Iranian activists use Twitter, proxy servers to deliver news from the streets
Posted on | June 16, 2009 | 2 comments
What do cyber intruders, privacy advocates and Iranian protestors have in common?
Proxy servers.
The technology that enables hackers and champions of privacy to cover their online tracks is now being used by Iranian activists to subvert government attempts to cut off their access to Twitter and Facebook.
Consider the sequence of events since last Saturday, when protestors took to the streets of Tehran to protest the disputed re-election President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:
The uber popular social networks quickly emerged as unofficial news outlets, with protesters on the streets feeding reports in real time to tens of thousands of ex-patriot Iranians in the US and other western nations.
Tweeters scoop reporters
One such expat was Al Garman, 52, of Bellevue, Wash., who remained glued to his Blackberry , according to this Seattle Times story by Erik Lacitis. “Many of the tweets are ahead of the news organizations. The stories in the news organization come after the tweets,” Garman told Lacitis. “They are right there. The reporter might be in another part of the city.”
Pres. Ahmadinejad recognized that these digital dispatches did not strengthen his position. He ordered all Internet traffic coming into and out of the country filtered to block access to Twitter and Facebook, along with the satellite jamming of Farsi-language radio newscasts by the British Broadcasting Co. and The Voice of America.
The potential good social networks might contribute during times of social crisis – as redundant communications trunk lines – has been demonstrated at least once before. During the October 2007 California fires, YouTube and Flickr carried impressive — citizen-produced — images of the fires. Meanwhile, NPR radio station KPBS and the Los Angeles Times sent out news updates via Tweets.
Great leap
Yet, in one sudden leap this past weekend, social networks were truly transformed. No longer can they be considered just a trivial pop-culture fad. Twitter and Facebook have suddenly emerged as grass-roots communication media worrisome to autocrats struggling to maintain power.
This milestone was underscored when the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to postpone maintenance scheduled for Monday night because it would cut into daytime service in Iran on Tuesday, just as protests against official election results were expected to heat up. Twitter complied.
That move worked in concert with a contribution from a San Francisco technologist, named Austin Heap, who posted these instructions for how to use proxy servers to bypass the Iranian government’s filters. Presumably some tech-savvy protestors didn’t require Heap’s help; they simply tapped into free proxy tools readily supplied at proxy.org, notes Chris King, director of product marketing at Palo Alto Networks, a network security firm.
“It’s a bit of a cat and mouse game,” says King. “The government will discover and close these proxies. But the sophisticated activists will just move to the next one. They can get through any blocks put up by the government.”
Shulman
In a show of support to the Twittering citizen reporters on the ground in Tehran, activists outside the country began launching denial of service attacks against Iranian government Web sites. “The Iranian elections have inspired a major cyber riot,” says Amichai Shulman, CTO of Imperva. “Most hacktivists are operating from outside the country–launching various types of service disruption and denial-of-service attacks on official sites.”
The tangible impact of the digital activists, inside and outside of Iran, quite obviously is difficult to accurately measure.
“Any way you look at it, Iranian citizens will end up the losers,” observes Shulman. “They will be unable to communicate with the outside world nor access important online commercial and government services.”
That said, it’s not hard to image a scenario whereby hacktivists deploy botnets to deface government Web sites, and co-ordinate those efforts with real time Twitter reporting and agitation from the mean streets.
In the larger scheme, it seems a model has taken shape which, no doubt, we will see used again.
–Byron Acohido
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Great report
Comment by dan — 6/16/2009 @ 6:23 pm
With not only global security, but national and online security at high risk, precautions need to be taken in every aspect of life. If you are looking for a little bit of online security, you can use a paid proxy that will at least cut down on the risk involved in the cyber world.
Comment by paid proxy — 1/30/2010 @ 6:13 pm