Internet & Democracy Blog

It has now been nearly seven weeks since the disputed election in Iran, and it seems clear that the opposition has settled in for a long, slow fight. This must be of serious concern for Ahmadinejad and his supporters. The opposition movement has found a major anniversary or milestone to commemorate roughly once a week since large scale protests were forcefully put down by the government. A little over a week ago it was Rafsanjani leading Friday prayers, before that the 10 year anniversary of student protests over the closing of reformist newspapers, and this week, the 40 day anniversary of the death of Neda Agah-Soltan, whose death was captured on video and shared around the world via YouTube. As the New York Times reports:

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.

Ben Smith at Politico has followed up on last week’s news that Obama’s Nowruz message to the Iranian people is one of the White House’s most popular YouTube videos. (Unfortunately for George Bush, we can’t count the clip of him serving as the target for a reporter’s loafers, which we found to be the second most popular video in the Arabic blogosphere, as an official White House video.) Smith quotes our own John Kelly who confirms the popularity of the online overture to the Iranian people:

Within a week, Obama’s Nowruz message (if you total several different versions of it – the official White House one was just one, others were posted to YouTube from different sources, with different subtitles,
etc.) was cited (linked to) by more Iranian bloggers than any other video from the entire year prior – which is a remarkably fast rise.

The timing of the video around Nowruz was also wise since any message directly before – and most certainly after – the election would have been cited by Iranian conservatives as meddling in Iranian politics. As Smith writes in his original post about the video’s popularity:

That’s a remarkable success for public diplomacy, and an end-run around state-controlled media.

You can learn more about the White House video stats here, as well as on TechPresident.

Al Jazeera is reporting that disputed President Ahmadinejad is moving to enforce a new Internet law that would force ISPs in the country to retain information created by their users for up to three months. According to government-backed Press TV, the law requiring capture of user content will make users “more safe.” However, given the role of the Internet in sharing information about formal and informal protests of the unresolved election results, it is hard to see how this law is anything but another way for the government to limit speech within the country. Our own Rob Faris is quoted on this count:

Rob Faris, a research director at the Harvard University’s Berkman Centre, told Al Jazeera that the new law could serve as an additional tool for the authorities to keep an eye on cyberspace.

‘For blogs that include restricted content, this legislation could give authorities one more way to go after them, though this doesn’t seem needed. The government has not been constrained in the past by a lack of legal instruments.’

Not everyone in the country appears overly concerned, since Iranian users have grown adept at getting around existing censorship and filtering efforts by the government. As Iranian blogger Potkin Azarmehr told Al Jazeera:

Given how internet savvy the young Iranians are and the help they are getting from Iranian expats, whatever law Ahmadinejad passes, there will be a way round it.

Hamid Tehrani has an excellent post on the emergence of underground, online newspapers that have sprung up since the disputed Iranian election. He argues that these newspaper allow Iranians to communicate in the face of increased repression. Hamid writes:

Dozens of journalists and bloggers have been imprisoned, pro-reformist websites have been filtered and a few not-yet-banned reformist journals such as Etemad Meli are under intensified surveillance. Under such difficult circumstances for the media, we are witnessing a new phenomenon inside Iran: the emergence of “underground” Internet newspapers.

At the end of June, at least two such newspapers were launched: Khyaboon (”Street”) and Kalam Sabz (”Green Word”) where the word “green” is a reference to Mir Hussein Mousavi’s campaign colors. So far, Khyaboon has published 13 issues and Kalam Sabz has published 10. Khyaboon is available only by email and the paper has no website or blog. Kalam Sabz also uses email, but has a website. Both journals are distributed in PDF file format.

Both Khyaboon and Kalam Sabz are firmly against Ahmadinejad and Khamenei’s decision to accept the election results, as well as suppression of the protest movement. This is demonstrated in recent headlines from the two papers:

“What is going on in the silence of Evin prison;”
“Stop forcing confessions;”
“Khatami: It was a velvet Coup against people.”

Hamid’s analysis of political trends in the two papers shows that Kalam Sabz “largely reflects the opinions and statements of reformist leaders and parties” while Khayaboon is more of a “radical-left journal, which criticizes even Mousavi for his inaction.”

Check out the full story on Global Voices; it’s well worth the read.

Photo: Daily Dish

The LA Times and other media outlets are reporting that a resilient group of Iranians has defied the government by publicly protesting the nearly month old election results. The opposition chose today to commemorate the 10th anniversary of student-led protests against the closing of reformists newspapers by conservatives during the Khatami presidency. Andrew Sullivan and others are back to relying on Twitter for updates. According to the LA Times, over a thousand protesters turned out in Tehran, and they have been met with violence by the Basij and regular security forces. In an attempt to thwart protest organizers, the government has cut off cell phone access for the last few days, although they apparently released 2,000 who had been arrested after earlier protests. On Tuesday, Ahmadinejad called the election, the “freest ever,” which alone was probably enough to push the opposition back into the streets.

Not (or not only) through sharing information on censorship tactics. Instead, as a mapping of the .ir domain by the firm Lumeta found, “one router in the .ir domain that passes the most traffic is physically located in Russia. Iran is apparently outsourcing a significant portion of its routed infrastructure.” This implies that Russia could also cut off that information, through that ‘choke point,’ if it wanted. According to Information Week, Lumeta also found that only about 10% of US-based traffic into Iran is blocked.

Lumeta also has a map of the Internet in the Middle East.

Which you can compare to our map and study of the Arabic blogosphere.

Hat Tip: Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH)

By John Kelly and Bruce Etling

While Twitter is getting a lot of attention in the current Iranian crisis, it’s good to know that the robust Iranian blogosphere also remains active in the face of the government’s interference with the Internet. The figure below shows new blog posts on blogfa.com, the dominant Iranian blogging platform, over the past three weeks. While some Blogfa users are outside Iran, the vast majority are inside. We can see significant, through sporadic, disruption of Iranian blogging for a period of about two and a half days beginning a day after the disputed election. After that, posting returns to roughly pre-election levels.

What are bloggers talking about? A scan of text reveals high levels of discussion about politics. Many bloggers continue to link to websites supporting Mousavi (such as mirhussein.com), whereas linking to the main site supporting Ahmadinejad  emtedadmehr.com) has nearly stopped, including among conservative political bloggers.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Berkman-affiliated Web Ecology project, lead by the Internet & Democracy’s own Tim Hwang, has done some amazing and very timely research on Twitter in Iran. This adds some more quantitative data to our Op-Ed in the Post last week. The key findings:

* From 7 June 2009 until the time of publication (26 June 2009), we have recorded 2,024,166 tweets about the election in Iran.
* Approximately 480,000 users have contributed to this conversation alone.
* 59.3% of users tweet just once, and these users contribute 14.1% of the total number.
* The top 10% of users in our study account for 65.5% of total tweets.
* 1 in 4 tweets about Iran is a retweet of another user’s content.

You can download the full PDF report here.

From Kamangir, who tell us this has been posted on a number of major Iranian blogs:

Statement by a group of Iranian bloggers about the Presidential elections and the subsequent events

1) We, a group of Iranian bloggers, strongly condemn the violent and repressive confrontation of Iranian government against Iranian people’s legitimate and peaceful demonstrations and ask government officials to comply with Article 27 of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Constitution which emphasizes “Public gatherings and marches may be freely held, provided arms are not carried and that they are not detrimental to the fundamental principles of Islam.”

2) We consider the violations in the presidential elections, and their sad consequences a big blow to the democratic principles of the Islamic Republic regime, and observing the mounting evidence of fraud presented by the candidates and others, we believe that election fraud is obvious and we ask for a new election.

3) Actions such as deporting foreign reporters, arresting local journalists, censorship of the news and misrepresenting the facts, cutting off the SMS network and filtering of the internet cannot silence the voices of Iranian people as no darkness and suffocation can go on forever. We invite the Iranian government to honest and friendly interaction with its people and we hope to witness the narrowing of the huge gap between people and the government.

A part of the large community of Iranian bloggers

July 26, 2009

Cross-posted on the ONI Blog

The Internet and mobile phones have taken on a major role in Iranian politics over the last several months. As protests over the contested election results continue in Iran, the government has dramatically increased its control over digital technologies. Many important Web sites have been blocked over the past couple of days, including the Web sites of the opposition parties in Iran, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. While political organizers have learned to leverage the organizing power of Web 2.0 tools, government censors in Iran are quick to shut them down when they are most effective. None of this is surprising; it reflects similar events seen in many places around the world.

Digital tools have been shown to be effective political organizing tools, from the Obama presidential campaign in the US to Ukraine, Colombia and Moldova. As powerful as new technologies may be as political tools, information and communication technologies have also been proven to be exceedingly fragile; in countries where the government has sufficient latitude to interfere with the use of these tools, they are easily disrupted and if necessary, can be shut down entirely.

The role of information and communication technologies in Iranian politics has matured rapidly over the past year. Political opposition groups in particular have adopted new online and mobile phone-based organizing tactics, using Facebook, Twitter, Web sites, email, cell phones and SMS and the full suite of Web 2.0 tools as mechanisms for political organizing. This is has all taken place in a highly restrictive media environment in which the Internet and other forms of digital communication are intensely regulated. Facebook has been blocked and unblocked several times in the past year. The rationale and legal justifications for censoring Internet communications are broad. Anything construed as anti-Islamic or damaging to the Iranian state can be blocked by what amounts to executive fiat, although there are many voices within the institutions charged with blocking web sites in Iran.

Earlier reports that the government shut down the Internet entirely during the June 12 elections appear to be exaggerated. Jim Cowie at Renesys looked at the evidence from international routing data and indeed found evidence of some strange events in Iran’s traffic to the outside.

However, the Internet is still up in Iran, though reports from inside Iran suggest that it is much slower than normal and a broader range of websites are being blocked. The fact that Iran has invested so much in blocking Internet content might mean that they have greater confidence about keeping tight controls over content available in Iran without shutting down the Internet entirely, as Burma had done in the face of popular protests there.

After a large surge in SMS traffic in the run-up to the election, multiple sources inside Iran reported that the country’s SMS networks went down just nine hours before the polls opened. This is unsurprising, as SMS has been used in many places as a powerful tool for organizing protests. Reporters Without Borders reports that the SMS take-down was part of attempt to prevent opposition supporters from collecting election results.

By Saturday, all mobile phone services had been shut off in Tehran. Plans by an organization led by former president Rafsanjani to carry out election monitoring using cell phones might have factored into this decision. Cell phone service was restored on June 14, but SMS continues to be blocked.

Western media sources have covered the news as it unfolds, although some US media outlets have been criticized for not focusing more attention on the events in Iran. The government has not thrown western journalists out of the country, though it has made reporting difficult. The BBC has traced the jamming of one of its satellites, which has interrupted access to radio and television for audiences in Iran, the Middle East and Europe, to a location inside Iran.

Despite the tightening restrictions on communications tools, citizen journalists inside Iran have been hard at work. Video clips are widely available on the net, as are photos of Iranian voters and post-election protests. Although YouTube and DailyMotion are both blocked, we were able to upload a small video to Vimeo. The generally slow Internet speeds will hinder the upload of large files.

ONI has confirmed the expansion of blocking over the past several days, making access to ongoing reporting of events as well as political organizing far more difficult for Iranians. In the past several days, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook have been blocked. The English version of BBC is now blocked; the Persian version has been blocked for months. Websites of the major opposition candidates are all blocked, including Mousavi’s website  mirhussein.com) and Karoubi’s website  teribon.com). The blog host, blogfa.com, has been down for several days now, preventing many Iranian bloggers from updating their blogs.

We tested the thirty web sites that receive disproportionate attention from the reformist segments of the Iran blogosphere and about half of these are not blocked, including norooznews.ir, webneveshteha.com, emruz.biz, emruz.info, yaarinews.com, mowj.ir, maryamshab.blogfa.com, mirhussein.com, masoudbehnoud.com, drmoeen.ir and noandish.com. Among those not blocked include ghalamnews.ir, aftabnews.ir and khatami.ir. (Thanks to John Kelly for the list of sites that we tested. This is derived from the blogosphere mapping work of John Kelly and Bruce Etling).

In response, some pro-democracy activists are targeting government Web sites with DDOS attacks in an attempt to strike back at the current regime. While they have had some success – leader.ir, ahmadinejad.ir, and iribnews.ir were reported to be down – experts worry that the attacks may be used by the Iranian government to justify their own filtering or, worse, may cripple the Iranian network as a whole. (Note: Leader.ir was back up when we tested. Ahmadinejad.ir and iribnews.ir were still down.)

Many years of Internet filtering have prompted the development of circumvention tools by and for Iranians. Many Internet users in Iran have become adept at getting past the Internet censors there. An unintended consequence is that there are many sophisticated users and tools that are prepared to circumvent government attempts to limit access to online sites. This increase in filtering associated with the elections can be expected to increase the demand for access to and knowledge about circumvention technology.

These measures to further limit access to information around the contested election results are not going to help the current the Iranian government if it seeks to build legitimacy.