Activists Use U.S. Tech to Poke Holes in Iran Firewall (Danger Room)

Activists Use U.S. Tech to Poke Holes in Iran Firewall (Updated)

• By Noah Shachtman
• June 26, 2009 |
• 10:48 am |
• Categories: DarpaWatch, Info War, Rogue States

Tehran's demonstrators rose up by themselves. But the technology that helped them organize — and helped them connect with the rest of the planet — was funded in part by the U.S. government.

Early in the pro-democracy protests, everyone made a big deal out of the State Department's call to Twitter, asking the short-messaging firm to reschedule maintenance so the Iranian opposition movement could keep communicating. In retrospect, that might have been one of least meaningful moves an American agency made on the activists' behalf. More important, it now appears, are the millions of dollars invested over the years in technologies that could pry open the Iranian firewall — and avoid the Supreme Leader's web censors.

"Our goal was to promote freedom of speech for Iranians to communicate with each other and the outside world. We funded and supported innovative technologies to allow them to do this via the Internet, cell phones and other media," former State Department Iran democracy program coordinator David Denehy tells Eli Lake of the Washington Times.

Forget the driven-by-DC mock-populism and the all-too-clever schemes; this is how America should be promoting democracy abroad. Give activists the tools — and then let them decide how and when to use 'em.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which oversees the Voice of America and the Farsi-language Radio Farda, has a three-person anti-censorship team that focuses on China and Iran. "Iran has a growing audience of young activist Internet users and we have repurposed our tools to work in Farsi and make it available to Iranians," BBG's Ken Berman says. "We open up the channels so the Iranian blogosphere is more accessible to Iranians in Iran."

One of those projects: design the Firefox Web browser to embed the TOR network. That's the "onion router" anonymous surfing service, which throws off the Supreme Leader's online goons by "distributing your transactions over several places on the Internet, so no single point can link you to your destination," the project's site explains. "The idea is similar to using a twisty, hard-to-follow route in order to throw off somebody who is tailing you — and then periodically erasing your footprints. Instead of taking a direct route from source to destination, data packets on the Tor network take a random pathway through several relays that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it's going."

"There are plenty of programs political dissidents can use to route their Internet traffic through third parties and escape censorship and avoid monitoring," one know-it-all blogger tells Lake. "But TOR is different because it is an encrypted network of node after node, each one unlocking encryption to the next node. And because of this, it is all but impossible for governments to track Web sites a TOR user is visiting. TOR is a great way to give Ahmadinejad's Web censors headaches."

That onion routing approach was originally developed by the Naval Research Lab and by Darpa, the Pentagon's leading science and technology arm.

UPDATE: Slate's Farhad Manjoo, on the other hand, thinks all this tech has actually made it easier for the regime to repress the activists. "On Wednesday, a reader alerted the Lede to an Iranian government Web site called Gerdab.ir, where authorities had posted pictures of protesters and were asking citizens for help in identifying the activists. That's right—the regime is now using crowd-sourcing, one of the most-hyped aspects of Web 2.0 organizing, against its opponents. If you think about it, that's no surprise. Who said that only the good guys get to use the power of the Web to their advantage?"