The Web vs. the Republic of Iran

Twitter gives Iranians a voice, but the government still controls the Internet.

Renewed efforts to stifle media reporting in Iran have turned Twitter and other social-networking websites into the main sources of unfettered and unfiltered information out of the country.

Tweet: Mousavi1388's Twitter feed allows the opposition party to share information. Credit: Technology Review

Attempts to censor the press have increased significantly since last Friday's disputed election. Yesterday, press credentials for foreign journalists were revoked, and many were told via phone and fax not to report from the streets. Other journalists have been injured, detained, or arrested by the authorities.

Yet despite the media crackdown, information continues to leak out of Iran via social networking, microblogging, and photo- and video-hosting websites. These resources have been used before to organize during political crises--in Georgia and Russia, Burma and Kenya--but the sheer scale and scope are striking in Iran's case.

Ethan Zuckerman, of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at Harvard University, and cofounder of the blogger advocacy group Global Voices, says that people inside Iran who are blogging, Tweeting, and sharing photos are "doing an amazing job of making this political movement visible to the world." Photo and video sharing, in particular, have brought the situation home to foreign observers and have made it "much more real, and much more real time," Zuckerman says.

Zuckerman attributes the continued information flow in part to "latent capability": savvy Internet users in Iran already know how to circumvent blocking measures, so in a political upheaval they don't have to relearn the process. "The longer a country censors and the more aggressively it censors," says Zuckerman, "the more incentive it gives citizens to learn how to get around that." Because Iran has been filtering since at least 2004, says Zuckerman, a lot of Iranians already know how to use proxies--computers that route traffic around a government-imposed block. So even if you're just using a proxy to surf porn, says Zuckerman, suddenly, a political crisis hits and you already have the means to communicate.

Normally, Iran's government maintains a tight grip on Internet use. Because Iran is economically ostracized, the government doesn't have many business relationships that it can leverage to prompt censorship from the outside--unlike China, for example, which runs a censored version of Google (and its ads) through its state-controlled filters. But communications from Iranian ISPs serving the public, rather than academic institutions or private businesses, are all routed through the state-controlled Telecommunication Company of Iran (TCI), allowing for easy filtering. Blogs and websites dedicated to anti-Islamic and anti-government content are routinely blocked. Facebook was blocked sporadically in the months leading up to Friday's election and during the election itself, as were websites for the major opposition candidates and several pro-reform sites. Facebook and YouTube are still blocked in response to the post-election protests.

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Having reportedly purchased an electronic surveillance system for Internet monitoring in 2008, the Iranian government is well equipped to handle tracking and recording through its centralized system. According to a just-released report from the Open Net Initiative (ONI)--a project involving researchers from Harvard University, the University of Toronto, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Oxford--this has already occurred with women's-rights activists who were arrested and reportedly shown transcripts of their IM sessions.

In the past, the Iranian government has used the U.S. product SmartFilter to block offensive websites, but the ONI reports that it now has a homegrown system for searching the Internet for objectionable content and keywords. This makes Iran and China the only two countries that "aggressively filter" Internet content using their own technology.