On the Protests in Iran: Technology rages against the machine

SUNDAY, JUNE 21, 2009 by Tamara Kachelmeier and Biodun Iginla, Tech Analysts for BBC News

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Modern-day autocrats may want to study the Iranian government playbook. Hold a phony election to stay in power. When protests break out, shut down the Internet servers, stop cell phone messaging and kick out the foreign journalists.

• IPhone upgrades could hurt some applications 06.20.09
• A daily dose of postings from The Chronicle's technology blog (sfgate.com... 06.20.09
• IPhone 3G S cements Apple's place at the top 06.20.09

So far, this game isn't working. Images of street protests and beatings by government thugs are making their way out - and then back in - to fuel a combustible political scene that Iranian authorities want to snuff out. These rallies are the world's rallies.

This isn't the first uprising to tap the Internet, but it's the latest to test limits on controls and deploy new ideas to evade the government muzzle. Iran maybe the perfect place to beta-test attempts to fight a censorship lockdown. It has a lively blogger culture in a nation where two-thirds of the 70 million population are under 30 years of age. Some 45 million have cell phones and 23 million have Net access. Talk about ideal demographics.

As anyone with a Twitter or Facebook account knows, there's a lot more technology to play with than a few years ago. In 1989 the Tiananmen Square bloodbath was broadcast around China via fax machine (anyone use one lately?).

Now after a string of uprisings - Ukraine, Georgia, Burma and even tiny Moldova in recent years- the tools have changed from plain-vanilla Internet Web sites to a kit box filled with cell phone cameras, messaging and social network sites, once regarded as playpens for chatting up friends.

Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube are the new soapboxes and organizing centers. One sign of the times: a message from the U.S. State Department to Twitter's San Francisco headquarters to delay a maintenance shutdown to a late-night hour in Tehran so anti-government tweeting wasn't halted.

"These sites didn't create a revolution," said Leslie Harris, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C. "But they provide essential tools for civil rights and democracy."

Once Iran's leaders launched a crackdown on protests, a new game emerged. Twitter, with relatively few users inside Iran, became an international town square. Its avatars - the small, identifying pictures used on its pages - turned green to match the campaign color used by challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Twitter became a way for those outside Iran to learn about the turmoil inside the country and then beam back the information to protesters cut off from the news.

"Twitter is sending a message: 'There's something you can do,' " said Harvard law professor and Internet analyst Jonathan Zittrain.

Likewise, Facebook became a rallying point. The Palo Alto-based operation was safely outside the reach of government gumshoes. YouTube and Flickr are stocked with photos and videos that the mullahs would just as soon you don't see. These new uses showed that censorship and Internet controls had the main effect of producing ingenious ways of evading the crackdown.

All of this sounds comforting: The more the bad guys try to rein in the Internet, the more they fail. But TV and radio remain in government hands. Journalists with one-week visas are forced to leave, leaving reporting and fact-gathering to scatter-shot bloggers and phoned-in interviews. The blurry photos and videos that filter out are of unknown origin. If politics is theater, this is definitely the improv variety.

There's even a darker interpretation. Someone somewhere - Beijing, Moscow, maybe even North Korea - is thinking of ways to exploit the Internet and turn its power back at change-seekers.

Just as secret police pulled off green scarves and began beating demonstrators on Tehran's boulevards, so could the same forces beam out wrong directions or false addresses to round up dissidents.

China has already begun efforts to tighten its heavily controlled Internet. It wants new computers to embed software that would screen pornography, a demand that critics regard as a first step toward straight-out political censorship. U.S. computer makers are protesting the plan.

The Internet's shattering effect on censorship continues to evolve. But it hasn't stopped efforts to contain political freedom.