heap felt the same defiant frustration that led him
in the past to butt heads with the music and movie industry
associations by creating file-sharing sites. "I believe in free
information," he said Tuesday. "And I especially have no room for a
tyrannical regime shutting up a whole population. I was 13 and able to
take on a huge company like Comedy Central from my bedroom. With a
computer, everybody has the power to do that."

Proxy server a weapon
Heap's weapon in the past few days was the proxy server, a computer
configured to act as an intermediary between a computer user and the
Internet. Such servers have many legitimate functions, such as
speeding response times, and some illegitimate ones, such as helping
spammers hide their identities. What interested Heap was the use of a
proxy server to bypass censorship. Properly configured, a proxy server
could identify Web surfers in Iran and route them to Twitter and other
sites the government had restricted. People around the world were
posting network addresses for such proxies on Twitter and elsewhere,
Heap said, but there was no organization and the servers were
unpredictable.

Simple first effort
Heap's first effort was simple: a list of working proxy servers that
he published Sunday afternoon. Almost immediately, those servers began
to vanish. Perhaps spammers or pornographers, who constantly cruise
the Internet looking for open proxies, were overwhelming the system,
he thought.

It was only later that Iranians on Twitter warned Heap - and others
publishing lists of open proxies - that by posting public lists they
were exposing those proxies to attack. "I really didn't expect their
government to be this on top of it," he said. "I know everybody knows
about Twitter. But I didn't think it was going to be to this extent."
So Heap took another tack, creating a password-protected list of proxy
servers and giving only a handful of people access to each, reducing
the possibility of a widespread attack. On his blog, he published
simple instructions for configuring proxy servers.

Heap wasn't the only techie setting up or promulgating proxies, but
his easy-to-follow instructions quickly spread through Twitter and the
blogosphere. Suddenly, people were sending him addresses for new proxy
servers in Australia, Japan and Mexico. Traffic on his blog grew from
a couple of dozen unique users a day to more than 100,000 in 24 hours.
A woman in Canada asked him for help getting her Iranian family back
online. On Twitter, a Tehran resident posted: "@austinheap Thank you
for all you are doing to help my people. This support and kindness
will never be forgotten."

'Almost made me cry'
"Most of the reactions from Iran have almost made me cry," he said.
"Having somebody tell me that their family thanks me - that's the
power of the Internet." The last 24 hours have been less fun, Heap
said. He's had to figure out which of the professed Iranians
contacting him he can trust and which might be seeking access to a
proxy service to shut it down. Monday night, his site came under a
denial-of-service attack - a flood of phantom file requests from the
United Kingdom designed to bring his system to its knees. Tuesday
morning he received his first e-mailed threats. Still, he thinks he's
doing the right thing. "If I can help them get their message out and
help them tell the story and step back, that's my job," he said.
"(But) my mom is terrified right now."

By mid-Tuesday, Iran appeared to be blocking all non-encrypted
Internet traffic, making the 1,600 new proxy-server addresses now in
his in-box temporarily useless. But Heap was working with other
professionals and companies seeking new ways to reconnect. "I haven't
been in the middle of an outpouring like this, ever. And it makes me
incredibly proud of the IT community," he said. While it's not clear
how much impact Heap's efforts are having, history may look back on
his tweets about proxy servers as a profound moment in political
evolution, said Stanford's Milani. "The regime probably doesn't
recognize it, but I can tell you, the marriage of civil disobedience
with the social networking savvy is the death of despotism in these
places," he said. "If you combine these two, you have a very potent
force."

PROXY KITS
http://proxy.org/
http://ultrareach.com/
http://www.howcast.com/videos/90601-How-To-Circumvent-an-Internet-Proxy
http://iran.sharearchy.com/#proxies
http://www.iranproxy.org/
http://www.twitter.com/IranAnon

AD HOC MESH NETWORKS
http://www.olsr.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimized_Link_State_Routing_Protocol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.A.T.M.A.N.
http://www.open-mesh.net/
http://nightwing.lugro-mesh.org.ar/en/
http://www.blogin.it/

PSIPHON
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psiphon
http://www.psiphon.ca/

OPERA UNITE
http://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2009/06/16/wanted-spartacus-an-opera-unite-web-proxy-for-iran/

NETWAR IN THE EMERALD CITY
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1382/MR1382.ch7.pdf
RAND report by Paul de Armond in 2001 about 1999 WTO protest in
Seattle

BEAMING IN BROADBAND BY SATELLITE?
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/06/obama-and-iran-and-intelligence
"By the way, at the same press briefing, one reporter asked if the
White House was considering beaming broadband capability into Iran via
satellite so the opposition forces would be able to communicate with
themselves and the outside world. Gibbs said he didn't know such a
thing was possible. (Is it?) But he said he would check on the
technological feasibility and get back with an answer. That caused
some head-scratching in the press room. If the United States could do
that and was planning on doing so, wouldn't this be one of those
intelligence matters that Gibbs won't discuss? But maybe some telecom
entrepreneur or Silicon Valley whiz-kids can make this happen. The
Google guys? The Twitter people? XM Radio? This is the sort of covert
action that could be worth outsourcing—with the project manager
actually taking full credit. Think of the endorsement possibilities:
the Iranian Revolution...Brought to You by DIRECTV."

PIRATE BAY IPREDATOR EFFORT TO ENCRYPT ALL INTERNETS
http://thepiratebay.org/blog/160
http://newteevee.com/2008/07/09/the-pirate-bay-wants-to-encrypt-the-entire-internet/
http://www.tfr.org/wiki/index.php?title=Technical_Proposal_(IPETEE)

GREAT FIREWALL OF CHINA WORKAROUNDS
http://chinesewall.ccc.de/index-en.html

CIVIL RIGHTS PROXY SPAM
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/07/08/20/1247230/Should-We-Spam-Proxies-to-China
Should We Spam Proxies to China? from the or-just-viagra-ads dept.
BY CmdrTaco / August 20 2007

"Frequent Slashdot Contributor Bennett Haselton is back with a story
about fighting censorship with spam. He starts "Is it OK to send
unsolicited e-mail to users in China, Iran, and other censored
countries, telling them about new proxy sites for getting around
Internet censorship? I hasten to add that I have NOT done this, am not
planning on doing it and would not have any idea how to go about it
anyway. Between the various companies that offer proxy services, I
don't know of anyone who is doing it (no, not even people who swore me
to secrecy about it). But I think the question involves ethical issues
that would not apply to most discussions of spam."

It doesn't seem that you could use conventional channels to advertise
proxies to Chinese and Iranian users. If you bought ads on Google
AdSense or a similar ad-serving network, China might threaten to block
all ads served from that network unless they started screening out ads
for anti-censorship services (especially in the case of Google, which
seems to comply with most Chinese self-censorship demands). Then
there's the question of how to charge Chinese and Iranian users even
small amounts for the services. It would not be a good idea to have
the charges show up on their credit cards issued by Chinese banks.
Paying small amounts with PayPal would be a little bit better since
the charge would simply show up from "PayPal", without revealing the
recipient. And since all traffic to the PayPal site is encrypted over
SSL, Chinese censors wouldn't be able to detect or block users who
were paying to circumvent the Great Firewall, unless they blocked all
traffic to the PayPal site. But could PayPal be leaned on to provide
the identities of Chinese users who were paying for circumvention
services, under threat of having their site blocked otherwise? And the
biggest impediment of all would be that once you start charging even
$1 for a service, there's a huge dropoff in people willing to sign up,
even if they would have to spend much more than $1 worth of effort to
find a free alternative somewhere else.

So, if circumvention services provide enough benefit to Chinese users,
maybe spamming proxy sites would do more good than harm, and if the
lack of freedom in the country means that you could not sell or
advertise the services to Chinese users by conventional means, maybe
that means spamming the proxy locations would be the only way to do
this."

THE FAX EFFECT
http://www.jackmyers.com/commentary/media-business-bloggers/46726327.html
Tiananmen Square and Technology
By David Houle / June 3, 2009

It was 20 years ago this week that the demonstrations in Tiananmen
Square turned violent. After days of open demonstrations, the Chinese
government had had enough and sent in the army. This led to one of the
most iconic visual images of protest in recent decades: a single man
standing right in front of four tanks, daring them to run him over.

The image is one that anyone over the age of 35 can remember as it
flashed around the world, and represented the individual facing down
superior force in a literal stand for freedom. It was this image that
gave the communist Chinese government its first taste of international
outrage as it was slowly moving toward a more open, capitalistic
society. It was a government and a country unused to global scrutiny.
While the crackdown on protestors continued, it was done quietly and
out of camera range of foreigners and journalists. A single image had
flashed around the world and had left an indelible mark on human
consciousness.

One of the dynamics that led this single man to stand in front of the
tanks was the impact of technology. When the government moved to end
the demonstrations, it blocked all known communications channels,
isolating the demonstrators. International TV and radio was jammed so
the demonstrators had no idea whether there was support for them
around the world. One thing the government missed was the new
communications technology called the fax machine. Evidently in offices
near Tiananmen Square and in universities there were fax machines.
They were used by demonstrators to get the word out to the world. Much
more importantly, the world responded, sending faxes by the hundreds,
letting the demonstrators know that the whole world was watching. This
is what gave the demonstrators strength. This is what emboldened the
young man to stand in front of the tanks.

Fax technology was just a few years old in 1989. The fax machine first
entered the office in the mid 1980s and didn't make it into the home
until the 1990s. It was this brand new technology of sending documents
through phone lines that fueled the demonstrations. There were only a
few million cell phones in the world in 1989, and certainly none
available for the demonstrators at Tiananmen Square. So it was the fax
machine using land lines that kept hope alive in Beijing.

What is striking is how much transformation in communications
technology humanity has experienced in the 20 years since 1989. In
1995 there were 89 million cell phone subscribers in the world, in
2005 there were 2 billion, and today there are 4 billion! In 1995, the
year the first commercial browser came to market, there were some 45
million people using the Internet. By 2005 that number had crossed 1
billion and there are close to 2 billion today. Cable and satellite TV
was still in early stage growth in 1989, today they are global in
reach. In 1989, the few laptops in the world were large, bulky and
heavy and there weren't very many of them.

Humanity is more globally connected than it has ever been. Terrorist
attacks are caught on cell phone cameras and telecast to the world.
Network news anchors speak live via videophone to correspondents
anywhere in the world. Internet services such as Skype allow us all to
cheaply communicate globally via video. Bandwidth expansion and data
compression are such that a month's worth of videos from YouTube
equals what coursed through the Internet the entire year of 2000. We
are constantly connected.

Communications technology may now provide us with more information
than can possibly be absorbed and digested. The electronic feed trough
of information is always on, and this can feel overwhelming. We move
from the delight in access and availability to the desire to totally
unplug. The good news for freedom and openness is that, with each
technological step forward, barriers fall, dictators' control lessens,
ignorance decreases and people can take ever more informed actions.

The fax technology of 1989 provided the demonstrators with the
knowledge that the whole world was watching, allowing one man to take
an informed action that single-handedly stopped a phalanx of tanks.
That was 20 years ago this week. How far we have traveled since then.

BONUS : UNVERIFIED PHONE NUMBERS
http://213.163.90.48/
"Call these numbers to discuss the Iranian elections! Do NOT do from
within Iran."
President : 00989121196107 / 00989123274006
Esfandiyar Rahim-Masha'i - Vice President of Iran : r_ma...@ichto.ir
Council of Guardians : 00982166401012
Mojtaba Samareh-Hashemi - President's trusted advisor and campaign
manager : 00989121081443
Ali Akbar Javanfekr - Press advisor to the President :
aajav...@hotmail.com / 00989123279500 (telephone) / 00982164454028
(fax)
Gholamhoseyn Elham - Government spokesperson : 00989121486826

FAN MAIL
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1848399/what_you_can_do_to_help_iran_election.html?cat=75
Amnesty International USA suggests the following:
write officials at: info_...@leader.ir

Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic
Ayatollah Sayed 'Ali Khamenei,
The Office of the Supreme Leader
Islamic Republic Street -
End of Shahid Keshvar Doust Street,
Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran

Minister of the Interior
Sadegh Mahsouli
Dr Fatemi Avenue
Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran
Fax: +98 21 8 896 203

EVEN FURTHER READING [PS HAVEN WENT OUT OF BUSINESS]
http://www.sealandgov.org/history.html
http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/00/07/02/160253/Answers-From-Sealand-CTO-Ryan-Lackey-Responds
Answers From Sealand HavenCo CTO Ryan Lackey / July 03 2000

"A few weeks ago, you asked questions of Ryan Lackey, CTO for HavenCo,
a company dedicated to providing secure off-shore data hosting from
Sealand, a principality off the coast of England. Ryan has lately
survived dental emergencies, the loss of a laptop (it dropped into the
North Sea -- how many people can say that?) and other stresses, but
he's followed through with some interesting answers. He even has some
ideas for how you can make a lot of money, and lists the tools you
need to start your own data haven. Kudos to Ryan for taking the time
to answer so thoroughly.

[by Jamie Zawinski] Q: Why do you need physical security at all?
Lots of people are asking questions about physical security, and how
you're going to repel missiles and commandos, but I've got the
opposite question: why do you need physical security and a physical
location at all? Would not the best way to protect your customers'
data be to wrap it in hard crypto and distribute it far and wide
across the whole of the net, ensuring that there is not a single point
of failure or a single physical installation that can be isolated? As
we've seen again and again recently, the best protection against
censorship and other legal attacks is massive redundancy and
decentralization.

[Ryan Lackey] A: This actually brings up several issues, which I will
address in turn:

1. Physical location vs. distributed presence
You seem to be suggesting a distributed data store, a la Eternity, by
Ross Anderson. Basically, a federation of servers on the net, possibly
hidden servers interfaced to the outside world through remailers (such
as Blacknet) or ZKS Freedom. These servers would move data around
among themselves, opaque to the outside world, and users would be able
to store their data, manually or automatically, on as many servers as
possible. There would presumably be some kind of payment system so
users could anonymously pay for documents to be stored (as if you run
the system for free, it will end up collapsing due to a flood of
useless content; if you use a MRU/LRU scheme for your caches, script
kiddies will just run scripts to keep their favorite documents in the
cache, dropping real content out).

While this approach is interesting from a theoretical standpoint,
there are no production-quality systems ready yet. Additionally, there
are fundamental limits to distributed computation -- latency, as you
add nodes, or threat of compromise, if you have very few nodes. We're
going to be incorporating some distributed cache technology which
should provide our datacenters with some of the benefits of freenet/
eternity type systems. Our system will, however, have a small number
of very secure nodes, such as our facilities on Sealand, in which
customers can conduct trusted transactions -- the intermediate results
are guaranteed confidentiality and integrity in processing.

The distributed data serving systems are also not practical for any
transaction oriented site, especially low-latency transaction oriented
sites, at least without a small number of trusted nodes to do the
processing. Due to security constraints, this means tamper-resistant
hardware, and since this hardware is expensive, it needs to be
purchased in limited quantity, and protected from theft/attack,
meaning you want to put it in a small number of high security physical
environments. Since it becomes a critical link in all of your
transactions, you also need high quality bandwidth. These distributed
hosting systems are certainly interesting, but don't really meet all
the neets of our customers. If we borrow 10% of the technology in
building a secure distributed cache system, we'll be able to offer 95%
of the benefits, as well.

2. Secret physical location vs. single well-defended point
If you're going to have a physical location, there's no easy way to
distribute to a very large number of physical locations; you have a
base cost per site, and your security is incredibly low until you
spend a substantial multiple of that. There are definite economies of
scale in running larger datacenters. Keeping physical locations secret
is difficult. Keeping active physical sites, with actual servers
connected to the net, secret, while still having decent pingtimes and
large pipes, is almost impossible. You would need to go with hidden
fiber cables laid through some kind of territory in which you could
destroy anyone or anything looking for them, and your physical site
would need to have the same density as the surrounding area, as well
as no magnetic anomaly, or unusual power consumption, or whatever. Or,
you could communicate by non-DFable HF SS radio, but that would
severely limit your bitrates. I'd say this is basically hopeless.

3. How much of our security is HavenCo, vs. Sealand
A fair bit of the security on Sealand is related to protecting the
Principality of Sealand from the kind of takeover which was attempted
in 1978, rather than strictly necessary for HavenCo itself. HavenCo's
security is primarily due to tamper-resistant hardware and
cryptography, not the site security of Sealand