Democracy in Iran

Iran widens jamming of BBC as Revolutionary Guard cautions bloggers


The BBC claimed today that Iran had widened electronic jamming of its services, as the country's Revolutionary Guard ordered domestic websites and blogs to remove any material that might "create tension" amid post-election unrest.
Both the BBC's World News and Persian TV channels are now being jammed by "ground-based interference" in what one senior corporation insider told MediaGuardian.co.uk was akin to "electronic warfare".
Iranian authorities also blocked access to Yahoo Messenger early today as the country intensified its crackdown on all means of communication following Friday's controversial presidential poll.
The BBC's Persian website has also been blocked by filters, although the corporation said people were finding a way to unblock them manually and that use of the site had been "massive". It was receiving five videos a minute from people within Iran.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard, an elite body answering to the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said through the state news service that Iranian websites and bloggers must remove any materials that "create tension", or else they would face legal action.
This is the first public statement from what is the country's most powerful military force since the crisis erupted.
Iranian reformist websites, as well as blogs and Western social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, have been vital conduits for Iranians to inform the world about protests over the bitterly contested declaration of election victory for the hardline president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
At least 20 websites affiliated to the defeated reformist candidate, Mir Hussein Mousavi, have been blocked, although some users can still update their profiles by using proxy sites.
"Before this we could bypass filtering by using proxy websites, the links for which were distributed daily among friends by email. But now the Iranian communication ministry has also begun to tackle proxy websites too," one Iranian student said.
"But there is still a small number of people who update their Facebook and Twitter profiles by using special anti-filtering programmes installed on their PC rather than regular proxy websites. The problem is that many people don't know how to use this software."
Yahoo Messenger had played an important role since Friday, when the Iranian government began to block Iran's mobile phone network and satellite TV channels.
"Yahoo Messenger was one of the most important means that Iranians could still distribute information after the government filtered Facebook and Twitter," an Iranian graduate said.
"In the early morning I couldn't log into my Yahoo Messenger account. First I thought that's because of the government clampdowns on the internet but then I found that I have access to other websites but not my Messenger.
"The internet has a very important social function in Iran in comparison to Europe and other countries. We are one of the top 10 world's active blogging communities because of the level of censorship inside the country and now the government is cracking down on the internet as well."
An Iranian blogger added: "Iran's blogging community has been very quiet this week – mostly because they are afraid of being arrested. The government has already filtered thousands of websites and blogs since Friday's election."
The Iranian government barred foreign media yesterday from leaving their offices to report on the street protests.
Iran's opposition announced a third day of street demonstrations today.
The violence has left at least seven people dead, according to Iran's state media.
In an attempt to placate the opposition, the main electoral authority said yesterday it was prepared to conduct a limited recount of ballots at sites where candidates claim irregularities.
But the announcement did not satisfy Mousavi, who has called the election an "astonishing charade" and demanded it be cancelled and held again.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jun/17/iran-bbc-jamming-bloggers-revolutionary-guard

The crackdown continues, the question is will the protests continue and grow larger, or might Terhan become the next Tienanmen

 

So Khamenei has demanded an end to the protests and said they would crack down on them, while more protests are expected for tomorrow. Which means Terhan might in fact be the next Tienanmen

 

Its amazing that they refuse to allow 471 out of 475 candidates to run and then when their candidate can't beat the other three left they just steal the election.

 

Hold strong!

 

Ahmidenijad and Khamenai must be idiots though to really think the Iranian people would believe Ahmidenijad won in a "landslide." If they were smart they'd have made it seem closer and given Mousavi almost half the votes.

I've said this time and time again now....

 

It's very difficult to find out what's going on there again.

I dig the Green, Skip! THANKS!

 

I don't know what to think about the Iran election/protest, it important that it's citizens fight for fairness but even if they get what they are fighting for it's hard to see much change coming from it. Either Mousavi (who was the prime minister of Iran during the Iran-Iraq wars back in the 80s) becomes president or Ahmadinejad (Jew hating prick that helps the Iranian poor).

Mousavi is just a little bit left of Ahmadinejad far as policy and even then as president's they don't have much power, as we have seen (especially in the past couple of days) Khameini has the real power. I just hope that the protesters have the gall and the persistence to keep it up so they may have their rights relinquished upon them.

Even with that said Iran's power players see activism as a threat to national security, so we could very well see all of the protesters dead or beaten into submission.

 

the ayatollahs in Teheran are attempting the card of lead to scare the masses into submission, rising the death toll. they are not going to win. they are a leftover of the past and they must be wiped out of the face of earth.
a wind of revolution is blowing in Iran : this is a chance to make a better place not just of Iran, but of this whole earth and must not be wasted. This rebellion can't just mean advocating the victory of Mousawi. No one is willing to die just to change the color of the curtains, i hope. let's hope that this is one of the signs of the awake of hippiedom intended as the refusal of pre-cooked truthts instead, a dish commonly served cold both in oppressed and "free" countries. i want to send my personal wish of best luck to the rebels , my mourning for the lives of those brave Iranians murdered by order of Khamenei, that lousy-bearded wizard and his lieutenant ahmadinejad, and an advice, not to leave this dish of rebellion to chill on the desk of history! a long time can pass until the next one is served, remember tiananmen square. yet iran is incomparably weaker than china so Iranian women and men, never put up the fight: remember, you are applying for a big life insurance in favor of your daughters and sons. i know it is your struggle, not ours; still you are fighting for something that is an issue for every thinking human being and it's too bad that this battle is fought only in Iran now.

look at ahmadinejad face. he looks tired and concerned. renew your courage and rejoyce, the price of freedom is high because freedom is precious and it is your pride as a nation to win it ourselves, not to take an usury loan from the US in order to purchase a counterfeit.

 

I think there is more potential for democracy in Iran than in the vast majority of the middle east.

Free Iran!

 

Nada,

a young Iranian girl dies , shot to death by religious lunatics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d70PtbSrLkY


people of Iran, never give up, don't allow your oppressors to make useless Nada's blood and of the tenths of other brave women and men .

That would be like killing Nada and her sisters and brothers twice.

ahmadinejad, khamenei, you should hang for this one and all the others.
Even Jesus would never forgive what you do... and neither the one and the only God Himself, i hope.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8111670.stm

the BBC has a good 90 second video. At first the giant crowd is running away screaming from police and militia on bikes and what may be gunshots sounds like it can be heard. Then the crowd(or a separate one) starts to advance and run down the security forces

 

What you fail to take into account as a consequence to this, is the formal unification and organization of the vocal left, the voice of the people, les voix de gauche.

People have a taste of democracy and they are craving it, in Iran. This is the kind of rebel against the changing of the guard is a positive outcome, mos def.

 

Today we learn that internet censorship in Iran is powered by western technology, a particularly active method known as deep packet inspection , a sort of distributed network sniffer and packet analysis tool that is also responsible for the slowness of network operations in that country (imagine how much computing power and/or time it takes to analyze each single relevant data packet). We also apprehend that the sellers of this technology are Nokia and Siemens. We are accustomed to corporations and their carefree politics when it comes to earning bucks but this is outrageously offensive and remembers us of the IBM affaire during WWII, when they sold their early-stage, pre-electronics computing machine technology to nazi germany which used it to run the administration of their extermination camps.

I am an enthusiast of nokia products. they are rugged and inexpensive and nokia labs are working on new efficient and potentially revolutionary ways to use solar power by exploiting the peculiar physical properties of nanotubes. they are working on a totally new ground, emerged from studies who actually discovered new physics laws.

but this is too much to take. if nokia-brand censorship in iran turns out to be a proven fact then the first line of defense is boycott & propaganda . I am going to tell beppe grillo's blog which is a powerful channel for independent media in italy and i invite everyone to search for info on this subject. after all we free westerners have the Holy Freedom Of Going Shopping and choosing as consumers, but we also can use our money as a weapon and choose as responsible activists.

also, i dont know how much the freenet project can be of help to create a communication tunnel, neither i know if the filters are used to spot and prosecute blindly the mantainers of freenet nodes in Iraq, or if tor hidden resources are monitored. every information on this ground can be highly valuable. network gurus, please give us hints.


http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=129123

 

The U.S. is exploiting the whole thing to create unrest and destabilize Iran, so they can gain geopolitically in the region.

This democracy thing is so cliche, it becomes predictable: every election that is unfavorable to the U.S. will be followed by a highly publicized "freedom rally" and innocuous statements by the Anglo-American official aegis.

The ironic thing is that protests of this magnitude and length are never ever allowed within the U.S., much less with guns being openly brandished in public.

And we all know the U.S. is also good at rigging elections.

 

I find it humerous when people come out and say how the elections were so obviously rigged, when until they saw the highlightes on CNN that showed that the "good guy" didn't beat the "bad guy" and all kinds of shit is going down.

Western media will always have a biased opinion, and there is lots and lots of stuff we will never know...

As with anything else in life, remember that there are always three sides to any story, the third side being the truth.


For those who are interested, here's an article that tries to shed some light from the other side of this issue;

http://counterpunch.org/amin06222009.html



How come no one is said a word on how the Egyptian elections in 2005 was a complete hoax, with obvious inconsistancies, yet, Bush called up the new president congratulation him for his win. ...


I'm not saying it was rigged, or it wasn't. Just keep an open mind.

 

Who here formed their opinion based on what CNN said?

Kind of like... every media in the world?

Wow that's deep dude.

That article is utter crap. Really. Its surprising that someone would praise a democracy that eliminates 471 out of 475 candidates before they hold an election that they completely steal anyway.

Its really a disgrace that people like you would do volunteer PR for repressive authoritarian states. For fux sake dude, this is a regime that hangs 16 year old girls for crimes against chastity. I don't know what kind of teen rebel politics you are trying to shock us with here but its not impressing anyone.

 

Not only are people showing solidarity in Iran, but protests have broken out through all fractions of the earth. Like the Sri Lanka conflict, people are rallying to pressure their own governments to acknowledge the importance that democracy and rights for all citizens of the globe are in the modern day and this ties into the freedoms of the press and access to information.

It's such a hopeful message that Iran and people everywhere can do this together.

 

A democratic Iran will be harder to stop going nuke i suspect. like things how they are tyvm.