Without a Traceroute

NOTE: If you came here from a search engine or elsewhere looking for things to do to help in Iran, and don’t care about my opinions (I don’t blame you), skip to here.

In the wake of last Friday’s presidential election, Iran (or Tehran, at least) has erupted in massive demonstrations over the very questionable results. Much has been made of the use of the microblogging site, Twitter, as an organizing tool by the protesters. The mainstream media have gone on at great, irrelevant length about how wonderful this is. What’s a bit distressing is that bloggers, tweeters and other Web 2.0 types seem to be buying into their own hype as well.

Contrary to the news media’s wide-eyed astonishment, and the blogosphere and twittercube twitterscape twitterverse’s(can I trademark that?) seemingly non-stop self-adulation, it’s really not that surprising to find Twitter being used as a tool by those inside Iran. New communication technologies have often featured prominently in times of upheaval. Mobile phones and text messaging were important factors in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004. In 1991, during the coup that attempted to forestall the dissolution of the Soviet Union, fax machines, along with internet technology like Usenet and IRC played a key role in organizing and informing the public (if you’re curious, there are really fascinating historical Usenet archives, and IRC transcripts available). Similar technologies were employed by student protesters during the 1989 Tienanmen Square uprising in China (the history of which, ironically, is scrubbed from today’s internet in China). Of course, Vietnam was famously, the “first television war.” And, going back a bit further, Martin Luther probably wouldn’t have accomplished much had it not been for the invention of the printing press.

New technologies are usually more accessible to small players, and especially useful in reaching younger, more affluent, and more connected audiences. Crucially, new communications technologies are also frequently poorly understood or overlooked by the relevant authorities. This was certainly the case in the late 80s/early 90s, when hardly anyone had even heard of the Internet. It appears also to have been the case in Iran, where reports are that government censors quickly blocked social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace, but missed the boat on Twitter initially.

The problem with the mainstream media and online coverage is that it lacks this historical context. They really, desperately, want this to be a “Twitter Revolution” rather than just a “Revolution that happened to use Twitter”. The story isn’t as exciting unless the use of Twitter is somehow unprecedented and groundbreaking, a watershed event for democracy, humanity, etc. Unfortunately for them, this isn’t even the first time they’ve decided it would be really super cool if somehow Twitter were the driving force behind a popular uprising. In April last year, when protests broke out in Moldova, the media had tons of fun saying all the exact same things they’re saying now. The problem being that it wasn’t exactly, you know, that thing…uh, true. There were only like 70 Twitter users in the whole country, and the main role Twitter played in the demonstrations was attracting the attention of a Western media with a hard-on for Twitter (but who generally couldn’t care less about Moldova).

To add to this, there’s an entire class of blogger-pundit who’s busy patting themselves and their favorite medium on the back, as though they had anything to do with what’s going in Iran. Andrew Sullivan has been one of the earliest and loudest offenders on this front. He throws out choice quotes like, “That’s why they didn’t see what those of us surgically attached to modems could spot a mile away: something was happening in Iran.” That’s right, Andrew, only you and your brave fellow bloggers and twitterites could ever have predicted that a rigged election might lead to controversy.

He goes on to be even more comically wrong:

That a new information technology could be improvised for this purpose so swiftly is a sign of the times. It reveals in Iran what the Obama campaign revealed in the United States. You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before.

No, no it doesn’t reveal that at all. With the exception that both cases could broadly be considered “political organizing”, those two situations could hardly have less to do with one another. I volunteered quite a bit of time to the Obama campaign. At no point was I was tear-gassed or beaten by riot police at a rally; to my knowledge, no Obama campaign offices were set ablaze by agents of the state; the federal government never tried to block barackobama.com. Furthermore, there was no need to “bypass…etablished media” because—let’s be honest here—with the exception of Fox News, the mainstream media was pretty enthralled with Obama and his campaign.

There is an enormous difference between political organizing, even for a minority or opposition party, in a free and democratic state with (reasonably) strong protections for political speech, and organizing a political insurgency in a repressive, theocratic oligarchy.

One thing most (ok, all–wait, I found one who gets it! Kinda.) of these blogger types seem to misunderstand is that organizing is not the same as publicizing. I can see why they miss this distinction. In a free and open society, it’s often possible to do both at the same time. Social networking platforms usually involve a hybrid of these two activities. If I create a party event on facebook, that produces a listing of the event so people can see that it’s happening (publicizing), but it also gives me a method to invite people, manage RSVPs and ask people to bring snacks (organizing).

There’s no need for me to try to separate those functions, because there’s no harm in having the organizing process open to observation before the event. With the exception of parents and school administrators, nobody’s scanning Facebook to try to stop parties from happening.

This is emphatically not the case in an authoritarian state like Iran. Holding a protest rally is more like throwing a surprise party: you want to organize privately and secretly, and then publicize the event only once it’s happening, or after the fact. In the case of Iran, the very things that make Twitter a good publicity tool make it a bad organizing tool. This is true for almost all social media platforms. Their effectiveness at generating publicity and broadcasting information to a wide audience drastically limits their utility for closed-door organizing.

For evidence of this, we need look no further than the actual Tweets coming out of Iran (as aggregated here by Mr. Sullivan and here at the Huffington Post)

Twitter is a service that’s free and open to any member of the public. Anyone can join, and unless you’re a celebrity, there’s no identity verification process. Hence, you see tweets like these:
“DO NOT RT anything U read from “NEW” tweeters, gvmt spreading misinfo”
“Security forces opening twitter accounts 2 pose as protestors n spread disinformation”

At the same time, Twitter is not at all anonymous. Most accounts are linked to a personal cell phone to allow for mobile updates. Protip: If the contact information on a given network is easily traceable to an actual person, then you are using the wrong freaking network to organize your insurgency. Sample tweets:
“STOP POSTING TWITTER NAMES ON TV! You are going to get them KILLED. Use your senses!!!!”
“@CNN You are risking lives for ratings! Stop posting Twitter names!”

Twitter posts are visible to anyone who cares to see them. Another tweet with good advice, “Do NOT publicise proxy IP’s over twitter, the moment you post iranian government will se it and block it. instead DM.”

For organizing against a hostile government, there are many other, much better technologies available. PGP-encrypted email is a basic, but very secure first step. Tor is an anonymous, onion-routing proxy service that effectively hides the original source of a piece of data. There’s a nice guide to anonymous blogging techniques here. IRC and other instant messenger protocols can also be encrypted for better privacy.

The problem with all of these more advanced technologies is that they require a greater degree of effort and technical acumen to set up and use properly. As any marketer will tell you, you have to reach people where they are, and from this perspective it makes perfect sense why the Iranian demonstrators are organizing on Twitter. Most of these secure options are now streamlined to the point where an average person can use them, but there’s aways going to be some kind of tradeoff between security and ease-of-use. If worked for a student activist group in Iran right now, I’d certainly invest some time in training, at least for individuals in core leadership positions.

So, suppose after reading all this, you’d like to do something tangible to help support the Iranian demonstrators. There’s a lot of suggestions out there, and most of them strike me as kind of pointless. Changing the background of your website to be green, or wearing a green tie, is not going to make a bit of difference. Tons of people on Twitter are telling each other to change their home city to “Tehran” and their timezone to GMT+3:30 in order to “confuse the censors” about who is actually in Iran. I’m pretty skeptical of this effectiveness of this tactic, too. Iran implements monitoring, filtering and blocking at the ISP-level for the whole country. Plus, if they want to find who the real Iranians are, all they need to do is have taken a snapshot from before the last couple days.

If you have a desktop computer and a decently fast (cable or DSL) internet connection, one thing you can do that actually WILL be beneficial is to set up your computer to act as proxy server, which will help Iranians to bypass government censorship. There are decent instructions available for Windows, Linux, or Macintosh operating systems. Another option on Windows is Peacefire’s Circumventor software.

Of course, once you’ve set up your proxy, the people in Iran need some way to know about it. Austin Heap has been doing yeoman’s work, collecting and passing on new proxy server information. If you set up a server, you can drop him an email at me[at]austinheap.com with your IP address.