State Dept. to Twitter: Keep site up in Iran

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/16/state-asks-twitter-to-keep-site-up-in-iran/?feat=home_headlines

by robg • 17 years ago

61 41 17 years ago

washingtontimes.com

brown9-22• 17 years ago

Another link to same story: http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssTechMediaTelecomNews/idUS...

siavosh2• 17 years ago

bravo to the State Dept. and twitter but I wish they made the request more discretely.

geuis• 17 years ago

Why must this be secret? This is a nice sign of transparency between the government and tech companies. Its much better read "State department working with Twitter" than "NSA installing secret monitoring equipment in AT&T building".

siavosh2• 17 years ago

well my concern is that it could be used as propaganda inside Iran trying to link the protests to foreign powers. but for domestic transparancy, to your point, is great.

mmelin• 17 years ago

Washington Times just broke through Safari 4's popup blocker and showed me a _really_ obnoxious ad for an Economist subscription. We're talking 600x400 pixels of #FF0000, flashing.

Dilpil• 17 years ago

Hmm, I don't see anything in Mozilla.

Zev• 17 years ago

I don't see this ad in Safari 4 on Mac.

biohacker42• 17 years ago

It has been very interesting to watch the information flow in Iran.

Full disclosure: I was born and raised behind the iron curtain so I've thought a lot about autocratic regimes and network theory.

It's very difficult if not impossible to stop a human wave revolution. Even if the police have guns and the protesters don't, it is usually impossible to stop, regimes just topple.

Violent regime change by small groups of people also happens, but I want to concentrate on the classic thrown off by the populace scenario.

To keep a population down, to have a police state and stay in power you need some percentage X of that population to function as police.

To do it by brute force requires such a large X that it's hard to function as a state, see North Korea.

But you can get away with a much smaller X if you can disrupt the formation of a human wave. And the best way to do that is fear, intimidation and preventing the flow of information.

That's why police states spy on their people and control the media. Parades are for propaganda, except they can also turn to bad, see Romania and Ceauşescu.

The spying is not about getting everyone who's dissatisfied with the regime. It's about getting at least some of the super links, and intimidating the rest.

Controlling the media is about preventing synchronization, you want to prevent EVERYONE going out on the street at the same time.

So no braking news, or reports of demonstrations. If there are large demonstrations anywhere, you definitely don't put that on TV, much less live TV. Even industrial accidents are suppressed and then slowly leaked over time, days.

You just don't want to give anyone a reason to panic. Controlling a populace like that is very much like crowd control, it's even somewhat similar to how you control an animal that could kill you if it got spooked, like a horse.

That control occasionally slips. Soccer is huge in the rest of the world and soccer matches are live even in autocratic regimes. And usually that's not a problem.

Except when a soccer riot at live soccer match starts a revolution.

Interestingly, I recall hearing that North Korea would not show the South Korean team's games in the soccer world cup live.

And what Iran is doing is very smart. Evil but smart. Shutting down Facebook and youtube is smart. Why they left Twitter open is anyone's guess.

Breaking up the crowds while they are still small, announcing fake rallies is poisoning the information well.

Given how important information is to regime change, I am stunned the CIA has not done more to make Facebook unblockable, or at least difficult to block. Or airdropped encrypted satellite cell phones on the crowds.

I am surprised and depressed there aren't free information distribution tools being made and given away by the NSA, CIA, etc to everybody living in autocratic regimes.

It saddens me to think this is because they fear those tools could be used against friendly dictators.

Watching the brutality of the police in Iran, how they beat people, students, women, anyone, I keep thinking to myself:

Iran needs soccer hooligans. Iran needs semi-pro, British, well organized, taking-hooliganism-as-a-serious-hobby, with many years experience hooligans. And lots of them. Why are we not parachuting them into Tehran?

You can also watch the crowds react, flow around blockades or confront them when numbers are on their side.

And the police go from bullies to running away as fast as the balance of numbers changes.

Watching has been painful, but Iran is after all the nation that used the human wave attack in the Iran-Iraq war, so I can't help but expect that to happen to the current regime soon.

bilbo0s5• 17 years ago

I take it from your comment and all of its upvotes that you and a good number of the people who read HN think that we should help the protesters.

I'll have to respectfully disagree. As a general rule I find distasteful, the idea of handing control of a nation that is a stone's throw away from having nuclear arms over to guys whose idea of protest is to stand on rooftops screaming Allahu-Akbar while burning buses.

I'm just saying.

Judging by the silence out of Washington and London I would bet there are a lot of people seeing the same thing. Even more are sitting around tables talking about the outcome of the last student led pro democracy revolution in Iran. Some are even remembering our history helping promising, bright young pro democracy students in the middle east. You know . . . like Osama Bin Laden.

I think that message has been communicated to the Iranian opposition though, given the peaceful nature of the marches today. Especially when contrasted with the behavior of the opposition marchers on previous days. Still, some of us have some legitimate concerns. And, judging by the upvotes, some of us have short memories.

sho3• 17 years ago

Well, I guess that depends on whether you think a people's right to self-govern depends on you liking them or not.

sketerpot• 17 years ago

> And what Iran is doing is very smart. Evil but smart. Shutting down Facebook and youtube is smart. Why they left Twitter open is anyone's guess.

They didn't leave Twitter open. Iranians are using proxy servers, and switching between them rapidly as proxies get blocked.

blhack• 17 years ago

I really like your idea of the "rogue communication kit". Quite frankly it wouldn't surprise me if we WERE distributing this sort of thing, just very discretely.

If we're not doing anything here, I will be very disappointed. What I would like to see is the United States leading the world in proclaiming that we're not going to tolerate this sort of crap. I do not mean dropping bombs.

I DO mean doing "little" things like encouraging ISPs to set up proxies for Iranian bloggers to use. (The ones set up by individual hackers seem to get shut down just as quickly as they start getting used).

I just feel like there are non-violent things that we could do to show our support for those that do not what Ahmadinejad in power.

gaius4• 17 years ago

Well, we kinda sorta are. Where does Iran get its mobile handsets and cell towers? Same place as everyone else, Sweden.

One concrete thing the US could do is run up GSM relays on warships already in the Gulf...

gaius4• 17 years ago

British hooligans, best in the world. With a bit of planning they could have been pre-positioned too.

danw• 17 years ago

"Hooligans" seem rare at football matches in Britain these days, thanks to cultural changes, better stadium design and improved policing.

ajuc• 17 years ago

I think hools would just get scared and run away the moment first real bullet would be shoot.

Also - helping "inferior" (in they opinion) races/nations? Not likely.

bint3• 17 years ago

Yeah, it would not surprise me one bit if all this mayhem in Iran is eventually found to have America's fingerprints all over it.

Remember the Orange Revolution and Yushchenko (the acid-on-face guy) in Ukraine not so long ago?

Quote: 'an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing…'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.usa

The situation in Iran, esp. the reaction to the Twittering, strikes me as the exact same thing, especially given the US history in the region covertly bringing down the democratic government of Mossadeq. Israel and therefore America want to destabilise Iran at any cost. They don't want democracy, they want a 'friendly' democracy -- that's the key.

It's been going on covertly and not-so-covertly for a long time:

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2002/09/12/Netanyahu_US_should_a...

rjurney2• 17 years ago

Its not really fair to talk about US meddling in Ukraine during the Orange Revolution without mentioning the overwhelming Russian meddling in Ukraine that it sought to oppose.

bint3• 17 years ago

So because they do it, it's okay for us to do it too? We've moved completely away from the "Trade with all nations and have emnity with none" of the Founders to the Machiavelian games of Brezinski, Kissenger and their friends at the CFR.

Why did the CIA plan and execute a coup against the democratically-elected Hugo Chavez, and attempt to overthow the legitimate democracy in Venezuela? How can it be justified from a non-Machiavelian (i.e. moral) worldview? Can it? The crazy thing is, the US subverts democracy in the name of democracy.

cabalamat• 17 years ago

It's extremely unlikely that Mousavi is a US stooge. He's a regime insider who was Prime Minister between 1981 and 1989, and also held the post of Foreign Minister.

raheemm• 17 years ago

Sort of unrelated but why does Facebook not co-opt Twitter. It does not seem to be all that hard. Problem with Twitter is that there is no way to verify identity. I always have a suspicion that the tweets from guy in Iran is really just some bozo in the state dept or the Iranian revolutionary guard.

jmillikin• 17 years ago

I do not think any authentic protesters would be using Twitter if their identities could be "verified".

brown9-22• 17 years ago

And how do you verify identity on Facebook?

sfphotoarts• 17 years ago

I just looked at the State Dept's website to see exactly what their mission is. They still have a page from 2007 outlining the will of the then President Bush. Maybe they should think about updating their own website sometime...

jmhodges• 17 years ago

Looks like the new url is:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/17/state-asks-t...

The day seems to have changed. (Perhaps their CMS updates the url as a side effect of saving an update that happens on a new day?)

axod• 17 years ago

Debunked: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8104318.stm

State Dept. to Twitter: Keep site up in Iran

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