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The Technology Keeping Information Flowing in Iran
Death Metal writes "Iranians seeking to share videos and other eyewitness accounts of the demonstrations that have roiled their country since disputed elections two weeks ago are using an Internet encryption program originally developed by and for the US Navy. Designed a decade ago to secure Internet communications between US ships at sea, The Onion Router, or TOR, has become one of the most important proxies in Iran for gaining access to Web sites such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook." A related story was submitted anonymously about the efforts of hactivists to keep the information flowing inside the data-locked nation.
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From nedanet:
If you are a Linux or *BSD or Mac OS/X user, we have a detailed recipe for setting up and registering a Squid proxy for the revolutionaries' use. Update: We are no longer recommending people set up plaintext squid proxies. The Iranian regime appears to be doing deep-packet inspection on all traffic now.
My work here is dung.
the reporter of that article is an idiot.
Onion Routing was invented at the Naval Research Lab, but it had nothing to do with ships.
If the reporter would have done a cursory reading of http://www.onion-router.net/, which is the page the creators made, the reporter would not have found any mention of ships on the description or summary of what onion routing is.
The resources needed to spy on tor users would be huge. They'd need to log all traffic that goes through their nodes and analyze it all to reconstruct what can be reconstructed. I find it very unlikely that a government would try to do that. The costs would largely overweight the benefits.
Do you have any idea how much tor nodes it would require to be able to log enough data to reconstruct enough communications to incriminate a few people? The computing power that would be necessary to reconstruct the communications?
I think they'd rather cut off the internet than trying to spy on tor...
wait... you say there's no encryption for the data? From the exit node point of view, maybe but the exit node doesn't know the identity of the source of the communication. When tor traffic goes out of your computer, there's a least three layers of encryption. And everybody who knows a bit about tor will tell you: don't use tor to communicate sensitive informations unless you're using encryption over tor.
If you lift your content from Stratfor http://www.stratfor.com - you could at least give credit.
I am following the issue in Honduras, and honestly, it doesn't appear as cut and dry as it looks. In Iran, at least the situation seems to be a lot more clear. We may not know for certain that the election was rigged, but the timing seems impossible for counting. Additionally, Iran is at best, a very limited democracy overtopped by a religiously motivated dictatorship, so these protests seem to be very compelling.
In Honduras, the president, Zelaya, was attempting to order a referendum which was designated to be illegal by the Supreme Court and the Congress. Supposedly, the military was directed to make the arrest by those bodies.
Of course, under their constitution, I doubt that those branches have that power, but on the other hand, the Hondurans failed to put an impeachment clause in their constitution that they could use. When the Congress and the Supreme Court in the US are against the Executive at that level, he'd have been legally impeached and removed. This does not appear to have been an option for those branches in Honduras and I got the feeling that the police are on the side of the President.
If you believe the opposition, the vote was a lead up to Chavez-esque referendum to remove or change the term limits in the Constitution for the President. While sketchy, this is not illegal in and of itself in many places. However, Honduras apparently also has the interesting constitutional provision that it is even illegal to propose a change to that provision if you are an office holder. One assumes that this is due to their bad experiences with people staying in office too long.
On the other hand, I believe the referendum was only for the purposes of calling a "constitutional assembly" to rewrite the Constitution, so the legal extrapolation they made is possibly not warranted, even if they may well be right about his intentions.
As I said, I am actually surprised that the world is supporting Zelaya as uncritically as they are, but there may be no choice in the matter. In this case, the Hondurans look to have be in a sticky mess constitutionally which no one wants to get involved in. I think that the major issue is that the military was involved, which is certainly bad news, particularly in that part of the world. Its hard for anyone to get behind a military action to remove a legally elected office holder, even if he may be up to something.
However, Zelaya seems to have troubling parallels to Hugo Chavez in his way of dealing with issues, and there are some suggestions that the referendum would not have been entirely without governmental pressure to vote for the provision, which would then be taken as a plebiscite to secure power for the President's entire program, including the removal of term limits. Certainly the Supreme Court and the Congress could be in the wrong here, but I am inclined to distrust Zelaya's motives as well. This may not be an actual coup, even if the military involvement tends to make it look that way.
Or it could be a coup by a corrupt or overreaching Congress and Supreme Court with military involvement.
This sort of ambiguity does not make for good news print, which is why I am unsurprised that it is not being featured. That and the fact that Honduras is not a state supporter or terrorism nor does it appear to have a nuclear program, peaceful or not.
Probably because the guy who has been ousted was trying to defy the constitution, defy the courts and sacked military heads who wouldn't assist him in doing so.
Effectively what is happening in Honduras is an example of what should ideally happen if a leader attempts to become a dictator (i.e. he gets removed), whilst Iran is an example of what shouldn't happen (i.e. the people get violently supressed).
The Honduras result is really a good one, he was trying to copy Chavez, the difference is he didn't have the support to do so. It's probably worth realising that copying Chavez isn't a good thing because Chavez is really no better than Ahmadinejad. Ignoring the fact they're best of friends it's probably worth noting that Chavez, like Ahmadinejad, has supressed opposition using militia etc. so again, seeing someone who wanted to follow this path ousted through a country's legal and constitutional procedures is probably a good thing.
Also, learn at least the basics of modern history...
After the Kremlin exited Eastern Europe, the peoples of each nation in Eastern Europe rapidly established a genuine democracy and a free market. Except for Romania (where its people killed their dictator), there was no violence.
Red Army went away only after many years of struggle. There was bloodshed practically in every Soviet satellite country.
In Iran (and many other failed states), no external force is imposing the current brutal government on the Iranians. The folks running the government are Iranian. The president is Iranian. The secret police are Iranian. The thugs who will torture and kill democracy advocates are Iranian.
Except for presence of external force (which was present for large part of modern Iran), all this was true in former soviet republics.
If the democracy advocates attempt to establish a genuine democracy in Iran, violence will occur. Why? A large percentage of the population supports the brutal government and will kill the democracy advocates.
Let us not merely condemn the Iranian government. We must condemn Iranian culture. Its product is the authoritarian state.
When democracy advocates attempted to establish a genuine democracies in soviet republics,for many years violence was the result. Even though majority of population supported the changes. The state of affairs had nothing to do with local culture. Minority that held power was enough.
We should not intervene in the current crisis in Iran. If the overwhelming majority of Iranians (like the overwhelming majority of Poles) truly support democracy, human rights, and peace with Israel, then a liberal Western democracy will arise -- without any violence. Right now, the overwhelming majority clearly oppose the creation of a liberal Western democracy. The Iranians love a brutal Islamic theocracy.
You know nothing about the struggle of Poland for democracy. There was violence, people died, change didn't come for many years.
And actually it might have come much sooner if, for example, Western Allies didn't handle Eastern Europe on a plate to Stalin. Or didn't let military aggresion on Czechoslovakia in the 60's. And so on... If there was some kind of intervention
One that hath name thou can not otter