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The Technology Keeping Information Flowing in Iran

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the learn-a-new-word-today dept.

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.

41 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. All this time... by fprintf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Sheesh, all this time folks were talking about TOR I thought they were being lazy and shortening Torrent. I learn something new every day!

    --
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  2. Support Them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Support them by becoming a Tor relay

    1. Re:Support Them by dnaumov · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Being interested in "helping the cause", I used to run a TOR relay on my primary system with a fair share of bandwidth. My exit policy was to allow only http/https/irc traffic out. Within 3 days, I found myself unable to browse several websites/forums that I normally frequent. Apparently, a lot of websites use proxies to filter connections from spam and abuse and some of these proxies identify, track and mark IPs running TOR exit relays as abuse relays. I have talked to a maintainer of one such "blacklist" and this is apparently a feature, not a bug as he considers complete anonymity on the internet to cause more harm than good. So, I cannot change the opinion of a blacklist maintainer and I cannot make the websites I visit stop using such blacklists. Essentially I was being blackmailed in a "either you stop running a TOR exit node or you can't browse this and this and this website" fashion. Eventually I had to cave in and had to stop running TOR on my system before the maintainers of these lists agreed to take me off them.

      Obviously I want to support the cause of having anonymity on the internet, but I am not really sure that this price of not being able to use internet properly myself is a price I am willing to pay. What can be done about this?

      The second problem comes from another point of view. What can I do, as a TOR relay operator, to protect myself from potentially getting harassed by law enforcement non-stop?


      P.S: Sorry for crossposting, I initially intended to reply to the parent post, but managed to post my reply into the wrong part of the discussion.

    2. Re:Support Them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You can simply operate a TOR relay configured to not be an exit node. Replace your exit policy in the configuration file by :

      ExitPolicy reject *:*

      You will still help the global TOR network, because you're sharing bandwith as an entry and intermediary node; and you won't risk anything because no "illegal content" will exit from your node to the public internet. Half of tor nodes are not exit nodes.

  3. Hmmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You almost have to wonder if this scares the crap out of the powers that be. That something they created could, in theory, be something that fuels their eventual downfall, (assuming things ever got really bad....)

    1. Re:Hmmm by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That something they created could, in theory, be something that fuels their eventual downfall ...

      Like nuclear weapons? Like a dependency on oil? Like a botched military campaign in a neighboring country? Like your own revolutionary spirit being turned against you after you become the abusive people in power? Sometimes I think it's hard to find a powerful tool that is not a double edged sword.

      --
      My work here is dung.
    2. Re:Hmmm by BenEnglishAtHome · · Score: 4, Insightful

      ...something they created could...be something that fuels their...downfall...

      The U.S. government has long-since established some mechanisms that would accomplish exactly that.

    3. Re:Hmmm by Eli+Gottlieb · · Score: 2, Funny

      Oooh, ooh! I've got one... the spice melange! Oh, wait...

  4. Just Make Sure You're Not Plaintext by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Informative

    Support them by becoming a Tor relay

    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.
  5. Accessing a TOR server is enough to get killed? by viraltus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I mean, perhaps they don't even care what are you saying, just that you try to hide it... How can you access a Tor network without them knowing? With another Tor network?

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  6. Side benefits? by BenEnglishAtHome · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I use Tor regularly and it's really slow. Not unusable, but really slow.

    If I understand this correctly (and I'm not at all sure I do, so feel free to correct me), the more people who set up and use Tor the more quickly traffic can propagate. So if the situation in Iran is causing lots of people, both in and outside of Iran, to use Tor, then the whole thing should speed up, right?

    So is that why when I visited a few miscellaneous .onion sites last nite, they were far more responsive than usual?

    I imagine the Supreme Leader would be pissed if he understood. :-)

    1. Re:Side benefits? by wdsci · · Score: 3, Informative

      Well, the more people who set up Tor *relays*, the more quickly traffic can propagate, yes. But not every Tor user is (or can be) a relay operator, and unfortunately the more non-relay-operator Tor users there are, the less quickly traffic can propagate. Basically, relays provide bandwidth for the network, and non-relay Tor users use it up. Ideally the ratio of relay operators to non-relay users should be reasonably high (well, at least a large fraction of 1).

  7. Flowing, but still risky by geegel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    TOR doesn't ensure true anonymity. The only thing the Iran regime would need to do in order to sabotage it, would be to setup a lot of TOR nodes and analyze the traffic going through them as there is no encryption for the data. Right now this technology benefits from privacy due to obscurity. If the service becomes popular enough, they'll probably resort to the tactics detailed above.

    --
    right...
    1. Re:Flowing, but still risky by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

  8. article is so wrong by spotter · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  9. Government setting up TOR nodes? by mrbill1234 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What is to stop the Iranian government setting up a plethora of TOR nodes and inspecting and tracing everything back to the source? I understand there are alot of different levels to a TOR connection (hence the 'O'nion) - but could the 'bad guys' setting up thousands of TOR nodes around the world help them trace back to the originator?

    1. Re:Government setting up TOR nodes? by rotide · · Score: 3, Interesting
      You contradict yourself.

      "Trouble hosting honest elections" isn't an accident and it isn't due to incompetence, it is due to the desire and ability to rig the system to win.

      If they can do that, what makes you think they can't set up TOR nodes? (potential infrastructure limitations aside).

      But don't think for a moment that a government that is out to win at any cost won't do whatever it takes to quash those that attempt to stand up to them. Also don't believe for a moment that they can't fund/hire or already have the technology and know how to setup simple nodes. It isn't too far of a stretch to believe they already have talented IT folk on their payroll.

      Long story short, they aren't in power because they are dumb.

    2. Re:Government setting up TOR nodes? by GreatBunzinni · · Score: 3, Informative
      No. According to the Tor project, it isn't possible.

      Because each relay sees no more than one hop in the circuit, neither an eavesdropper nor a compromised relay can use traffic analysis to link the connection's source and destination.

      So, according to that description I believe that the iranian government would only stand a chance of being able to monitor traffic if the entire network was comprised of tainted tor nodes provided by the state of Iran. So even under that scenario Iran's job would become a bit harder if suddenly more people started contributing to the tor project. At least that's my non-security expert take on that. Nonetheless I'm getting my tor node up and running.

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  10. Re:Can't the eds even make a headline sentence now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Why does it need to be a complete sentence? The headline makes perfect sense: The Technology (implied "that is") Keeping Information Flowing in Iran

  11. Selective Values by chord.wav · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How come nobody talks what has happened this past week and is still happening in Honduras?

    How come the election in Iran provokes such a passionate response from the US (which is not bad) and a call to support them, put proxies, blablabla, but a real military coup in an american country much next to the US doesn't provoke Sh1t? Have you heard of it at least?

    Don't follow the imposed agenda people, trust your judgment. And apply it equally for everybody, not just the ones that your leaders want you to hate.

    1. Re:Selective Values by yachius · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You mean besides for the LA Times and every other major newspaper in the US? And Slate? And a million other blogs with admins who have an interest in these events? It isn't tech related at all, there's no great cry for democracy. It's just another coup in an insignificant country.

    2. Re:Selective Values by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Successful revolutions have three phases. First, a strategically located single or limited segment of society begins vocally to express resentment, asserting itself in the streets of a major city, usually the capital. This segment is joined by other segments in the city and by segments elsewhere as the demonstration spreads to other cities and becomes more assertive, disruptive and potentially violent. As resistance to the regime spreads, the regime deploys its military and security forces. These forces, drawn from resisting social segments and isolated from the rest of society, turn on the regime, and stop following the regime's orders. This is what happened to the Shah of Iran in 1979; it is also what happened in Russia in 1917 or in Romania in 1989.

      Revolutions fail when no one joins the initial segment, meaning the initial demonstrators are the ones who find themselves socially isolated. When the demonstrations do not spread to other cities, the demonstrations either peter out or the regime brings in the security and military forces -- who remain loyal to the regime and frequently personally hostile to the demonstrators -- and use force to suppress the rising to the extent necessary. This is what happened in Tiananmen Square in China: The students who rose up were not joined by others. Military forces who were not only loyal to the regime but hostile to the students were brought in, and the students were crushed.

      This is also what happened in Iran this week. The global media, obsessively focused on the initial demonstrators -- who were supporters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's opponents -- failed to notice that while large, the demonstrations primarily consisted of the same type of people demonstrating. Amid the breathless reporting on the demonstrations, reporters failed to notice that the uprising was not spreading to other classes and to other areas. In constantly interviewing English-speaking demonstrators, they failed to note just how many of the demonstrators spoke English and had smartphones. The media thus did not recognize these as the signs of a failing revolution.

      Later, when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke Friday and called out the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, they failed to understand that the troops -- definitely not drawn from what we might call the "Twittering classes," would remain loyal to the regime for ideological and social reasons. The troops had about as much sympathy for the demonstrators as a small-town boy from Alabama might have for a Harvard postdoc. Failing to understand the social tensions in Iran, the reporters deluded themselves into thinking they were witnessing a general uprising. But this was not St. Petersburg in 1917 or Bucharest in 1989 -- it was Tiananmen Square.

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    3. Re:Selective Values by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      If you lift your content from Stratfor http://www.stratfor.com - you could at least give credit.

    4. Re:Selective Values by tnk1 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    5. Re:Selective Values by knutkracker · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's the story. A good story bypasses the rational parts of our brains, goes straight to the emotions and grabs us.

      The subtext of the Iran story is about the surprise of realising that a people we previously thought of as hostile (and frankly a bit too Muslim for comfort) are as much against their crazy muppet of a ruler as we are and decidedly less Muslim than the scary hard-line ones (relaxed dress codes, keen to party). It's the underdogs fighting The Man and we especially identify with the underdogs, because they use Twitter and speak English on TV. It has resonance.

      It shouldn't work that way, but it does. Compare to a certain recent internet phenomenon. Someone who we previously thought was ugly (and a bit too Scottish for most Western tastes), is as good a singer as any that the crazy muppet Simon Cowell could point to. It's the underdog fighting The Man and we especially identify with the underdog because she sings in a perfect English accent and embodies all of our fairytale ideas of how the world should ideally be.

      We don't care about Honduras for the same reasons we don't care about Fabia Cerra (Who? Exactly!) - the story has no resonance, so we ignore it.

    6. Re:Selective Values by Xest · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    7. Re:Selective Values by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20090622_iranian_election_and_revolution_test is the actual article, if folks would rather read the non-plagiarized version.

  12. Zmodem? by localman57 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There seems to be all of this press about how people are getting information out using the internet. But back in the early 90's, before I had access to the internet, my friends and I used to transfer information and files from one place to another using two modems connected via a plain old telephone line, sending files back and forth using Zmodem protocol. Is this technique still being used? I'm picturing someone using an acoustic coupler on a pay phone to send small cellphone videos out of Iran to a friendly party...

    1. Re:Zmodem? by wdsci · · Score: 2, Informative

      You mean steganography, not stenography. ;-)

  13. Re:The Grotesquely Ugly Truth by knutkracker · · Score: 2, Informative

    Dupe.

  14. Re:The Grotesquely Ugly Truth by ArcherB · · Score: 3, Interesting

    While I agree with a lot of what you have to say, I have to ask, do you think the people in N. Korea are happy with their lot in life?

    --
    There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
  15. When I was a kid we used Kermit by davidwr · · Score: 2, Funny

    We didn't have Zmodem. All we had was Kermit. We didn't have modems either. We wrote our bits on the back of his little froggy-back 7 bits at a time and waited for him to go and come back with the reply bits. If we were lucky he managed to cross the highway without getting run over.

    Anyone know the packet loss of frogs hopping across a desert?

    --
    Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
  16. Apples and Oranges by interactive_civilian · · Score: 2, Informative

    Because what happened in Honduras was legitimate by their constitution (the president was committing TREASON according to article 4 of their constitution, therefore it was legal for the Honduran Supreme Court to vote to remove him and for the military to execute that). It is not exactly a military coup, because once the president was removed, the next in line was legally put in his place to serve out the remainder of the term until elections next year.

    So, in Iran, you have a corrupt government trying to steal the election from the people and implement their own de facto dictatorship. The people are standing up against that. In Honduras, you have a president defying the law and committing treason by trying to set up a way for himself to become a dictator, and then being legally removed from power by the government he was trying to betray. Very different situations.

    --
    "Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
  17. I hate to sound alarmist by The_AV8R · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Call it naivety on my part, but am I the only one worried about National governments studying the Iranian uprising, in search of countermeasures to YouTube and Twitter? Judging from various crowd control measures being implemented (such as 50,000 volt riot shields, I'm sure there is an interest in figuring out a way around everything people are doing in Iran. I can easily see the physical destruction of a website's servers to be on the top of a government contingency plan. Cut power to Twitter's servers? Done. I hate conspiracy theories, and am looking for anyone to tear me apart on this one.

    --
    What? I can't assume Occam's Razor was a slick fold-up scooter?
  18. Re:The Grotesquely Ugly Truth by sznupi · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  19. Not feasible by basicio · · Score: 3, Informative

    There is no way Iran has the resources to perform correlation attacks on Tor traffic.

    Facts: -There are about 1800 Tor nodes running right now, and about 900 of those are exit nodes. (http://torstatus.kgprog.com/)
    -Any entity performing cross-correlation attacks on Tor isn't going to have a very good chance of compromising a given circuit unless they control a very significant portion (say, a third or more) of the Tor network.
    -There are tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of clients using Tor, and Iran only accounts for about 3000 of them. (https://blog.torproject.org/blog/measuring-tor-and-iran)
    -By default, Tor will not construct circuits with two nodes that share /16 subnets.
    -Iran's assigned IP address blocks include 75 or so distinct /16 subnets

    So to even have a chance of being effective, Iran needs to come up with at least 600 geographically distinct Tor nodes. Any nodes inside Iran are going to be almost entirely ineffective, because deep packet inspection means that all traffic into and out of Iran is slowed to a crawl. Iran also needs to write the code to do cross-correlation attacks. Iran then needs to deal with a ton of data they don't care about from users not in Iran (and there are a lot more people using Tor who aren't in Iran than people who are). It would take a lot of smart people distributed around the world to pull this off, and for very little gain.

    Compromising Tor? That's pretty difficult. Blocking it, when all internet connections are being routed through a single place? Not so difficult.

  20. questions on setting up a TOR relay by dnaumov · · Score: 3, Informative

    Being interested in "helping the cause", I used to run a TOR relay on my primary system with a fair share of bandwidth. My exit policy was to allow only http/https/irc traffic out. Within 3 days, I found myself unable to browse several websites/forums that I normally frequent. Apparently, a lot of websites use proxies to filter connections from spam and abuse and some of these proxies identify, track and mark IPs running TOR exit relays as abuse relays. I have talked to a maintainer of one such "blacklist" and this is apparently a feature, not a bug as he considers complete anonymity on the internet to cause more harm than good. So, I cannot change the opinion of a blacklist maintainer and I cannot make the websites I visit stop using such blacklists. Essentially I was being blackmailed in a "either you stop running a TOR exit node or you can't browse this and this and this website" fashion. Eventually I had to cave in and had to stop running TOR on my system before the maintainers of these lists agreed to take me off them.

    Obviously I want to support the cause of having anonymity on the internet, but I am not really sure that this price of not being able to use internet properly myself is a price I am willing to pay. What can be done about this?

    The second problem comes from another point of view. What can I do, as a TOR relay operator, to protect myself from potentially getting harassed by law enforcement non-stop?

  21. Re:The Grotesquely Ugly Truth by Twinbee · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Weird that this gets 5 insightful now when before the dupe got -1 troll. Where's the consistency slashdot mods?

    --
    Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
  22. Re:The Grotesquely Ugly Truth by pdxp · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The Iranians love a brutal Islamic theocracy.

    Unless your name is "The Iranians," I don't understand how you can speak in such broad terms and not be modded as a troll.

    The Iranians created this horrible society. It is none of our business [...]

    We should condemn Iranian culture and its people.

    So, it's not our business until it's time to weigh in our thoughts? All I can say is that with that kind of attitude, I hope you too are stereotyped to be the same as everyone else in your country when it begins to collapse and everyone says, "Well, they made their own mess. Let's just condemn them all for now and take action against them if we feel threatened." I hope you don't wonder where the compassion is when you are suffering.

    Read some books, watch a few movies, maybe even go to Iran. Then tell me the same things you've said here without knowing you're lying. Nobody deserves to be oppressed or "condemned" for actions they cannot control.

    And for fuck's sake, please don't title your unsubstantiated bullshit as "The Grotesquely Ugly Truth".

  23. Re:The Grotesquely Ugly Truth by Clandestine_Blaze · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Please don't stress yourself out - my blood pressure went up when I read the parent you're responding to, but then again, I am Persian and what they wrote was 100% BS. The government and militia of Iran is composed of Lebanese and Palestinian arabs. The members of the Basij that were beating protesters couldn't even speak Persian properly, and were shouting commands in Arabic. The majority of Iranians want a democratically elected government and want normalized relations with the West. The parent that you responded to was just a troll trying to get a rise out of people.

    Don't bother - some trolls aren't worth it. The sad part is that there are a lot of idiots that modded this guy up and agreed with them. Anyone who lived during the 60s and 70s knew that Iran had always been a 1st world country. It's slipped a little since the revolution, but hopefully a regime changed started by ethnic Persians will correct things.

    Thanks for trying though.

    --
    Best "String" Ever!
  24. Another Iranian Here Agrees by linumax · · Score: 3, Informative

    OP keeps posting (read pasting) that bullshit, on and on every time we discuss Iran, no wonder posting as AC. By his "logic" North Koreans enjoy starvations and really really love dear leader.