Electronic Warfare in Iran
A very common military tactic is to damage the communication ability of an enemy before the bullets and bombs start to fly. Here in the US we couldn’t imagine the government blocking all SSL encrypted traffic on the Internet, or disabling the ability to send SMS on our phones. In Iran it is a reality. But it goes much further than that. Roving groups of militia the “Basij” are raiding dorm rooms and college computer labs to physically destroy computers. People are being tracked down and detained for using Twitter. Today the Khameini warned citizens that he is watching their twitter accounts, and they will be held accountable. The government is even using ECM jamming to prevent reception of foreign television. The people in power in Iran obviously see the free flow of information as a serious threat to their being able to continue to hold power, why else use military grade tactics on your population? I fear the worst is yet to come in Iran.
Chilling.
But despite fearing for their lives, people in Iran haven’t stopped sending pictures and video of what is happening in the country. Video of protesters being shot, students beaten, and smashed computers haunts the Iranian regime. How is it happening?
One way is the use of “Open” protocols. Why is it that Twitter, which previously had been most famous for allowing a person to program an arduino processor to automatically post when he used the restroom, become such a great tool of dissent in a place like Iran? The same thing allowing the preposterous use of the bathroom technology is what makes Twitter hard to stop. Twitter publishes their API (application programming interface) which allows third parties to plug in directly to their website. Nothing ground breaking really, but there are so many ways to post, and read tweets that it is difficult to stop.
The next is more intentional and potentially dangerous for the Iranians who use the technology–if they are caught they are certainly in peril, perhaps grave based on the news reports seen to date. There are groups of people all over the world working to create networks of proxies, onion routing and other tunnels that allow people in Iran to get past the government’s efforts to block communication. The effort is being coordinated via email, IRC, web forums, and just about any technology you can imagine. There have been reports of harassment of some people in the USA helping with this effort, but this is unsubstantiated, though certainly plausible.
One problem with this approach is that it is difficult to gauge how effective it works. And because of the mutually anonymous nature of the endeavor, it would be quite easy for Iranian government agents to infiltrate the network and actually turn the information against the people using it. If they have a list of the proxies being used, then all they need to do is watch for connections to those proxies, and you know who is bypassing their censorship. I hope for the sake of the dissidents in Iran, that the people coordinating these and similar efforts implement containment procedures, so that it would be difficult to compromise the entire list of proxies by any one person. The only comfort is that there are many groups in many countries speaking many languages working on this in an collaborative, yet uncoordinated method–the chaos is perhaps the most valuable aspect.
Which of course leads to the next question, how long before Iran just shuts off their Internet connection?