Ethan Zuckerman fist noticed a disturbing trend earlier this year when Internet companies such as Bluehost and others began to use sanctions against countries like Zimbabwe, Iran, Syria and Sudan as an excuse to cut off service entirely to users in those countries, even if the users were human rights groups fighting against the governments that are the real target of the sanctions. Not long after he observed the problem in Zimbabwe, Bluehost shut out users in Iran, including leading bloggers like Kamangir. It seems that most firms, large and small, just shut off access to most of their products that require a software download out of fear of running afoul of US sanctions. In their cost-benefit analysis, it is just easier to shut off access and not look at the impact of those decisions on activists in those countries.

However, it seems that Microsoft has continued to allow citizens in Iran, Cuba and other sanctioned countries to use its Hotmail e-mail and Live Spaces blog service, since they are hosted in the cloud. This is possibly another argument in favor of cloud computing, where services are increasingly migrating lately, although it depends on where those services are hosted.

This is a good first step, but there is still much the US can do to ease restrictions on Internet speech and access to software and services provided by US companies in countries where we have the strictest sanction regimes.

The 30th anniversary of the International Day of Quds will be Green this year, according to reformist websites in Iran. Opposition leaders Karroubi, Khatami, and Mousavi have all confirmed their participation in this important ceremony, which is traditionally held in every city of Iran.

Our research on the Arabic blogosphere showed that Palestine was the one issue that united the entire blogosphere, in particular last year’s war in Gaza, as well as Quds day and other pro-Palestine events such as Nakba Day, which marks the 1948 exodus from Palestine. My informal discussions with Arabic bloggers have also indicated strong support in that part of the Middle Eastern blogosphere for Iranian protesters after the election, so Friday has the potential to turn into a day of solidarity with the Iranian protest movement across the region. In an attempt to undercut their plans, the Iranian regime has banned opposition cleric Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who normally speaks at Friday prayers on Quds day, from doing so this year.

State television reported the indictment on Monday of a prominent student leader, Abdullah Momeni, who is accused of “spreading reports via Internet to provoke the unrest.” Reading from the indictment, Tehran’s deputy prosecutor, Ali Ahmad Akbari, said that that Facebook, the Internet and YouTube were “used as effective tools to organize illegal gatherings and to spread false information,” the ISNA student news agency reported.

The Times also reports that opposition leader Mehdi Karoubi struck back at the judicial panel that found no cases of abuse or rape of protesters in Iranian jails with more evidence and testimonials from victims. Hamid Tehrani also recently pointed to a number of sites that are commemorating the dozens of protesters that were killed after the election.

Image Credit: The New Yorker

“He says that the interrogation continues but he has very friendly relation with interrogator and protesters in prison know that there was no significant fraud in Iran’s presidential election.”

Yeah, right.

Clearly, his captors haven’t gotten the memo that the show trials, forced confessions and now blogging at gunpoint just aren’t working like they used to. As Laura Secor writes in this week’s New Yorker:

“Show trials have been staged before, most notably in Moscow in the nineteen-thirties. Typically, such rituals purge élites and scare the populace. They are the prelude to submission. Iran’s show trials, so far, have failed to accrue this fearsome power. In part, this is because the accused are connected to a mass movement: Iranians whose democratic aspirations have evolved organically within the culture of the Islamic Republic. It is one thing to persuade citizens that a narrow band of apparatchiks are enemies of the state. It is quite another to claim that a political agenda with broad support—for popular sovereignty, human rights, due process, freedom of speech—has been covertly planted by foreigners.”

Secor highlights later how the Iranians, and indeed those from around the world, have taken to the Internet to mock the entire show trial process and the ridiculous confessions that their interrogators have made up for them, kicked off by satarist Ebrahim Nabavi’s stripped pajama confession that he has met with the CIA, imported green velvet and cavorted with the likes of Angelina Jolie. As Secor concludes, “…the spectacle that was meant to produce compliance and terror instead has stoked fury and derision.”

“I think Morozov’s basic insight is right — there were gems of information popping up on Twitter throughout the #iranelection explosion, though it was quickly swamped out by noise, spam, and disinformation. However, this is only true if people take a naive view of Twitter as “just” the data stream. Simple methods like filtering the list of users with the highest number of RT’s or @’s give a much higher signal-to-noise in using Twitter as an information source. So while this time around and for most users Twitter may have been a fuzzy news source at best, this is a problem of platform design and available tools, rather than something inherent to the structure of Twitter or its users.”

While Twitter offers search, Facebook offers Lexicon to track wall-post trends, and Google offers Insights for Search, the value such services provide will increasingly become reliant on the ability to sift through, and determine what is truly important. Understanding trends may require deeper probing than is currently available through public interfaces, but such probing will likely invoke privacy concerns, impeding the facility of such analysis.  This science of “Web Ecology” will become increasingly relevant. The Internet ecosystem is only growing in its complexity. Platforms that empower citizen journalists can also enable opportunistic marketers. Faster content syndication can help broaden access to information, but it also facilitates spam.  Relevance is being conflated with noise, and dissection is intensive. As Google economist Hal Varian stated last week:

“…The sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians.  And I’m not kidding.”

And as Morozov concludes, the Twitter is in the eye of the beholder, and in the understanding of Web Ecology:

“Figuring out how to sift through all the noise and actually get hold of signal can be a challenging task… But ultimately it pays off. A carefully maintained Twitter feed can deliver you information that is far more diverse and interesting than it was in the pre-Twitter day.”

Hamid Tehrani at Global Voices shows us powerful images of leading reformist and blogger Mohammad Ali Abtahi before his arrest (left photo) and how he looks at last weekend’s trial (right photo), proof for many that he has been forced to confess. Hamid translates Iranian blogger Alfba’s reaction to the radical change in Abtahi’s appearance:

Dear Abtahi, we know you were under pressure and you family suffered a lot. You should know what you confess, we still love you. We support you.

Juan Cole provides further analysis of the trials and reaction, writing:

The trial of 100 leading protesters against the announced outcome of the June 12 presidential elections commenced on Saturday, complete with pitiful coerced recantations. Amazingly, former president Mohammad Khatami’s web site openly denounced the trial as just that, a show trial. Khatami’s problem was always that he was insufficiently willing to stand up to the hard liners, and that he is being so blunt and confrontational suggests to me that he has reached the end of his patience. He is likely furious about the regime torturing his own associates, such as his former vice president Mohammad Ali Abtahi, into a confession.

But the Twitterverse may have summed it up best (my paraphrase of translation):

These trials are about as believable as Ahmadinejad’s 24 million votes.

This seems to me an important moment for citizen journalism, for we’d surely be even more clueless about what was happening in Iran if it wasn’t for YouTube, Twitter and the Internet more generally. Yesterday, I watched LA Times reporter Borzou Daragahi (who’s reporting on Iran from Beirut) say on the Newshour:

Well, we’re not exactly sure what happened here. But from one thing that we understand, not only in terms of eyewitness accounts, but YouTube video that I’ve seen, although there were some reports of clashes between the security forces and the mourners at Behesht-e Zahra, Tehran’s greatest and largest cemetery, there were also reports that they were getting along quite amicably, the mourners and the police, at some point. (my italics).

And the Lede, which had probably the best coverage throughout the day, relied heavily on video accounts shared from trusted sources. Seeing it seems, is key to believing.

It may still be that the Internet is more important in getting the news out about what is happening in Iran than organizing protesters inside the country, but I can’t help but wonder if by recording and sharing with others video proof of peaceful protests, despite the government threats and virtual silence on government controlled media, that this medium hasn’t helped galvanize the opposition to turn out again next week, and the week after that…and the week after that. While Susan Sontag wrote critically about the desensitizing effect of images of death and suffering in the Balkan wars, it seems that in Neda’s case, the opposite happened. Hers was an unnecessary and gruesome death that is not easy to watch, but perhaps because it was not scrubbed clean of its brutality for network news, but instead seen more often than not in all its powerful reality on YouTube, that Iranians were mobilized again to turn out against the government that killed her.

At first mourners were confronted by the security forces, who struck them with truncheons and arrested some in an attempt to bar them from gathering at Tehran’s Behesht Zahra cemetery, the country’s largest. The tree-lined streets leading to the graves of Agha-Soltan and others were blocked by riot police, the witness said.

The witness said the mourners also identified and violently confronted several plainclothes Basiji militiamen.

“Police, police, support us,” the mourners chanted. “God is great!”

But as the numbers mourners poured out of the nearby subway station and taxis along the highway, security forces retreated. One witness said police released detainees and began cooperating with the mourners, directing them to section 257 of the cemetery, where Agha-Soltan and others were buried. Mourners have been denied a permit to hold a ceremony in the city’s Grand Mossala mosque later today, but protesters have said they will try to come together near the site of the mosque anyway, and march along nearby streets if they are prevented from entering the site.

This recently tweeted video of mourners chanting, “Oh, Hossein! Mir-Hossein,” has been posted on YouTube.

Obviously a developing story and lots of conflicting information out there; hopefully events will become more clear throughout the morning.

Update: Andrew Sullivan is tracking events and reliable Twitterers, and the NY Times Lede blog is also routinely updating Times coverage.

Some prisoners say they watched fellow detainees being beaten to
death by guards in overcrowded, stinking holding pens. Others say they had their fingernails ripped off or were forced to lick filthy toilet bowls.

The accounts of prison abuse in Iran’s postelection crackdown — relayed by relatives and on opposition Web sites — have set off growing outrage among Iranians, including some prominent conservatives. More bruised corpses have been returned to families in recent days, and some hospital officials have told human rights workers that they have seen evidence that well over 100 protesters have died since the vote.

Rooz online and gooya.com have served as platforms where relatives have come forward to describe the return of bruised bodies by the government and testimonials by those held at the Kahrizak prison, which Global Voices reported yesterday was shut down by the government. The government also released 140 prisoners as another conciliatory gesture, but the revelations have the potential to foment further outrage in the opposition movement, as well as within conservative circles since the son of a key adviser to conservative presidential candidate Mohsen Rezai was beaten to death in prison.

The Times relayed a number of postings from previously detained protesters that were posted online:

“We were all standing so close to each other that no one could move,” he wrote in a narrative posted online. “The plainclothes guards came into the room and broke all the light bulbs, and in the pitch dark started beating us, whoever they could.” By morning, at least four detainees were dead, he added.

In another account posted online, a former detainee describes being made to lie facedown on the floor of a police station bathroom, where an officer would step on his neck and force him to lick the toilet bowl as the officer cursed reformist politicians.

A woman described having her hair pulled as interrogators demanded that she confess to having sex with political figures. When she was finally released, she was forced — like many others — to sign a paper saying she had never been mistreated.

While the government has rejected the application of the opposition to publicly mourn the death of Neda that I wrote about yesterday, Mousavi apparently wants to go forward with it anyway, saying in response to the torture and death of protesters in detention:

They cannot turn this nation into a prison of 70 million people….The more people they arrest, the more widespread the movement will become.

Mr. Moussavi and other opposition leaders have asked permission to hold a public mourning ceremony for the dead on Thursday. That day has great symbolic importance, because it is 40 days after the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman whose death ignited widespread outrage in Iran and beyond.

Commemorating the 40th day after a person’s death is an important mourning ritual in Shiite Islam; similar anniversaries for dead protesters were essential in the demonstrations that led to the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

It would be surprised if both sides are not also priming for next week, when Ahmadinejad is expected to be formally inaugurated.