Slashdot Mirror
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."
Propaganda both prevents and wins wars. Propaganda can serve as a tool of persuasion in trying political struggles between two or more nations. In the case of Iran, it is imperative that we win a large portion of mindshare to use as security in the future. For it would seem that the possibility of armed conflict with Iran is a reality, and we should do what we can to avoid it, considering the implications of such a thing.
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
Could some Iranian please set up a proxy so that we can bounce back and use anonymizer for free. Thanks :-)
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.
We now need someone to create a system that lets US users tunnel INTO Iran so we can use Iran's privacy protection (funded by the US gub'mint) to protect US users from the US gub'mints warrantless TIA Big Brother spy programs.
cpeterso
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
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
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
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
RTFA.
You tell me how "whilst" differs from "while," and I'll stop calling you a pretentious jackass.
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?
Bzzt. Wrong.
If anything the Chinese were pulling for us in Vietnam. Who was the next country to declare war on the Chinese after the US? That's right, it was the PRC.
People have this illusion that the various Marxist nations were lovey-dovey as part of the quest for International Socialism. The reality is that, while most were Soviet satellites, the Chinese were displeased with the USSR for a long time. There are dozens of recorded instances of territorial infractions, shots fired, and planes shot down between the PRC and the USSR. The Chinese basically took a neutral position on the issue of a NATO vs. Warsaw Pact war; their hope was that both sides would nuke each other into cinders.
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
Here's a whitepaper on Triangle Boy, a solution to allow users to circumvent a censoring firewall (with the help of an external network of proxies, of course).
It's a little complex, so I advise you read the article to get the details, but here's my take: The general idea is the user behind the firewall doesn't connect to a single proxy; instead, it connects to any one of a network of ever-changing mini-proxies. These mini-proxies forward the request to the real proxy.
The mini-proxies can be blocked, but you just switch to a different mini-proxy. In order to reduce load on the mini-proxies, the real proxy returns data directly to the user, but with a spoofed ip address of the mini-proxy.
Pretty cool.
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
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.
After U.S. goverment approved so-called "Patriot Act" which allows it to spy what you write in your e-mails, what you read in a library, ...
I'm waiting for Iranian goverment to fund Anonymiser for U.S. citisens so they can browse the Web anonymously without fear of being spied by U.S. goverment.
MSDOS: 20+ years without remote hole in the default install
I'm a half-Iranian American and I have a lot of Iranian friends, some of whom came from Iran just a few years ago. I've yet to meet a single person who supports the regime in Iran. People want their freedom. The women pull their scarves high and show a lot of hair, they wear makeup and jewelry. Protests are a constant occurence. People won't put up with the Islamic republic for much longer.
I wonder how effective the actual blocking within Iran is. I know that many Iranians can be found on Yahoo Chat. Iranians also download mp3's and porno. I doubt the filesharing services and chat would ever be effectively blocked by the Iranian government. Nevertheless, the anonymizer should help Iranians read western media and get a more accurate report of the world's news.
Imagine if most of the rich and educated Iranians had't fled to places like Los Angeles, Toronto, Dubai, Washington, D.C., Paris and London. The Islamic government would have been dead by now.
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.
I spent a month travelling in Iran last December. I have a few observations that may surprise some:
1- Internet access is unfiltered, from what I could tell. From pr0n to sites advocating political dissent, people where happy to show me that things weren't blocked in Internet cafes. Since most people access the net from these cafes, they benefit from a layer of anonymity assuming that they can afford the $0.50-0.80us/hour rates.
2- The government is a complex machine. THE PEOPLE VOTE for their elected representative. Mr Khatami, the current president is a reformist. However, he cannot push reforms through too fast for a host of reasons, the first being that the country's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khameini holds veto power over all decisions made by the elected government. Khameini also controls the military and the police. The conservatives, on their part, cannot block all reform, for the knowledge that reformists get violent if there's no progress. The end result is a country that's slowly moving towards reform. Conservatives think things are moving too fast, reformists think things are moving too slowly, but most people agree that the last thing the country needs is another war or revolution - far too many people die then. From my visit, I'm steadfast in my opinion that Iran will sort itself out on it's own, but it will take time. Sort of like Turkey, which has gone from an Islamic Monarchy in the 1910's to a democratic state today.
3- America's allies in the Middle East, such as the United Arab Emirates (spent 2 weeks there), do have filters, and nasty ones at that. There is only one ISP in the UAE, the governements, and it filters lots. I could frequently reach a blocked site when following links in slashdot stories, and there's nothing that you can do about getting those sites unblocked. The government of the UAE is a big-time monarchy, but is Open for Business. Will the proxy be available to the UAE? I don't think so.
4- Iran isn't as isolated as you would think, and a lot of this is due to the Internet and the availability of cheap international phone calls. For example, I was in the city of Qom, some 180km south of Tehran on the 17th of December. This is the conservative hub of the country. Ayatollah Khomeini was born and operated from there, and the city is home to the important Shiite shrine of Fatimeh's tomb. Through a long sequence of happenstance events, I found myself touring a school, and was amused when a teacher gave a copy of The Two Towers on vcd to the vice-principal who was showing me around. Information flows...
Iran does still leave a lot to be desired, but people seem generally happy, the standard of education is high, and there's universal medicare for citizens... but most medical drugs have to be purchased from smugglers because of some country's trade embargo. Certainly the lifting of the later wourld be a much better perceived sign of goodwill than an unnecessary proxy.
Maybe they all got modded down, but I'm noticing a disturbing lack of conspiracy theories, for the slashdot crowd.
Personally, I see this as more of the same TIA/PATRIOT nonsense we've been enduring since 9/11. I find it far more likely that the GWB / Ashcroft crowd is using this as a tool for our own 'National Security'. Of the following 2 scenarios, which seems more likely given the practices we've seen from the current US administration?
A> Washington truly and deeply cares for the plight of the Iranian citizen, and the censorship they're subjected to by their oppressive government, despite showing no such concern for its own citizens.
B> Washington provides 'anonymous' internet access, in order to monitor the browsing activities of 'potential terrorists'. (Read: Everyone in Iran). All in the name of national security of course.
Considering the US's track record on things like this, I'm personally voting for B. Total Information Awareness really said it all for me. The United States Government has decided that privacy is the antithesis of freedom and security. I find it really hard to take this act at face value, considering the US's current stance on Internet Anonymity.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine...
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