Iran IV: 'Iranian Protesters Stay One Step Ahead in the Cyber World'

Amnesty International has updated its Iran coverage by issuing a blog rather than a full report, further indicating human rights organizations are unable to ascertain information that meets their credibility standards.

The blog briefly summarizes attempts on behalf of the government to limit information, particularly internet access, and attempts on behalf of the protesters defeat such government measures. Even more interesting, and a major contribution to understanding the current affair, is the inclusion of a graph which measures internet activity within Iran over the course of the crisis (see above). Further, it contains a number of useful links.

The blog is copied and pasted bellow:

In the face of a tightening government grip on all things viral, Iranians have managed to circumvent the communication restrictions laid upon them to tell the world their story in ways previously thought to be reserved only for social networking. For anyone who has so much as glanced at the news during the past week, Twitter has been the name of the game for Iranian protesters.

With a limitation of 140 characters per post, only the most pertinent information is tweeted—rally locations, real-time updates, and details only those on the ground can see. While sites such as Facebook and Twitter have been blocked off before, Iranians have continued to gain access to them via proxies, servers that allow users to access another site through them. Proxy sites are continuously being updated in an effort to stay one step ahead of the Iranian government’s filtering apparatus.

The Iranian government’s strategy for blocking the flow of information appears to be two-fold. Foreign news services have all been asked to leave (just this morning, the BBC reporter Jon Leyne, one of the few reporters left, was given a similar request) and the internet speed has been slowed to a snail’s pace. According to the Wall Street Journal, limiting bandwidth in this manner is meant to discourage and frustrate users so much that they’ll give up.

This strategy is, for now, not working. Iranians have harnessed the internet in ingenious ways—from their Twitter posts to uploaded YouTube videos. All major news networks have caught on to the phenomenon, allowing the messages coming out of Iran to truly reach the entire world.