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U.S. Funds Anonymizer for Iranians
SiliconEntity writes "British online rag The Register is reporting that the U.S. Government is funding anonymizer.com to provide anonymous browsing services to Iranians. Using U.S. funding, the company created a special version of its anonymizing proxy which has instructions in Farsi and only accepts connections from Iranian IP addresses. The service defaults to the Voice of America web site, but users can input any address and browse free of (Iranian) government censorship."
Why does our government work for the freedom of others, while chipping away at ours daily? Has freedom been reduced to a tool to pry open restrictive regimes to the point where our system can rush in and clamp things down in the "correctly" restrictive ways?
sigh.
-sarcasm-
And now that our tax dollars are being used to allow members of a radical Islamic regime (one that harbors terrorists and has WMDs) to anonymously look at all the bomb plans burried in steganographied images on eBay, aren't we opening ourselves up for more terror?
-/sarcasm-
Makes you wonder if anyone believes that Axis of Evil crap.
I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
IAALS.
If a country decides to abolish copyright, we'll be forced to block all traffic, right? So we'll be the ones needing anti-censorship proxies then.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
I do fine it ironic and irritating, though, that our own country (US) doesn't seem to like for us to do the same...trying to pass laws where anonymity, or falsifying online id in order to hide ones identity...
If its good enough for US to pay for them to do it...should be open and good enough for us to use it in all our communications.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The US is going to institute a national health care program for Iraq, a nationalized educational system for iraq, govt controlled water and power monopolies for Iraq, anonymous surfing for the Iranians.
How come these things are not good enough for US
War is necrophilia.
The spies in the Iranian government can still see who is connecting to the anonymizing service, so they'll be able to treat them as harshly as if they accessed the "worst" possible sites.
Jason
ProfQuotes
It amuses me that, while anonymizers would likely be condemned as a tool of terrorism by the National Security State in the US, the same spooks use anonymizers as a weapon against their counterparts of old Iraq.
On second thought, it depresses me.
Also, when I renewed my EFF membership, the first thing I did was to drop anonymizer.com a note asking if it was anything they could do to undo the damage of the block.
I haven't had a lot good to say about the current US administration, but funding anonymizer for Iranians is a very good move, in fact, I think it is the best thing the US administration has done for Iran and iranians for a very long time.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
We should be delivering privacy and freedom *everywhere* we can. In fact, isn't the whole idea (paraphrasing) "to deliver the Axis of Evil to freedom" or some crap?
The people in the country aren't what put it on the "Axis of Evil", anyway. It's the actions of the government and political leaders. But people are just people. The everyday citizens of any country deserve the same thing no matter what country they live.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
why dont they sponsor anonymous access for their own citizens?? its extremely ironic that they are saying iranians should get "anonymous" access but at the same time there is proposed legislation trying to limit americans' anonymous access and invade the privacy of americans...
will this be used for propaganda? will the US censor their access? and if they did, wouldn't they be hypocrites to say only american citizens should have freedom of speech and freedom of press etc?
Mostly unfettered. Like the Iranian filters, the U.S. service blocks porn sites -- "There's a limit to what taxpayers should pay for," says Berman.
So, the object is to provide Iranians with access to political sites that the Iranian government wants blocked. As a taxpayer, I want to know what filter is being used, and what political sites are still being blocked.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Politics go beyond embargos and wars. With North Korea, it's going to be a game of chess, not checkers.
Or is China just too large of a trading partner, even if they have the world's largest oppressed population and a navy designed to defeat the United States.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
eh.
/. has heard about the ever increasing length of the food lines in more rural areas of Ohio, etc).
First of all, they want us here in the US to abide by their bullshit (DMCA and the two sons of Satan (Patriot I and II)) yet we are in another country blasting radio stations and FUNDING (at an undisclosed amount) a free proxy to *circumvent* another countries security. We should put the government in jail for violating the DMCA.
Second, we shouldn't be funding shit (not Iraq, not free proxies for Iran, nothing), we should be funding the fucking Americans without jobs (I don't know if
Third, I wasn't aware that we were back in the 1950s and 1960s where we feel the need to stop the possibility of the spread of communism, I mean the threat of terrorism. I get those ism's confused.
Let's fucking work on freeing our own country first TYVM. I would PREFER that our own people are fed, clothed, covered, and paid, rather than worrying about 10s of billions of dollars being sent overseas to countries that (for the most part) don't want us there.
Remember who is funding this funding.
Some interesting observances about Iran:
/. post, probably very little... Just wanted to throw in my two cents about Iran.
In the late 70's, students were protesting the overthrow of the Shah because he was corrupt, pro-West, etc.
Now, in Iran, the children of the students who were protesting in the 70's, are the same people who are protesting against the corrupt Ayatollah and his cronies. The students as well as the majority middle class is aching for Western reforms. They overthrew the shah because he was corrupt, but only a handful of the government owns the majority of the wealth in the country. Essentially, they have turned into a socialist nation and the people are fed up.
It is only a matter of time they will be a more moderate nation again, sharing with the world the beauty of the nation. The US's persistent feeding of western ideas is only fueling a fire of revolution that the Iranian people (sidenote: being of Persian-Armenian descent, we hate referring to ourselves as Iranians, sounds so 1980...) will take part in.
What does this have to do with the
100% Insightful
Nevertheless, I have a sneaking suspicion that some propaganda arm of the US may still be assisting those that are using the old "Safe Web" technology to circumvent the Great Fire Wall.
I suppose you also want martial law?
If the Iranian gov is censoring the web, do you think this would be an exception?
It'll last until the Iranian goverment puts blocks on their border routers and then it's case closed.
China has followed and blocked all such services from their country and in some cases has recorded what the people were doing through those sites first (IIRC).
"We're providing a system whereby the people in the countries that are suffering Internet censorship can bypass the government filtering and access all the pages that are blocked," says Cottrell.
DECSS... hello????
pretty soon i will have to use a foreign system like this and i live in MICHIGAN!!
since i am not sure if its legal to link to this site i will just post the URL
http://raisethefist.com/index1.html
It's not understandable. The United States government has pressured every anonymizer open to the U.S. public to shut down. That is not understandable.
Hey, U.S. government, maybe think about the freedom of your own citizens! Okay!
Thanks to the U.S. government, Iranians can now view material blocked in U.S. libraries after being categorized by a private company as violence/profanity, alcohol/tobacco/drug related, satanic, sexual, or otherwise containing information which may be considered harmful or offensive?
Why are Iranians entitled to view more of the web then Americans?
It should be quite easy to avoid war with Iran - simply don't invade.
Saddam Hussein is a homicidal maniac, but he was bending over backwards to avoid war - doing all he could to comply with UN demands. The trouble was, the US and Britain were not prepared to consider any outcome other than war. A war which killed tens of thousands while doing damage which Paul Bremer indicated a couple of days ago, was almost impossible to overestimate. Now countries which see themselves as threatened by the US know that behaving rationally will get them nowhere. The way to go is to accumulate nukes and point them at an ally of the US. At the time, I thought the N Koreans were insane. It took time to work out what they were up to.
To go back on-topic, it is rather ironical that the US is against anonymous browsing at home (or have I got that one wrong?) but supportive when it can cause other people trouble.
So what is the next stage? Given a proxy web-server in Iran (is there one there?), surfers in other countries can also make use of this service. Iran is a semi-open country nowadays, there won't be a similar service available in N Korea any time soon for obvious reasons.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Last week a Dutch guy was caught who bribed a producer of yoghurt products. He threatened to poison products that were placed in the super market and as a demonstration placed a few poisoned products in a supermarket.
He used a US based anonymiser service to cover up his contacts with the police. He was caught because the anonymizer sevice in question happily cooperated with the legal forces, after some pressure from the dutch police and their US counterparts.
I don't approve of this guy's actions. He actually poisoned someone (who survived) with his actions. Apparently he actually tried out the poison on his goat to make sure the stuff wouldn't kill anyone. However it's a clear demonstration that anonymizers are just as anonymous as the FBI/CIA wants them to be. Anyone using the anonymizer.com services can be sure someone is watching what they do.
Jilles
"You know full well that a government such as the one in Iran is doing everything possible to spread lies about the West."
No i don't, but i'v heard that on fox news often enough. Your entire "us" against "them" attitude and philosophy (which is exactly the same as whoever you end up fighting) is what makes armed conflict likley. If we want to avoid wars then we shouldn't elect presidents who insist on a fight out of their xenophobia.
Given what the Allies have found there over the last 4 months (nothing), it remains to be proved that they actually had anything.
There were those short-range missiles which were designed to be within the permitted specs, but were capable of flying beyond their nominal range (nothing unusual, remember when the Ukranians shot down an aircraft at around twice the distance they thought their missiles were good for) and the Iraqis had started destroying those when the Allies invaded.
Exotic claims are easy to make, the US, UK and Australian Governments all made hysterical claims over Iraq before the war.
They have had 4 months to provide proof. Are you still holding your breath?
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
This announcement is pretty ironic considering:
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/477 9109.htm
Let me get this straight -- if I go to a public library, my browsing is censored by mandate of the U.S. government (unless the librarians are rebels, of course).
But an Iranian can browse the web free of government-imposed censorship?
Aarrrgggghhhhhh!
Actually, the dichotomy makes sense: the U.S. government wants to control its own populace while mucking about in the politics of other countries. The U.S. government doesn't care about the freedoms of the Iranian people; it just wants to undermine the Iranian government.
Well, I hope those Iranians enjoy their freedom now; as soon as the U.S. trumps up enough false data to "liberate" Iran, they'll be in the same boat we are in terms of censorship and spying.
"May you live in interesting times", indeed.
All about me
I can't get to the anonymizer.com site, but if they are not SSL to the anonymize proxy server, its worse than no security, as it's clear text for sniffing with the illusion of security and will surley get people killed if they falsely make use of it.
Otherwise it only makes you anonymous to the site your a visiting. Not the effect they are going for I'm sure.
Even the attempts to connect to the changing ip address as the article states could be tracked and used to identify people trying to use the service, expect a visit if you do this.
Remember the government controls all the wires in the country, it's trivial to sniff the traffic or track usage on the proxy server they use I'm sure.
I would think they would be better off funding GPG so the people could communicate with each other freely and organize. Also no worry about black lists or gambling, or reading slashdot.
It allows for no more abuse than SSL and authentication to a forum site on the web and is probably more accessable to users in Iran anyway.
And it seems more realistic than one point of failure/survelance like anonymizer.com.
Becareful if you use this, make sure you understand how it works and what protections it really provides.
Cheers
Wax on, wax off baby!
As much as I think Iranians deserve privacy and personal freedom, I think it is incredibly hypocrit that the USA is doing this, against the will of another government, while at the same time it is bullying around individuals denying them other freedoms and privacy.
When it comes to so called economic self interests, nothing goes too far, such as procesuting russians for violating absurd laws such as the DMCA, allowing industry lobby groups such as the RIAA to deny people the right to share files and make personal copies, removing the right to reverse engineer, removing the right to invent because of software patents (which it is trying to push through worldwide).
In short: the USA government also is restricting a lot of people (their own and elsewhere), not representing the people (as should be in a democracy) but instead representing those who have the money to bribe the politicians and to buy laws.
I find it quite disturbing that Anonymizer and the gubmint are in bed. Don't think that dubyah and co. aren't keeping tabs on what the Iranians are looking at, if for no other reason than to figure out where their "hearts and minds" are.
DISCLAIMER: This post was not checked for speling and grammar- if you complain- you're a whiner
Dont americans want one of this? Arent you the least bit worried about the loss of your freedoms both online and offline.
I say Kudos for America, and lets try and make an anonimizer for american citizens.
NO SIG
See this Wired article for example.
That was a call do 'do something', where the 'something' was rather ill-defined. I don't see anything there that I'd define as socialism.
FDR took over with the country in a far worse mess than this and turned things around to the extent that the US could take on two of the largest military powers on the planet and emerge as bigger than either. I have heard that described as socialism (which is probably crap) but it set the US up economically for decades.
Would that sort of solution work now?
No idea. Globalism has changed the rules.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Saddam Hussein is a homicidal maniac, but he was bending over backwards to avoid war - doing all he could to comply with UN demands.
Playing shell games with inspectors and flagrantly violating UN resolutions for ten years is "bending over backwards"?
The trouble was, the US and Britain were not prepared to consider any outcome other than war. A war which killed tens of thousands while doing damage which Paul Bremer indicated a couple of days ago, was almost impossible to overestimate.
I'll overestimate it for you: the world was destroyed, and everyone died. There that wasn't so hard, you see?
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
So the students rebelled thinking they were going to get a democracy, but instead got a dictatorship that was even worse than the previous one. One that saw as its mission the export of islamic fundamentalism and the funding of terrorist groups.
Skip many years. Fast forward through Iran-Iraq war and our role in helping both sides with intel so that neither side would wons, etc...
Now we're sponsoring freedom and democracy. About 50 years and hundreds of thousands of lives too late, but better late than never, right?
If all of this anonymizer shit means the people of Iran will get some help freeing themselves from a group of bloodthirsty fundamentalist fuckwads, great. But let's not delude ourselves about our real motivations. We use lofty language about democracy when it suits us, and just as easily discard it to support dictators.
By the way, there hasn't been a Persia for a long time. It's been "Iran" since 1935. If you want to make yourself sound like a rug or a cat, be my guest.
Talk to Phil Zimmerman than... apparently he has a program to sell ya :-)
:-)
So far as I know PGP [and GPG] are perfectly legal. If you're afraid of mr. govt spying on ya, encrypt/sign all your messages.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
"Playing shell games with inspectors and flagrantly violating UN resolutions for ten years is "bending over backwards"?"
Israel violates UN resolutions how come we don't invade them. The US violates UN resolutions or just ignores them and invades other countries.
"I'll overestimate it for you: the world was destroyed, and everyone died. There that wasn't so hard, you see?"
This is a very handy thing to fling out when you can't dispute somebodies facts or arguments in a rational way.
War is necrophilia.
we have this thing called morality here. Piss enough people off and see what it gets you...
What it gets you is "moral" fucknuts commiting a crime. Fuck Jesus, and double-fuck any supposedly morally superior idiot who would commit a crime just because I said "Fuck Jesus".
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I hope the US Government is aware of exactly what Anonymizer.com does. Unfortunately I doubt they do.
The anonymizer.com service protects you from the sites that you are connecting to, not really from anyone else. Your web accesses go through the anonymizer site, then get stripped of any identifying information, and then are sent to the destination. This is useful when you don't want to be tracked by Doubleclick, or you want to view a site that you don't trust with your IP address, but it does nothing to prevent sniffers from seeing who you intend to connect to if they can see the traffic before it hits the anonymizer. (Which Iran is surely doing.)
This is actually worse than doing nothing at all, because some mistaken Iranians may believe that their actions are protected from snooping when in fact the Iranian government is probably paying more attention to this kind of traffic. It could get someone killed or imprisoned.
Luckily all those Iranians that want to protect their identity from Doubleclick will be safe, though.
It's really unbelievable how many bad security decisions are made every day by organizations that should know better. All you really have to do is think about a security problem for a second in a real-life context and it becomes obvious how stupid this answer is. Imagine sending a kid into a store to buy you something, but the person you really are trying to avoid is standing right next to you, listening to you tell the kid what to buy.
*sigh* I applaud the intentions, but I guess it's too much to expect that they think it through a little first.
fear of being spied by U.S. goverment.
Ok I'll bite. Please tell me that you understand the difference between being spied on (US) and being shot in the head for speaking out (Iran). Please tell me that you understand the difference between a bad law (US) that we can repeal just by getting enough people informed and an oppressive regime (Iran) that can jail you or kill you on a whim and there's not a damn thing you can do.
Are you deliberately trying to be obtuse?
Various UN resolutions were passed regarding Iraq, and weapons inspectors were sent there.
Iraq continually violated those resolutions and was as uncooperative with the inspectors as it felt it could get away with without provoking another war.
Iraq at the present moment does not appear to posess WMDs.
Those three statements can logically exist together in the same universe without any self-contradictions.
It seems to me that you're like most anti-Bush fanatics out there, trying to paint anyone who disagrees with you as a pro-Bush fanatic. That's wrong; I can disagree with you and him at the same time. The fact that Bush was wrong about WMDs and lied in his case for war does not change the fact that Iraq was extremely uncooperative in every way with the UN and with the weapons inspectors. Are you capable of understanding this?
If you respond to this post, please try arguing with the points and opinions I have actually expressed, rather than the points and opinions you imagine I should hold.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Ok I'll bite. Please tell me that you understand the difference between being spied on (US) and being shot in the head for speaking out (Iran). Please tell me that you understand the difference between a bad law (US) that we can repeal just by getting enough people informed and an oppressive regime (Iran) that can jail you or kill you on a whim and there's not a damn thing you can do.
Guantanamo Bay.
"Hello, World", 17 errors, 31 warnings
This is the nonsense rhetoric I and him were referring to, and it is absolutely ridiculous. The damage caused by the war was quite mild as far as wars go, and the number of dead was remarkably very few civilians, and the fact is, the naysayers predicted a lot more death and destruction than actually happened. "Impossible to overestimate" is ridiculous.
Furthermore, the Iraqi regime is responsible for far more deaths than were caused by the war, so for all this anti-war talk, within a year or two the war will actually result in a net reduction in the number of lives lost. And THAT is a fact. Just look up the number of deaths in Iraq that were the result of the Iraqi regime, and consider the torture and fear caused by the Iraqi leaders.
Oh sure, you can blame the U.N. sanctions for the deaths related to poor drinking water quality, but the starvation and malnutrition is purely the result of the regime abusing the food for oil program and generally not caring about their own populace. But now that the country is no longer controlled by a dangerous regime, things can be restored, and lives can be saved.
I'm not even saying the U.S. had pure intentions, but this cry me a river nonsense is ridiculous. Boo-fucking-hoo, people died. People always die. The actions of the U.S. will eventually result in far fewer deaths, so what's the problem? You don't like the current U.S. regime? Fine, but you're working the wrong angle.
And if you point out that the Iraqi people don't have electricity and running water currently... Yes, that is pissing me off too, so save it. The U.S. needs to get its act together and show the Iraqi people that they're making a good faith effort to improve their conditions. I don't care how much it costs, get it done! Otherwise, it casts a shadow on everything they've done up to this point. If you want heads to roll, it should be for that!
<snip - of course it's not fun... *rolls eyes* />
For every israeli killed by a palestenian three palestenians are killed.
1. Most Israeli deaths are the result of suicide bombings, meaning at least one Palestinian dies in every attack.
2. The Palestinians are far weaker than the Israelis, therefore their attacks are far less effective.
3. The Palestinians have turned down every chance for peace, and the offers have been good compromises on the part of Israel, I've read them.
And I never said that I support the position of the U.S. w/regards to Israel, nor do I support the Israeli attacks on Palestinians, as they more often than not result in nothing but the deaths of innocent people. However, the Palestinians are FAR from blameless, and are in fact more to blame for the continuation of the violence than the Israelis are.
Now if you were to ask me who I feel the most compassion for in the whole mess, I'd say the innocent Palestinians, because there are many of them, and they're living in very poor conditions. But I feel it's their own leaders who are mostly to blame at this point.
Try looking at both sides of the issues, because there are two sides, and more often than not, the truth is somewhere in-between.
Cheers.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
"As Sharon put it, "its not easy being a Palestinian". Israel has indeed done a terrible thing, when it placed a military regime in the conquered territories between 1967 and 1987. But you must remmember that this was always a response to terrorist attacks that could not otherwise be prevented."
The answer is simple.
Make the palestenians Israeli citizens. This is what civilized nations do when they invade and occupy some land. We did ti with the Indians, The russians did it with all their republics, the chinese did it with tibet. It's the humane and civilized way to treat human beings under your control
Give the palestenians citizenship with full rights and a vote and they will have no reason to bomb anybody.
War is necrophilia.