The revolution will be Twittered...

Great story on the "wired" Iranian uprising and the innovative assistance from a Bay Area "tech nerd" in today's SF Chronicle...

S.F. techie helps stir Iranian protests

Matthew B. Stannard, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 17

Little about Austin Heap's first online venture, a site hosting free episodes of the cartoon "South Park," suggested he would one day use his computer skills to challenge a government. 

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But for the past few days, Heap, an IT director in San Francisco, has been on the virtual front lines of the crisis in Iran, helping people there protest the presidential election, which opponents of the incumbent regime maintain was fraudulent.

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets since Saturday, organizing and sharing news on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The Iranian government, in response, has blocked those sites, along with mobile phone service and other communications tools.

But Iran has the highest number of bloggers per capita in the world, said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University, and they were undeterred. "People used Twitter, and people used their cell phones and used all kinds of mechanisms."

Heap, 25, has never followed Iranian news much. But as reports of the election began dominating Twitter - but not, he believed, American mainstream news - Heap felt the same defiant frustration that led him in the past to butt heads with the music and movie industry associations by creating file-sharing sites...

Proxy server a weapon

Heap's weapon in the past few days was the proxy server, a computer configured to act as an intermediary between a computer user and the Internet. Such servers have many legitimate functions, such as speeding response times, and some illegitimate ones, such as helping spammers hide their identities.

What interested Heap was the use of a proxy server to bypass censorship. Properly configured, a proxy server could identify Web surfers in Iran and route them to Twitter and other sites the government had restricted.

People around the world were posting network addresses for such proxies on Twitter and elsewhere, Heap said, but there was no organization and the servers were unpredictable.

Simple first effort

Heap's first effort was simple: a list of working proxy servers that he published Sunday afternoon. Almost immediately, those servers began to vanish. Perhaps spammers or pornographers, who constantly cruise the Internet looking for open proxies, were overwhelming the system, he thought.

It was only later that Iranians on Twitter warned Heap - and others publishing lists of open proxies - that by posting public lists they were exposing those proxies to attack.

"I really didn't expect their government to be this on top of it," he said. "I know everybody knows about Twitter. But I didn't think it was going to be to this extent."

So Heap took another tack, creating a password-protected list of proxy servers and giving only a handful of people access to each, reducing the possibility of a widespread attack. On his blog, he published simple instructions for configuring proxy servers...

Suddenly, people were sending him addresses for new proxy servers in Australia, Japan and Mexico. Traffic on his blog grew from a couple of dozen unique users a day to more than 100,000 in 24 hours. A woman in Canada asked him for help getting her Iranian family back online.

On Twitter, a Tehran resident posted: "@austinheap Thank you for all you are doing to help my people. This support and kindness will never be forgotten."

'Almost made me cry'

"Most of the reactions from Iran have almost made me cry," he said. "Having somebody tell me that their family thanks me - that's the power of the Internet."

The last 24 hours have been less fun, Heap said. He's had to figure out which of the professed Iranians contacting him he can trust and which might be seeking access to a proxy service to shut it down.

Monday night, his site came under a denial-of-service attack - a flood of phantom file requests from the United Kingdom designed to bring his system to its knees. Tuesday morning he received his first e-mailed threats.

Still, he thinks he's doing the right thing.

"If I can help them get their message out and help them tell the story and step back, that's my job," he said. "(But) my mom is terrified right now."

By mid-Tuesday, Iran appeared to be blocking all non-encrypted Internet traffic, making the 1,600 new proxy-server addresses now in his in-box temporarily useless. But Heap was working with other professionals and companies seeking new ways to reconnect.

"I haven't been in the middle of an outpouring like this, ever. And it makes me incredibly proud of the IT community," he said... (more at SFGate)

Comments

[Akaky]

The revolution may be twittered, but the counterrevolution has triggers, and in a contest of raw political power between a laptop and an AK-47 the latter wins nearly all of the time.

[reg]

Am I reacting to my own biases, or is there some conservative investment in the failure of the pro-Mousavi movement. So far Daniel Pipes has come out "rooting for Ahmidenijad and Danielle Pletka decared the rebellion a failure and the rightwing Mullahs the victors in a NYT editorial. This logic - mostly coming from extreme Zionist neo-cons - is reflected in the head of Mossad also hoping for an Ahmadinejad victory so as not to give credence to the pro-negotiations position and make the most hardline anti-Iran arguments more credible.

Also, I think you know better than your comment - think back to 1989...

[Akaky]

Reg, the extremes play off of each other; if you like a black and white world, then the coming of Moussavi is a problem. For the Israelis, a more moderate Iran developing nuclear weapons is a problem, as it will encourage the US to put pressure on Jerusalem to negotiate as opposed to using force and will still leave them vulnerable to nuclear attack at the end of the day. The Israelis can only look at the American track record with North Korea to see just how effective negotiations are with a regime intent on getting the bomb. It bodes ill, to say the least. As for "extreme Zionist neo-cons," Reg, if you mean Jews, then just say so. The former term smacks of Newspeak. As for thinking of 1989, I am thinking of it. I am thinking that Gorbachev lost his empire and eventually his state because he lacked the will to hold it together. Deng Xiao-ping lost neither his will, his empire, nor his state that year. The year the Berlin Wall came down was also the year of Tianamen Square, and I think that, unless I am greatly mistaken, the mullahs and the Revolutionary Guards are prepared to stay in power by any means necessary, even if it means wading through streets filled with blood.

[reg]

"As for 'extreme Zionist neo-cons,' Reg, if you mean Jews, then just say so."

I would say so if I meant Jews. My point has little or nothing to do with Jews. I mean extreme Zionist neo-cons. Or is it it forbidden to name such a bird ? Have you considered that it might actually be "Newspeak" to claim that when one is talking about a particular ideological formation - one which most Jewish people disagree with, incidentally - that to even mention their existence is sneaky anti-semitism or some such ? This is a thinly veiled attempt to shut down debate about the neo-cons' ties to Likud, a foreign political party, or question some of the extemities of Zionism - or even some fundamental premises of the Zionist project for that matter, which have become increasingly dubious over the decades ("save haven against ant-Semitism for the Jewish people" - uh, how has that turned out ???? - or territorial claims based on the Torah, which is crazy on the face or it.)

My sons self-identify as Jews for what its worth and are part of a large, tightly-knit family on their mother's side that ranges from Lubavitcher to "lefty" and is steeped in the legacy of early militant Zionism and they happen to agree with me on this stuff. And my general perspective on what Israel needs to do to move closer to some possibility of fruitful negotiations is commonplace among Jewish-Americans. And Israelis for that matter. Zionism was a come-lately ideology among Jews - very much an extreme minority view until it gained legitimacy via the Holocaust - but ironically it has perpetuated, rather than elimiinated, the feeling among a large populace of Jewish people that they are facing an existential threat.

Also, Iran is hardly North Korea. Which is why both your point about negotiations and your point about demonstrations are both dubious. The comparison to the Chinese may be closer in some respects, and nobody in their right mind would argue that China poses a serious nuclear threat to either us or its neighbors and that it must be disarmed and dealt with by confrontation. Among other things, that kind of hysteria would be disastrous for WalMart.

[reg]

Just another thought, even given "worst case" - the Tienamien Square events undoubtedly had a major impact on China and were signals that much had already radicallychanged in that country from any effectively totalitarian social system. Think back to China circa 1969, when whatever turmoil existed was over extreme Maoism versus traditional bureaucratic communism. As for Gorbachev, he was dismissed the way many neo-cons currently dismiss Mousavi - actually they're mostly the same people who were making those arguments that it was all window-dressing back then.

[Tambopaxi]

I'm for Mousavi and his backers. Some pundits maintain that there are really no differences between him and Ahmadinejad. This makes no sense on the face of it; if there were no differences between these two men, we wouldn't see the masses of people out in the streets with green hands and wristbands. It's clear to me that the Iranian populace has had it with the system of government that's held over there for the last 30 years. What's not clear is where the changes will ultimately take the country; I would bet, though, that it won't be as religiously conservative a country as it is now..

To the extent that Iran becomes a more moderate country, it will undercut Israeli efforts to portray the country as a danger to Israel and therefore, a danger to the U.S.

That's fine by me.

The whole Iran thing is just another Israeli attempt to throw red herrings in front of the USG and the American public so as to distract Americans from the continuing and worsening disgrace of the West Bank settlements, Gaza, and so on. Just in case no one's clear on Israel, its intentions, and its attitudes toward the States, yesterday Israeli Foreign Minister Lieberman told SecState Clinton, no, we're not going to stop settlement growth, and that's that.

Well, ok, since we're being frank, here's what I think: Israel and its policies towards the Palestinians have been wrong from the get-go, going back to 1948. Throwing people off of their land and doing that as an on-going, long term policy is just plain wrong, morally wrong. Still, I like a lot of other Americans, rooted for the gutsy, feisty Israelis in the years running up to '67 for a lot of reasons, collective guilt/apologies for the Holocaust, vicarious pleasure in seeing white European types give it to the "ragheads", whatever, we backed these guys through thick and thin.

Beginning in '67, though, and since then, without let up, the Israelis have taken the wrong road, in terms of the settlements, the various Lebanese invasions, Gaza, spying on the U.S., stealing nuclear secrets and materials, the U.S.S. Liberty, etc., the walls, and more walls, and so on, sin fin. Year after gradual year, they've slowly become the bad guys, repeat, the bad guys.

The end result to this date is that we've got a small country bent on becoming the South Africa of the 21st century, and worst of all, from an American perspective, is that it considers itself to be - and is perceived to be, by the rest of the world - the be America's best friend in the Middle East - and it charges us billions of dollars each for year for that dubious distinction.

The saddest thing of all, though, is that Israel and its policies (and our supportive relationship with those policies) has damaged us morally and damaged our standing in the rest of the world. Israel is wrong, and has been wrong for many years, in its policies and its actions towards the Palestinian people and Arabs in general.

Still, the Israelis been extremely skillful in fooling Americans in general into thinking that the suicide bombers, Hezbollah, Hamas and all the other botched, half-baked, inchoate attempts of the Arabs to fight the Israelis, is a racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Western plot to destroy a country that's white, non-Islamic (and therefore, just like us, in a clash of races, religions and culture, so therefore we HAVE to be allies!). The Israeli approach (we're just like you, so we're the good guys!) has played well for years, as i say, but over time people like me (and Jimmy Carter, it seems)have begun to realize that we're backing the bad guys, the wrong side in all of this, not because the other side is a bunch of angels, but because the other side isn't busy throwing an entire people off of its land and killing 25, 30, or 50 of them for every Israeli lost in seizing those lands.

Where I come out is here: I want a divorce from Israel. If Netanyahu, Lieberman, et al, want to go on with their disgraceful crushing of a people, that's their business. But we, the U.S., and the USG should no longer have anything to do with these bad guys; we should cut all aid to Israel immediately and vote against them from now on in all UN resolutions against Israeli actions and policies. Sadly, we've been on the wrong side of the moral fence for a long time on the Israeli problem, and it's high time that we get on the right side of that fence.

[iran protest proxies]

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