A woman shouts during a state-organized rally in Tehran yesterday. In the unrest following Iran’s disputed presidential election, a made-in-Canada Internet tool is helping Iranian activists gain access to information on the Web – and post their own.
At the heart of the disputed Iranian elections, a group of Canadians is helping Iranian activists gain access to what has become the most precious and tightly controlled commodity in Iran: information.
The Canadian researchers behind Psiphon, an online censorship avoidance tool, have begun a massive grassroots campaign to give Iranians access to sites that the Iranian government has gone to great lengths to ban - including Facebook, Iranian opposition sites and international news networks. Psiphon has been "pushing" that content to Iranians, giving them a glimpse of the outside world that has been largely blocked since the elections began.
But Psiphon's founders are walking a tightrope in their attempts to empower Iranians, as they try to simultaneously offer activists unfettered access to the Internet and dissuade those same activists from launching cyberattacks on the government institutions that took that access away in the first place.
"Thousands of people are arguing for [cyberattacks against government infrastructure]" said Greg Walton, editor of the Information Warfare Monitor and a research fellow at the Citizen Lab in the University of Toronto's Munk Centre, where Psiphon was first developed. "We're concerned that if people launch [denial of service attacks]- the Iranian government is already throttling [down]bandwidth - this may take up the remaining bandwidth."
Mr. Walton said some government sites have been defaced, including the site for a government-run radio station, and that others had gone down, possibly as a result of cyberattacks.
Iran's biggest mass protest since the 1979 Islamic revolution - sparked by what is seen by many Iranians as a sham election - has become a full-fledged global movement, fought on and fuelled by the World Wide Web.
The cyberrevolution's epicentre is the microblogging site Twitter. Often disparaged as trivial because of its 140-character limit on posts, the site has proved to be an extremely effective way for activists to post rapid-fire updates on the situation on the ground in Iran.
Among the thousands of posts popping up by the hour are descriptions of government raids and the date and location of planned protests.
Indeed, Twitter was supposed to go offline on Monday for prescheduled maintenance. However, the site's founders delayed that shutdown because of "the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran." Washington officials reportedly also asked Twitter to postpone the maintenance.
Without tools such as Psiphon, most Iranians would still be unable to gain access to sites such as Twitter. The censorship avoidance tool essentially links "trusted members" together with members who have access to content, sending it to those who don't, all under the authorities' noses.
"When a people has no access to a free press, of course they have to get their words out there," said Jaffer Sheyholislami, an Iranian-born assistant professor of linguistics at Carleton University who has been monitoring the election closely. "As soon as the election results were announced in Tehran, you could tell something was not right from the beginning and you could tell by the fact that the Internet services such as Facebook and many websites were shut down - especially … opposition-group websites."
One Tweet in particular caught Mr. Sheyholislami's attention. It was sent from Twitter account mousavi1388 (1388 is the year in the Persian calendar), and it read: "We have no national press coverage in Iran, everyone should help spread [Mir-Hossein]Mousavi's message. One Person = One Broadcaster."
Without tools such as Twitter and cellular technology, it would be much more difficult for Iranians to get information out of the country, said Jeff Jarvis, associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism.
"Once you have access to the Internet, information will flow around the despots," he said. "It is now inevitable. It will be more and less efficient and they'll be more and less smart about trying to stop it, but it will flow around tyranny and that is new and that is an absolute impact."