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Attached is a stunning piece by Cyrus Farivar, who is an internet/technology journalist, and our guest blogger this week. He has kindly offered us the first chapter of his upcoming book called “The Internet of Elsewhere”. In a sense, Cyrus is Iran’s answer to Austin Heap, and so you will discover here a remarkable chronicle of the internet wars between Iran’s bloggers and the government, including Khamenei’s Twitter account. This is offered as precious resource to journalists, as well as our readers…
ABRIDGED INTRO SECTION Tallinn, Estonia June 19, 2009 One week after the Iranian presidential election I found myself sitting alone at Veljo Haamer’s desk. I scoured the Internet for information about Iran. The country had been essentially at a standstill and the foreign media expelled as the government clamped down on what little free speech remained. Occasionally, I sipped from my Estonian lager and stared out his second-story window. I watched the hours-long summer twilight burning through Hammer’s curtain-less east-facing windows. On that night, I was alone, as Haamer had gone to visit his father in the eastern countryside, near the Russian border. Veljo Haamer is Estonia’s well-known WiFi evangelist and had become a good friend ever since my first trip to Estonia in March 2005. Hammer’s apartment is one of eight units in a small building at the end of Leigeri Street in Kalamaja, one of the Estonian capitol’s oldest suburbs. Local lore has it that Kalamaja dates back to the fourteenth century when it was a mere fishing village. Today, it’s a charming neighborhood filled with small wooden houses from the 1920s. It’s one of Tallinn’s few areas that was not damaged during the Soviet occupation of Estonia, which lasted from 1945 until 1991. Although it’s just a short walk from Tallinn’s train station, and a little further to the Estonian parliament, it feels like a world away from the expensive, fast-paced, cosmopolitan, English-speaking, city center where many foreigners spend much of their time. Officially, I had been in Estonia to speak on the first NATO conference on cyberwarfare and cybersecurity. But at that late hour, I was working on a story for Public Radio International’s “The World” about how Silicon Valley companies, including Apple, Google, and Facebook, had just released new Persian-language capabilities in the wake of the controversial Iranian election. Enthroned in Haamer’s chair, I used Skype to please free calls over the Internet to sources in California. Skype had been created just a few years earlier, only a few kilometers from where I sat in Kalamaja. Here I was, bringing together California and Iran through Estonian engineering. In just a few short hours, I conducted interviews, wrote, edited, and recorded my entire piece for a nationally syndicated American radio program. While I made a late dinner in the midnight twilight, I listened to the show live over the Internet. Less than a decade earlier, this would have been impossible. These were just the latest iteration of new technology tools that have become vital to Iranian dissidents, given that all independent foreign media had essentially been kicked out of the country, and that free domestic media did not exist. Weeks before the election, I had reported on the increased use of social media, including Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed by all major candidates in the Iranian presidential election, reformist and conservative alike. Even President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself had started a blog back in 2008. But in an environment with almost no non-governmental voices, and a crackdown on the existing foreign satellite broadcasts, reformists and protestors had no choice but to turn to the Internet, to send emails, photos and video. One Persian-language satellite television channel based in southern California was said to have sent thousands of miniature pen cameras to Iran, which could easily be connected to a computer and then uploaded to the Internet. Reformist candidates, most notably Mir Hossein Mousavi, the former prime minister, used his Facebook page on June 13 to call for supporters in Tehran to go to their rooftops and shout the normally religious chant: “Allah wa Akbar!” (God is Great!), thereby co-opting it from the hardliner religious conservatives. He wrote: “Tonight all go to the roofs and let the chant of ‘Allah Akbar’ fill the air in Tehran. Internet and cell phones are completely offline. Use landlines as much as you can and spread the news.” Later, messages in English and Persian spread quickly across Twitter with a small handful of users in Iran sending out as much information as possible. Sina Tabesh, a 23-year-old Internet user in North Tehran, tweeted in English on June 13, 2009: “Northern part of Tehran is on fire, people attacked a gas station to explode it.” Others were spreading information of arrests of dissidents as the government disseminated it: on June 13, 2009, another blogger, Somayeh Tohidlou wrote on her FriendFeed page in Persian: “Latest News: Doctor Mohsen Mirdamadi – Ms. Zahra Soon Mirdamadi wife – Saeed Shariati – Zohreh Aghajari and Behzad Nabavi, Abdollah Ramezanzadeh are confirmed arrested.” While I waited for my piece to be edited and mixed, I ran Twitter searches, looking for the latest news and information about Iran, checking messages tagged #iranelection, a searchable code word to find more information about the Iranian election. Many journalists, myself included, felt overwhelmed with the sheer volume of Twitter messages pertaining to Iran. The torrent of messages providing links to photos and videos, watching them as they came in – particularly when more than usual claimed to be coming from within Iran – was unlike anything I’d ever seen. The best and most newsworthy messages, I forwarded on to friends and sent out on my own Twitter account. Some messages included raw emotional messages, like this one from Parastoo Doukouhaki, a young feminist blogger in Tehran, who wrote in English: “feel like somebody’s foot is on my neck, preventing me to breathe. I can do almost nothing online. suppression. want to cry. #IranElection” Others expressed frustration at the seeming lack of help by foreign tech companies, like Google. As Babak Mehrabani wrote in Persian: “A few days ago [companies made] any excuse not to service the Iranians, now how special services for Iranians are starting? Example: Google Translate.” The more I read these posts, the more I felt like I was part of something bigger than myself. With information flowing faster than I could read it, I got swept up in the fervor, as did many others across the globe. But with my own Iranian-American heritage, and my extended family in Iran, how could I not try to understand the play-by-play of actions and analysis that were coming out about Iran? This time, though, many non-Iranians and others who had no previous connection to Iran somehow suddenly became captivated as well. Many users changed their Twitter avatar color to green, in solidarity with the opposition campaign of Mir Hossein Mousavi. The former prime minister’s campaign used the traditionally Islamic color of green as a way to co-opt his religious conservative opponent, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I also noticed that many Twitter users had changed their virtual location to Tehran, hoping to confuse Iran’s Internet police – the idea being that if everyone is in Tehran, then no one is. There’s no evidence that this strategy worked, but that didn’t stop many people from trying to help, even in some small way. Indeed, later research by the Web Ecology Project, an academic interdisciplinary research group based in Boston, confirmed that between June 7, 2009 and June 26, 2009 there were over two million messages on Twitter about the election in Iran. While it was easy to think that these Twitter messages were part of a mass movement, the top 10 percent of users produced two-thirds of the Iran-related tweets, and one-quarter of all tweets about Iran were a retweet, or re-broadcast, of someone else’s message. This research confirms Twitter’s role as more of an amplification and dissemination tool. It was not primarily used as a social organization tool from within Iran. However, while relatively few Iranians were using Twitter prior to the election, nearly all those who had a mobile phone – roughly two out of every three Iranians – are familiar with text messages. As is the case in many parts of the world, text messages are the cheapest and most effective way to communicate quick pieces of information. The Islamic Republic clearly knew that mobile phones would also be used as a way to socially mobilize dissidents, and blocked all text messages on all three carriers from Election Day until July 1, 2009. Earlier that week, on June 15, 2009, the United States Department of State realized the potential power that Twitter can have in distributing information out of Iran. A low-level State staffer reached out to a Twitter founder and suggested that the company reschedule its planned maintenance time – during which the entire service would be shut down – so that it would be more conducive to users in Iran, instead of American users. Twitter complied, noting at the time that the service “is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran.” Even before the State Department took notice of Twitter, there were other forms of protest that many reformist sympathizers abroad began to take into their own hands. These activists targeted Iranian government websites, including that of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a way to show disapproval. This tactic, known as a “denial of service” attack, false traffic overwhelms a web server, causing it to crash. It would be as if a highway could suddenly get flooded with so many cars such that no car could possibly move. Although I didn’t know it at the time, tech-savvy activists, like Austin Heap, a twenty-five-year-old “cyber activist” in San Francisco, wrote scripts and created new sets of instructions that specifically targeted Iranian government websites. Non-techies discovered existing tools, like PageReboot designed for commercial uses like monitoring auctions on eBay, and configured them to automatically reload particular sites every few seconds. While some Islamic Republic sites did go down at various points in the immediate aftermath of the election, it’s hard to say how effective the calls for such cyberattacks were. Nonetheless, countless, anonymous Internet users worldwide felt compelled to show their defiance of the Islamic Republic. Other online pundits provided a more sobering analysis at the effectiveness of such attacks, noting that as Iran had throttled down the overall speed of its domestic Internet by sixty percent (from five gigabits per second before the election to two), the cyberattacks made it it that much more difficult for pro-opposition websites to get their message out. James Cowie, the CEO of Renesys, a bandwidth analysis firm, put it this way in an email to technology journalist Evgeny Morozov: Cowie explained that for all the well-intentioned efforts to attack government websites in Iran, dissidents and their supporters may in fact just be shooting themselves in the foot, as he concluded that technically-speaking: “if you attack a pro-government site, you are almost certainly also stealing bandwidth from pro-opposition sites.” Howver, the Islamic Republic and its supporters began reacting as well. Just as reformists and other dissidents were active on Twitter, so too were voices of the regime, including the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A Twitter account in his name @khamenei_ir – linked back to his official website, There were also reports that government agents or supporters were using Twitter to spread false information, such as sending protestors to non-existent protests. These actions by the government and/or their sympathizers mimicked the behavior of a cadre of reformist bloggers who had been active for years, writing from both within and outside of Iran about the failings, abuses and crimes conducted by the Islamic Republic. The government, in turn, responded with a clamp-down and in the months leading up to the June election, it announced that it would be launching an online army of 10,000 Basij – a morality and violent enforcer police – who would act as pro-regime bloggers. Further, the months leading up to the Iranian presidential election of June 2009, a government-run site, gerdab.ir (“whirlpool” or “vortex”), appeared, and posted photographs of protestors, asking the public to identify them. If any government sympathizers have come forward with “useful” information, the Iranian government hasn’t said so. This battle has continued on in subsequent months, with the headlines on its website: “Iranian Revolutionary Guards ready to fight cyber and Internet war,” (September 7, 2009) and “An Internet battle report in the defeated velvet coup” (October 1, 2009). Clearly, the Islamic Republic is trying to make an online show of force – to underscore the point that it is capable in engaging online dissidents in its own way. But despite the unprecedented level of attention given to Iran both from inside and outside the country, the status quo was preserved. Amid international outcry and violent repression at home, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was inaugurated for a second term on August 5, 2009. If there were any instance when an online community should be able to “fight the power,” it should have been in the summer of 2009. After all, Iran is a country with a young, literate, and highly wired population. Given its history of political turbulence, coupled with the new social networking capabilities, online “netizens” might be expected to influence local politics in a meaningful way. However, Iran has also illustrated its capability and willingness to limit Internet access, text-messaging access, infiltrate online communities and intimidate dissidents. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that the incumbent regime is being consolidated through military and political power, despite all of the international efforts from within Iran and from outside to speak up online. But the Islamic Republic is constantly playing catch-up, as dissidents get their message out any way that they can. Less than two months after Ahmadinejad’s swearing-in, on September 27, 2009, Mobin, a company entirely run by the Islamic Republic’s Revolutionary Guards, bought a controlling stake (fifty percent plus one share) in the Telecommunication Company of Iran. It paid $7.8 billion for the privilege – the largest single deal in the history of the Tehran Stock Exchange. This acquisition further suggests that the regime’s importance on controlling online access and activities within the country. Despite this new level of control, blog posts, photos and videos continue to trickle out of the country to this day. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, conventional wisdom dictated a technological determinist view, that the mere presence of such a revolutionary telecommunications technology would upend the existing political, economic, and social regime. MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte famously argued in 1995 that “being digital” could “flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize control and help harmonize people” and that “overly hierarchical and status-conscious societies will erode. The nation-state may go away.” He added: “Developing nations will leapfrog the telecommunications infrastructures of the First World and become more wired (and wireless).” On its face, this may not be such a ridiculous notion. Conventional social-science theory argues that interpersonal relationships can beget community, which can beget widespread solidarity, which can beget enlarging power, which can beget greater authority, which can finally, beget revolution. However, a quick check of history and the Internet’s historical analogy – the telegraph – shows us that this theory does not quite hold up. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the telegraph promised to connect the world as never before. People around the globe marveled that this new technology could now move information with incomparable speed. As Captain George O. Squier of the U.S. Army Signal Corps wrote in the January 1901 issue of National Geographic: “The fastest mail express, or the swiftest ocean ship, are as naught compared with the velocity of the electrical impulse which annihilates any terrestrial dimension.” As the telegraph began to spread to all regions of the globe, many intellectuals like Henry Field (a Presbyterian pastor, author, and brother of Cyrus Field, who laid the first direct telegraph cable between Europe and the United States in 1858) began to posit that perhaps this global network could even bring about world peace. He wrote shortly after the trans-Atlantic cable was laid, that the telegraph “unites distant nations, making them feel that they are members of one great family…By such strong ties does it tend to bind the human race in unity, peace and concord.” Nearly a century later, similar intellectuals marveled at the astonishing power of the Internet, and its best-known application, the World Wide Web. In a 1993 article about the nascent Web, The New York Times’ John Markoff wrote with much of the same tone of marvel that Squier did at the beginning of the century: Click the mouse: there’s a NASA weather movie taken from a satellite high over the Pacific Ocean. A few more clicks, and one is reading a speech by President Clinton, as digitally stored at the University of Missouri. Click-click: a sampler of digital music recordings as compiled by MTV. Click again, et voila: a small digital snapshot reveals whether a certain coffee pot in a computer science laboratory at Cambridge University in England is empty or full. Perhaps this gee-whiz utopian notion may have worked in the early days of both of these technologies, but as the Internet has spread around the globe, it has not brought a single country that much closer to “harmonizing people” – indeed, crime, conflict, and war all still exist, just as they did at the peak of the telegraph-connected world. What has been happening in Iran during the two decades since the Internet first arrived is far more interesting than the simple narrative of a young wired generation throwing off the yoke of an oppressive regime. Iran is a key example of a more complicated and protracted struggle between a government and its people online, a constant seesaw situation in which each side can have the upper hand depending on the week, or sometimes, even the day. It’s more than just a tale of societal progress and democratization as brought about by the Internet. It’s deceptively simple to proclaim that Iran’s online voices are “nothing short of a revolution within the [Islamic] Revolution,” as the Iranian-British author, Nasrin Alavi (a pseudonym), wrote in her 2005 book, We Are Iran. Indeed, for every voice yearning for freedom and reformist politics, there are other voices that simply choose not to engage, voices that are silenced by intimidation and threats, and still other voices that are made more cautious by government agents infiltrating or spreading disinformation on social networks. It is important to recognize the political, economic, and social context in which Iran’s unique turmoil online has happened. Iranian politicians did not use Twitter and Facebook by accident. Iconic videos of protestors – and sometimes their tragic deaths – were not disseminated on YouTube randomly. Iran has a unique political situation as an Islamic Republic that attempts to be semi-democratic within the confines of an authoritarian Islamic regime. In Iran’s previous elections, subsequent to the establishment of the Republic in 1980, there were disagreements and even protests. Many younger citizens were frustrated that President Mohammad Khatami’s social reforms of the early 2000s did not go far enough to allow for more newspapers and other forms of political freedom. These “reformists” were not calling for an out-and-out overthrow of the Islamic Republic, merely substantial reforms within the larger structure. However, in 2009, large numbers of men, women and children gathered together in the streets of Iran’s biggest cities to fiercely oppose what they believed to be outright fraud in an election that the government proclaimed as authentically democratic. In other words, the government couldn’t even win an election that was rigged to begin with. After all, it had disqualified many candidates who did not meet the adequate “religious” qualifications. From an economic standpoint, Iran has been in shambles. Since Ahmadinejad took office, unemployment has been estimated as high as 20 percent. Further, 80 percent of Iran’s state revenue is taken from oil and gas sales, and as oil and gas prices have dropped significantly since 2007, and that revenue has dropped precipitously. Further, President Ahmadinejad has not slackened his economic handouts, low-interest loans and lots of state spending – leading the country further into debt. Worse still, inflation hovers at 25 percent, with no signs of abating. These economic troubles are hitting Iran’s youth especially hard – this is, after all, a country where half of the population is under 25 years old. These “Children of the Revolution” were born after 1979, during a time when Ayatollah Khomeini encouraged Iranian women to have more children while many men were being killed during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. But now, these children are growing up in a country that can educate them – it was more than ten years ago that women began to outnumber men in Iranian universities – and they are finding that their country cannot adequately provide for them. So, whether the Islamic Republic likes it or not, an entirely new, educated and wired generation has grown up in Iran with the Internet and bootleg satellite television, and mobile phones. However, in a country that cannot find adequate work for them, in a country that restricts sports, music, and other social freedoms (particularly between the sexes), it’s no surprise that so many go online as a form of cheap entertainment. It is in this environment of international and domestic political turmoil, economic difficulties, and social restrictions that drive overly-educated and under-stimulated Iranians to the Internet. This confluence of events has created a completely unique online outcome that’s far more interesting and unpredictable. It’s no wonder that Iran was the first country to arrest a blogger (2003), and sadly, the first country to have a blogger die while in prison (2009). Iran has been active in trying to influence domestic online activity for over a decade, and has engaged in the world’s most sophisticated Internet filtration system, second only to China. It’s no wonder that in the aftermath of the June 2009 election the Internet became a key tool to get information in and out of Iran as foreign media were barred from the country and the country’s own media remained highly restricted. In other words, as the Internet has collided with Iran’s political, economic and social realities, it has created a see-sawing struggle far more complicated than anyone could have imagined. FOOTNOTES [1] “Iranian satellite TV channel finds inventive ways to broadcast despite censorship,” June 23, 2009, Fox News. http://www.foxnews.com/search-results/m/23175929/camera-pen.htm [2] Mir Hossein Mousavi, Facebook status update, June 13, 2009. [3] Somayeh Tohidlou, FriendFeed message, June 13, 2009. http://friendfeed.com/smto/d47bd200 [4] Parastoo Dokouhaki, Twitter message, June 20, 2009. http://twitter.com/parastoo/status/2250977960 [5] Babak Mehrabani, Twitter message, June 2009. http://twitter.com/BabakMehrabani/status/2250307699 [6] Daniel Terdiman, “Twitterverse working to confuse Iranian censors,” CNET News.com, June 16, 2009. [7] Web Ecology Project, “The Iranian Election on Twitter: The First Eighteen Days,” June 26 2009. [8] “Iran lifts text message restrictions,” July 1, 2009. United Press International. [9] Mike Musgrove, “Twitter is a Player in Iran’s Drama,” The Washington Post, June 17, 2009. [10] Biz Stone, “Down Time Rescheduled,” June 15, 2009. [11] Siavash Shahshahani, in Skype text conversation with the author, June 22, 2009. [12] Evgeny Morozov, “More on the unintended consequences of DDOS [13] Cyrus Farivar, “Twitter confusion in Iran,” June 25, 2009, The World. http://www.theworld.org/2009/06/25/twitter-confusion-in-iran-300/ [14] Hamid Tehrani, “Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Take on the Internet,” January 8, 2009. http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/idblog/2009/01/08/irans-revolutionary-guards-take-on-the-internet/ [15] Gerdab.ir, July 1, 2009. http://74.125.53.132/translate_c?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=fa&tl=en&u=http://gerdab.ir/fa/pages/%3Fcid%3D422&prev= [16] “Iran’s biggest ever bourse deal,” Tehran Times, September 28, 2009. http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=204100 [17] Nicholas Negroponte, “Being Digital – A Book Preview,” February 1, 1995. http://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/Wired/WIRED3-02.html [18] Captain George O. Squier, “The Influence of Submarine cables upon Military and Naval Supremacy,” National Geographic Magazine 12, no. 1, (January 1901), 2 [19] Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet, (Walker & Company, 1998), 104 [20] John Markoff, “A Free and Simple Computer Link,” The New York Times, December 8, 1993. http://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/08/business/business-technology-a-free-and-simple-computer-link.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print&pagewanted=print [21] Nasrin Alavi, We Are Iran: The Persian Weblog, (Softskull Press, 2005), 361 [22] Golnaz Esfandiari, “Iran: Unemployment Becoming a ‘National Threat’,” Radio Free Europe, March 12, 2004. http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1051866.html [23] “The populist’s problem,” The Economist, May 5, 2009. http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=13580307 [24] “Iran economy facing ‘perfect storm’, BBC News, October 24, 2008. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7687107.stm [25] “Population,” Statistical Centre of Iran. http://www.sci.org.ir/portal/faces/public/sci_en/sci_en.Glance/sci_en.pop [26] Scott MacLeod, “Our Veils, Ourselves,” Time, July 27, 1998. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/1998/int/980727/middle_east.our_veils_ou11.html |
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