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How Iran's Hackers Killed Big Brother
Burhan Ozbilici / AP Photo
Tehran's streets may be bloody, says Douglas Rushkoff, but the opposition has won the digital war. The battleground: Facebook and Twitter. The weapons: bandwidth and hacking. The prize: the end of totalitarianism.
Plus, read more insight on Iran's election from other Daily Beast writers.
Perhaps the best indication for Americans that something important is going on in Iran right now is the fact that Twitter has delayed a scheduled downtime for maintenance in order for Iranians and others involved in the post-election digital melee to keep at it. For anyone lacking a Twitter feed and thus missing the intense virtual crossfire, what's happening is nothing short of a test of Internet users' ability to challenge not only a regime's power over an election, but over the network itself. The effort alone constitutes a victory.
Unlike the United States, where Facebook friends, Meetup groups, and other online innovations successfully elected a candidate who (at least initially) lacked top-down support, the Iranian power structure has less compunction about snuffing digital democracy. Incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is widely believed to have shut down Iranian access to Facebook as soon as it was clear his opponent's supporters were using the social network to organize rallies and motivate voters. Not that Mousavi's 36,000 Facebook friends at that point would have led to the undeniable landslide the opposition leader would have needed to actually win—but the heavy-handed gesture hinted at what was to come. It was the opening salvo in a digital war with global implications, and a blueprint for the democratizing influence of the Internet.
Iran's government counterattacked with a blockade, closing off the four Internet access routes it controlled, leaving just one pipe through Turkey for messages to breach it.
Now that Ahmadinejad has claimed victory, the blogosphere, Twitterverse, and the rest of the social-networking sphere is on virtual fire. Tens of thousands of messages per minute condemning the results as fraud are passing to and from Iran, as angry Iranians and sympathetic outsiders exchange datapoints, analysis, and on-the-ground coordinates. While only a small minority of these posts are from people actually organizing protests, rooting out provocateurs, or sending aid to victims of violence, it's too easy to discount the more virtual interactions as trivial.
Ahmadinejad sure hasn't. His regime is working hard to stifle protest without completely unplugging Iran's telecommunications infrastructure. Their tactics: limit cell service to in-country only, shut off text messaging, block transmissions to and from Facebook, and even shut down access to Friendfeed, a messaging aggregator extremely popular in Iran. They're also identifying and then blocking messages from offending users and Web sites.
Iran's Internet-savvy youth have fought back, however, exploiting "proxy servers" to make their messages appear to be coming from different sources, and exchanging the digital addresses of the ever-changing list of servers still capable of transmitting packets. Iran's government counterattacked with a blockade, closing off the four Internet access routes it controlled, leaving just one pipe through Turkey for messages to breach it.
One particularly aggressive opposition group responded by facilitating a "denial of service" attack on the Iranian government's servers. All over the Internet, users of all nations can get easy instructions for how to install a small program that "pings" the offending servers so frequently that they crash, unable to handle the incoming requests. Of course, the problem with this strategy is that it also overloads the few, compromised pipelines into and out of the country.
The net result proves that the age of the totalitarian dictatorship is over. Pictures of protests, police violence, and the reality of life on the streets in post-election Iran manage to seep out through the social networks. It's impossible for any American user of Twitter to remain focused on the iPhone's new features with this much real world life-and-death stuff crowding the inbox.
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Douglas Rushkoff, a professor of media studies at The New School University and producer and correspondent for the PBS Frontline Digital Nation project, is the author of numerous books, including Cyberia, ScreenAgers, Media Virus, and, most recently, Life Inc., released this month by Random House.
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Douglas Rushkoff, a professor of media studies at The New School University and producer and correspondent for the PBS Frontline Digital Nation project, is the author of numerous books, including Cyberia, ScreenAgers, Media Virus, and, most recently, Life Inc., released this month by Random House.
The situation in Iran gives the phrase "Power to the People" new life. Good for them.
There were a lot of Iranians at my Midwestern state college in the pre-Ayatollah latter 1970s. None of them struck me as the radical extremists Iranians have been portrayed as since then in the media. The only thing that I thought unfair was that most of the boys were in my 4 year college while their sisters were enrolled at a local 2 year college - the parents didn't think girls needed more education than a 2 year college to go home, get married, and raise families. And then I realized that my in-laws who had their kids in the 1950s did the same things with their children's college funds - budgeting for their boys to go to 4-year schools and their girls to 2-year schools. So, the Iranian parents of the 1970s were just 20 years or so behind our 'social enlightenment.' And, granted, these were kids whose families were prospering under the US-backed Shah of Iran's regime, but they were everyday people and not the caricatures of evil drawn by the media and politicians since then.
I suspect there is a substantial portion of Iran's professional population who are now in their 40s and 50s who were educated abroad, who have also imparted at least some of our Western ideals to their children who are the students and young professionals we see in the streets in these videos. They've had 30 years of living in a version of the 1950s where everyone will be happy as long as everyone pretends to be happy. They've been stuck with Toby McGuire and Reese Witherspoon in Pleasantville. The info that's leaking out via the internet is the equivalent of Pleasantville's red rose.
Iranians, prepare to see your world in full, living color.
A think most of the Iranians who could afford, and did send, their children to college abroad were going to be far more likely to be tolerant liberals than the kind of insular religious fundamentalists who currently rule Iran.
And like the legions of liberals who didn't know anyone who would vote for Bush, these people unlikely knew anyone who would have wanted a revolution.
I hear Marie Antoinette was so surprised she lost her head.
Of course the opposition is winning the internet war.
One candidate sought to represent the rural poor. The other candidate is the favorite of the urban elite.
The fact that powerful, foreign governments also favor the candidate of the urban elite, well, it makes me ask, again and again and again, can anyone show me one pre-election poll which suggested Mousavi was going to win?
One?
Yes. But I'm going to make you go look for it.
"The breadth of Ahmadinejad's support was apparent in our pre-election survey," the pollsters said, rejecting arguments the poll might have reflected a fearful reluctance to give honest answers.
Rejecting such arguments for reasons they stated quite plainly, such as, they were not afraid to make their views known on any number of controversial topics.
The current Iranian government is doing everything in their power to ban outgoing media. Why would you even consider a fair poll showing Mousavi ahead would be available?
The numbers aren't adding up. Millions of PAPER BALLOTS were counted and certified in 3 HOURS?! In a process that normally takes 3 DAYS in Iran? America has digitized voting and we don't even get our results in 3 hours.
I hope you don't think this is just a "No, we wanted him to win" argument.
To answer your question,Yes I can. But I'm going to have you look for it. You may have to read/listen as well. Even do a little math.
In Canada, they count millions of paper ballots in a few hours, and Iranians take their elections more seriously than the Canadians.
The fact that U.S. voting and counting software is entirely unfit for its intended purpose, easily hackable, and halfway brain dead is irrelevant. Yes, of course I can do better, thank you for asking.
The number of votes cast in Canada's last election was just under 13 Million. The number of votes cast in this Iranian election: 40 MILLION. So it would be silly to compare the two.
This guy Rushkoff's lack of a sense of history is pathetic. Mousavi was a previous president of Iran, during which time he approved the fatwah on Salman Rushdie as official government policy.
Twitter means one really doesn't have to think. Superficiality rules. Probably why rushkoff champions it.
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"The net result proves that the age of the totalitarian dictatorship is over." Rushkoff
Either of the candidates is a stooge for the mullahs. And truly liberal candidate was not allowed to run. Moussavi is as much a totalitarian as Ahmadinejad.
I'll give the rest of your comments the consideration they deserve.
The headline is hype, but the core argument is right, and the analysis of how tech is being deployed and contested with Iran seems reasonable.
You do have online groups, not sure I would quite use the word community, who are bearing witness, and making it much harder for the Iranian regime to pretend to the outside world that this is a minor issue, with "Alles in Ordnung" as the Germans might put it.
Couple this with CNN being slow off the mark, and the Iranian authorities booting out or limiting international press and you do have a new media world.
All I have to say for the young in Iran... "Go kids Go!"
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The Internet also apparently by-passed the hopelessly inflexible poseurs who populate the US Department of State's Foggy Bottom: They were loath to denounce the Iranian election fraud (indeed, they still may not have done so). The upshot? They were made to look like the risible dinosaurs that they are.
The State Department takes its cues from the White House. The Secretary of State cannot go on her own...she represents the President..It so happens that they were both right in staying relatively quiet. In that way the Iranian leadership could not blame this country for causing all their troubles..If you knew any history of our relationship with Iran then you will realize that we had interfered before and it caused this country big problems. As far as twitter is concerned...it was the State Department that asked twitter to keep runningso the Iranian students could keep in touch with the outside world. Twitter was going to shut down for upgrades. It is common knowledge that the US States department has become the most tech savey of all the departments...they even hired technical specialists to modernize Foggy Bottom....get your facts straight.
Twitter is a hero and Obama is a zero. http://thedailyinstigator.com/2009/06/iran-uprising-obama-flinches-twitter- steps-in/
The Borgen Project has some good info on the cost of addressing global poverty.
$30 billion: Annual shortfall to end world hunger.
$550 billion: U.S. Defense budget
Mousavi seems like a transitional figure - comparable to some of the Serbian politicians who rose around the time that Milosevic lost power.He's no democrat, but compared to the current leadership, he offers some hope of some type of greater openness; hence, the urban elites and students rally to his side.
Thank you.
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