Iran Cant Stop Dissemination Of Information

With all the violence and government censorship taking place in Iran, international journalists from the United States and elsewhere are having lots of trouble.  Iran doesn’t want any information getting to the outside world about the extent of the revolution and violence taking place. 

“Following a massive opposition rally Monday, authorities restricted journalists — including Iranians working for foreign media — from reporting on the streets. They could effectively only work from their offices, conducting telephone interviews and monitoring official sources such as state TV.” – Associated Free Press

Some journalists having been forced to leave because the Iranian government would not renew their Visa which they received to cover the election. 

Iran has also begun censoring communication online as well.  They are throttling bandwidth within their country and blocking popular communication platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube to name a few.   All of these efforts by Iran to censor information have been rather futile.  Social media and tech savvy geeks in Iran and around the world have shown that trying to completely shut down communication is tough to do.  The only way to really crush communication would be to pull the plug on critical network infrastructure and backbones, however that would leave government entities out of luck as well.  Corporate media who cannot have large six-figure cameras on the street have turned to citizen journalist tools to tell the story from the front lines. 

I watched a reporter on CNN who was walking near a rally in which Iranians were being beaten record his story on a cell phone while walking down the street, he nervously looked around while talking knowing at any time they could become a target of Iranian police.  Truthfully, this could have been anyone using a simple cell phone to record a video describing what they were witnessing.  The only difference being this reporter had the backing of a major news network.  The Iranian election has shown that you don’t need that support to get your message out to thousands.

Pictures (like this) spread on TwitPic(a website for sharing photos on Twitter) of a rally with an estimated 100,000 protesters collected over 60,000 views in less than 24 hours.  This YouTube video shows unarmed Iranian’s being shot at by Basiji forces in the streets of Tehran. These are the kind of images Iran wants to keep under wraps as they try and down play the size of protests.   Iran has now stated as of Wednesday evening that those who engage in ‘incitement’ by using Twitter and other blocked websites to communicate to other countries could face execution.  Yes, I said execution.

Iran will continue to try and keep things up wraps, but tech geeks world wide who are aiding and embedding Iranian protesters in online ‘bunkers’ by offering proxies and encrypted VPN’s will continue to prevail.  The real question is where is all this heading?  #IranElection continues to stay atop Twitter trends though trends showing it may be leveling off with 27,000 tweets using the #IranElection hashtag on June 15th, 2009 and just 19,000 tweets on June 17th.