Sunday, a few days after the failed Iranian election, I went to bed thinking about the state of things in Tehran. I had been reading an interesting page called the Tehran Bureau, weblog started by a Massachusetts woman that had become a very good source for news coming from Iran. With a growing feeling of hope, and dread, I went to bed.
Never in a million years would I have expected that about 7 hours later I would be engaged in full-fledged cyber-freedom fighting, espionage, and a battle to save lives over an online service that I barely used.
Monday morning I awoke to find that Tehran Bureau helping to open a new chapter in the Iranian election. Iranian dissidents had been using Facebook and Twitter to track government movements, organize their own protests, and get news out of Iran. But the Iranian Twitterers were in trouble. The regime was cracking down, and somebody had finally found a way for us to help.
The directions were simple. If you have a Twitter account, login, change your location to Tehran, and change your timestamp to Iranian time.
Within minutes, it became apparent that I had stepped into a pretty serious rabbit hole. I had received a tip that certain websites, claiming to support Mousavi, were in fact government sites. I went to these cites, investigated a little, and it seemed oddly pro government for opposition propaganda. So I retweeted that they were fakes. Then Twitterers began to launch Denial of Service Attacks (DDOS) and shut down the websites. I began to get direct messages from Iranians, thanking me for spreading the news. Some I began to follow. Within minutes I began to retweet information publicly that seemed relevant, and I used private messages to communicate with those who needed information. It was 7:30 in the morning, and 30 minutes within this process I already felt like I had been sucked into the middle of a Cyber Revolution.
In the following days I assisted in a project to put the location of all Iranian tanks on a Google Map, report specific streets or buildings where there were government or Besiji attacks, report news from Iran hours or days before it was mentioned in major media outlets, and I had uncovered a number of Twitter accounts that were clearly illegitimate or working against the people of Iran. Cyber War had become an armchair activity, and it was working.
For weeks now I’ve followed Iranian blogs, translated Farsi, and done some good-old-fashioned Sherlock Holmes Googling to uncover the sources who were reliable and those who were spies. Three accounts that were following me on Twitter had their accounts canceled due to cyber crime. At least two of them, it was later confirmed, were government officials working for Ahmadinejad. And things didn’t always go smoothly. Sources were arrested, or worse, some just disappeared, the DDOS were disrupted, and the gov’t crackdown may have proven too powerful to overcome. I spent 3-8 hours a day following my Iranian sources, and I lost some of those people. Armchair or no, this was clearly serious business.
But the episode taught us many things, which I will speak more about in my next post. At the very least, it proved that individual Americans could make a difference with nothing more than a computer and an Internet connection. It also proved how global the World Wide Web had really become.
I don’t know how this ends, but I know that the Iranian elections have provided a new frontier for American foreign policy, and it has nothing to do at all with the men and women in elected office.
Posted in Foreign Policy, Iran
One Million Voices for Iran