After the tragic and brutal murder of Neda Agha-Soltan on
desolate Tehran soil, the man who shot the footage of it in a
journalist-banned area knew he had done something monumental. He
recognized that he had done something that would infuriate his
government and had to be mindful of his own safety.
He considered
posting the video to YouTube or FaceBook, but those were too mainstream
and were monitored meticulously. Instead, he turned to a close
confidant, emailing him the low resolution, minuscule two-megabyte
video. Quickly, this friend propagated it to everyone, sending it to
"Voice of America", the newspaper "The Guardian", and five of his
friends. The message was inscribed with: "Let the world know."
People
copied the video and posted it on multiple websites and others who had
their own video and picture evidence came out of the woodwork. After
appearing on YouTube, it aired on CNN, and soon everyone in American
knew the once-nameless girl who is now the poster child of the Iranian
protest movement.
Once upon a time in a less-than-idyllic age,
authoritarian regimes could simply snip a few phone lines, and block a
couple of foreign interlopers from their sites, but that time has
passed. The advent of modern technology has changed the way people
operate, and made it that much more difficult for the system to suppress
information. The public now has virtually (no pun intended) unlimited
amounts of media from which to communicate, and no matter how many are
blocked, more will appear.
Iran's attempts at pulling the wool
over their citizen's eyes and their foibles and triumphs are being
carefully observed and monitored. Minds that were once imprisoned are
fighting for their rights to privacy and their rights to speak freely,
and not have certain things concealed from them, especially injustice!
Bob Dylan was right; the times they are a' changing.
There is one
lesson the government in Iran is proving to be infallible. While they
may be able to limit their own citizens from accessing and posting
content on the Internet, they cannot stop anyone from outside their
jurisdiction from doing so. People in America and other countries around
the world are there to lend a helping hand (or proxy server) to these
oppressed peoples, allowing them to remain heard and exercise their
impromptu cameraman skills.
Almost three dozen governments around
the world are known to actively monitor and censor their citizen's
Internet access and web activity. China, Uzbekistan, and Cuba are on the
list, but the recent winner has been Iran. Maybe soon they will have
their own pithy headline, like "The Great Firewall of China." As the
decades have progressed, Internet censorship is actually showing an
increase in these countries, but it is a moot point. The censor can't
win. All they can do is stall and frustrate. It's like a game of
whack-a-mole; one medium is censored and another is reporting three
minutes later.
This censorship has always been a tit for tat
system. When the people have some sort of uprising, no matter how small
in scale, the government gets nervous, thinking it is losing control. So
they do some censoring, create a scene, and flex their muscles so the
public is clear about who is in charge. Sometimes they do it as a
pre-emptive measure as well. On the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen
Square massacre in China, they actively blocked sites about a week
before, so the public couldn't find a place to come together and start
an e-riot.
Iran is actually very sophisticated in their Internet
censorship. When countries first started doing this, it was very
unstructured and easy to get around. People had no trouble defeating the
censorship methods employed by the government and it was only a minor
inconvenience, but it was the principle of the blocks that angered them.
Now, in Iran the censoring is actually a complex infrastructure, with
all Internet traffic squeezed through a sieve to find incriminating
information. Although this stops the grassroots of the computer user
community from surfing the web, the computer can get around these blocks
with myriad tools. Being resourceful is the only way to defeat these
injustices.
Because of those computer savvy and determined
netizens, the Internet is rich with raw, uncut footage of the Iran
protests, police brutality, and other crimes against the people. You can
see the evidence of their actions on other forms of communication as
well: news networks on T.V. eat this stuff up, and play it 24/7 with
their world highlights. As was mentioned earlier, the censor cannot win.
The Internet will always find a way to defeat the injustice and get the
real news to the people who need it, and won't be stopped by the
government crying "insubordination" or "treason" as someone tries to
talk to friends on MySpace.
Although safe once they are on the
Internet, in real life the risks are quite genuine for these amateur
journalists. People taking pictures are often harassed and threatened,
and their cameras confiscated, and they face the threat of being sent to
jail. On June 12, when the controversial outcome of the Iranian
election was announced, the country shut down text message servers for a
time, which was the prime tool of communication that the protestors
used, and so continues the endless game of whack-a-mole. The government
knocked down mole #1, and out of slots #2 and #3came Twitter and Skype.
Once the government finds a way to thwart this method of speak, the
people can always go back to the archaic art of speech: all share a
common vernacular, and word of mouth can spread like wildfire if the
message is incendiary.
When the government is serious about
getting something censored, and tired of the whack-a-mole game, they can
employ professional companies. Even before the much anticipated
election and its dubious outcome, the country of Iran was well-known for
running a tight ship on the subject of sensitive matters. They have a
great infrastructure for filtering and blocking that suppresses
information that is considered harmful or slanderous by the government.
Obviously, these companies don't condone or endorse government
censorship or any sort of privacy invasion, but whistling to the tune of
multi-million dollars, and they will do anything. This was empirically
proven when Iran brought in big names Siemens and Nokia to help engineer
an impregnable wall that had no loopholes for their citizens to utilize
and bypass their security checks.
Although some are scared into
submission by their repressive government, many are just determined to
circumvent the measures taken by their rulers, for there are always
loopholes. Many of these headstrong Iranians have utilized proxy
servers, which can help these illicit surfers remain anonymous while
browsing, and allow these incognito citizens the freedom of avoiding
being tracked while online.
In exchange for the small tradeoff of a
slight performance reduction in their browsing speed, these Iranians
can surf any site they want without being blocked. Tor, a volunteer run
proxy server, reports that Internet traffic using their servers to surf
anonymously from Iran has shot through the roof, when the censorship has
been heavily deployed and is breathing down every civilian's neck.
There is hope! Some people will not put up with this injustice, and will
fight and be resourceful in finding ways around it.
These
despotic tyrants hope to completely sequester their countries from the
rest of the world, so no one knows what is going on within their
borders, and the citizens don't know what they are missing on the
outside. They also want to eliminate any website or document that would
hurt their ideology at all. This simply cannot be done in today's world;
the genie is out of the bottle. The people know better, and they are
not going to take it.
Some governments are trying harder than ever
to censor and strip their citizens of their freedom and privacy rights.
China is a real over-achiever when it comes to this. They should be
awarded a big medal for all of the work they put in keeping their people
shielded from the rest of the world, and completely shut off.
Isolationism can only work for so long. You can feel the rumble every
time you log onto a news site, or view a shaky hand-held camera video
from a persecuted Iranian. It's getting more intense, and the feeling is
becoming more palpable every day; even the government is perturbed by
the vibrations.
It is an earthquake, slowly emerging, but every
time the tremors die down, the racket grows as another program
infiltrates their defenses. The people can feel it, and they are fueling
it. It is an earthquake, not to destroy and hurt, but to knock down the
monolithic skyscrapers that bar the public and infringe on their
privacy and freedom rights. It's growing, and the authoritarian
governments had better check their Richter scales and, however
grudgingly pursue change before it's too late. Bob Dylan may have been
an idyllic flower child, but he was also a soothsayer of his day, and
his words ring as true as they did back in the summer of '69, the summer
of purple haze, psychedelics; peace, love and rock n' roll: "There's a
battle outside and it's raging'... It'll soon shake your windows and
rattle your walls, for the times: they are a changing."
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