News stories tend to drift across us in a ‘who cares’ sort of way – the Berlin Wall didn’t because it was such a seachange that it was obviously going to change the world and it was great to see attractive women dancing on the wall. What is happening in Iran just now, in the blue corner is the recently ‘re-elected’ incumbent government and in the green corner is the opposition who seriously believe the election was rigged, is more buttock clenching because things are being fought for – this is freedom wrought from real oppression – Berlin kind of wanted freedom anyway with the guards deliberately missing escaping east Berliners – these bastards don’t. Eight dead and countless injured from beatings with horrific pictures and video of the police doing the beatings with sticks – and the press confined to their hotels with no information coming out.
Or so the bastards thought.
Twitter unbelievably comes to the fore – simple under 140 character messages become resistance encryptions to release real stories about what is going on which every new agency is listening to. The US foreign office has even asked Twitter’s ISP to delay its outage for essential maintenance to allow this communication to continue. This is almost a World War II type of operation with a 21st century spin – cyber warfare is real.
There are real people risking real lives in Iran twittering information to a global audience (I see 1200 messages waiting in a minute on twitter on #iranelection” – this is a 21st century phenomenon – like the documentary ‘Death in Yugoslavia’ this is a media driven war or a cyberwar over a protest on a suspect election.
The Irananian secret service are seeking out the Iranian twitterers so everyone is setting their twitter position to Teheran and their time to GMT +3.5 to protect them. And they are blocking proxy servers allowing them to twitter in the first place so tens of thousands of people, like me, are opening up Iranian IP addresses to allow oppressed protesters the chance to speak to the world.
Without twitter I wouldnt have seen the shocking Boston Globe photographs and not had a sense of how important this world event was and how horrific it can turn into. This is such an electronic warfare with photoshopped pictures of government rallies with figures duplicated to make it look large! Fake sites are asking for name/address/mobile and email address of supporters are set up to gather list of supporters to silence them. Cyber attacks (DDOS) on the Iranian government websites are soaking up Iranian bandwidth for the supporters as well as the government.
Long live freedom, having read Persepolis recently it was so depressing to see the first few chapters recreated in the news – hopefully the 21st century technology will change the later chapters. Obama did point out that the opposition policies are not far removed from the current government, although Holocaust denial doesn’t seem to be amongst them.
Green marks the colour of the revolution – people colour their twitter icons green, Iranian football playes wear green bracelets and people got excited when the BBC’s page went green (it does that depending on one of 4 colours – ironically it means Comedy on the BBC site).
What will happen if it is found out that the current government have been democratically elected after all (assuming the recount takes place and is shown in their favour) where will democracy supporters stand then?
The guardian reports -
Readers: Please keep in mind that Twitter is not reliable and that the Guardian is for the most part unable to verify the authenticity of these feeds. We are doing our best to maintain our standard, stringent journalistic practices, but since the Iranian government has banned foreign journalists from covering the protests, it is difficult.
