Noli Irritare Leones

A little Darfur news, really quick, and since I’ve been neglecting this area for the past couple of weeks, I’ll be referring to articles from last week as well as this week. A lot of the stories at the moment concern refugee resettlement. Some displaced people in eastern Chad are finding that they can’t go home again.

… “The Risk of Return: Repatriating the Displaced in the Context of Conflict in Eastern Chad,” a new report from Human Rights Watch, documents the dangerous conditions returnees encounter. Based on hundreds of interviews in the region conducted over two years, it also outlines the complex political and ethnic currents that have turned eastern Chad - along with the Darfur region of neighboring Sudan - into a crisis zone.

Upheaval in Chad has displaced an estimated 180,000 people. Crowded into camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) and concerned about their property, about 27,000 of these have ventured home in 2008. The UN peacekeeping operation in eastern Chad, known as MINURCAT, has designated return of a “critical mass” of the displaced to their home villages as one criterion for measuring the success of the mission. However, the Human Rights Watch report says, the government’s army, police and gendarmes are rarely encountered anywhere in the east except for large, well-defended towns.

Dangerous conditions greatly limit humanitarian groups’ access to outlying areas. But armed groups, ranging from Chadian rebel factions to loosely organized criminal gangs, operate freely….

A group of refugees (many of them from Darfur) have left camps in eastern Chad to begin new lives in the US.

In Sudan, UNAMID officials visited returnees in north Darfur.

The visit to Masri village town was prompted by recent reports from the Sector regarding the return of some people earlier displaced from the village as a result of the conflict. UNAMID team held a meeting with traditional leaders (Sheikhs and Umdas), women and youth groups. Mr. Miguel Martin explained that the purpose of the visit was to be familiar with the situation in the village and to see how UNAMID can assist in terms of providing security and to verify the total number of people that have returned to the area voluntarily.

During the meeting, the residents revealed that about 2,300 households with an average family size of 8 individuals had returned to the area. Before the conflict in 2003, Masri’s population was more than 2,500 households, while others were displaced to places such as Kabkabiya, Nyala and Kutum town. UNAMID was also informed that population have been returning since mid of 2007 where a total of 500 households returned to Masri. More displaced have expressed willingness to return, however, lack of transportation remain as main impediment preventing the displaced from returning….

Reliefweb has a United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Humanitarian Action in Southern Sudan Report, week 26, 22 - 28 Jun 2009. This report says that the Sobat River Corridor is set to reopen for humanitarian aid and commercial cargo, and that the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has carried out more attacks within Southern Sudan.

Darfur rebels say they are ready to resume peace talks, and two Chadian tribal groups, in a dialog sponsored by the UN peacekeeping mission there, have agreed to end a longstanding ment. Some displaced people in eastern Chad are finding that they can’t go home again.

… “The Risk of Return: Repatriating the Displaced in the Context of Conflict in Eastern Chad,” a new report from Human Rights Watch, documents the dangerous conditions returnees encounter. Based on hundreds of interviews in the region conducted over two years, it also outlines the complex political and ethnic currents that have turned eastern Chad - along with the Darfur region of neighboring Sudan - into a crisis zone.

Upheaval in Chad has displaced an estimated 180,000 people. Crowded into camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) and concerned about their property, about 27,000 of these have ventured home in 2008. The UN peacekeeping operation in eastern Chad, known as MINURCAT, has designated return of a “critical mass” of the displaced to their home villages as one criterion for measuring the success of the mission. However, the Human Rights Watch report says, the government’s army, police and gendarmes are rarely encountered anywhere in the east except for large, well-defended towns.

Dangerous conditions greatly limit humanitarian groups’ access to outlying areas. But armed groups, ranging from Chadian rebel factions to loosely organized criminal gangs, operate freely….

A group of refugees (many of them from Darfur) have left camps in eastern Chad to begin new lives in the US.

In Sudan, UNAMID officials visited returnees in north Darfur.

The visit to Masri village town was prompted by recent reports from the Sector regarding the return of some people earlier displaced from the village as a result of the conflict. UNAMID team held a meeting with traditional leaders (Sheikhs and Umdas), women and youth groups. Mr. Miguel Martin explained that the purpose of the visit was to be familiar with the situation in the village and to see how UNAMID can assist in terms of providing security and to verify the total number of people that have returned to the area voluntarily.

During the meeting, the residents revealed that about 2,300 households with an average family size of 8 individuals had returned to the area. Before the conflict in 2003, Masri’s population was more than 2,500 households, while others were displaced to places such as Kabkabiya, Nyala and Kutum town. UNAMID was also informed that population have been returning since mid of 2007 where a total of 500 households returned to Masri. More displaced have expressed willingness to return, however, lack of transportation remain as main impediment preventing the displaced from returning….

Reliefweb has a United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Humanitarian Action in Southern Sudan Report, week 26, 22 - 28 Jun 2009. This report says that the Sobat River Corridor is set to reopen for humanitarian aid and commercial cargo, and that the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has carried out more attacks within Southern Sudan.

Darfur rebels say they are ready to resume peace talks, and two Chadian tribal groups, in a dialog sponsored by the UN peacekeeping mission there, have agreed to end a longstanding feud.

While the persiankiwi account is still silent, one Iranian Tweeter is saying that

persiankiwi is safe but not able to tweet,. 4 their safety best not say more till they r ready

Several are tweeting about the people detained:

RT: Mahsa Amrabadi, EtemadMelli journalist, detained 2 weeks ago, was/is pregnant. No info since 2 weeks #iranelection

Mahsa Amrabadi, Etemad Melli journalist, has been detained for over 2 weeks & her family are worried. #iranelection

prosecution of protesters started. ,Saeed Mortazavi, man in charge, indicates dozens B sentenced 2 death . #iranelection #iranelections

as well as other aspects of the crackdown on dissent

Daily Khabar was stopped from printing 4 time this week. #iranelection #Iran #gr88

A Teen age boy is set upon by a gang of Police Thugs!@ http://shooresh1917.blogspo… #iranelection

Others discuss what kind of protest actions can be taken.

Long-term strikes need some preparations. #Iranelection

get list privately on own cmputr, prepare who U wld spread news 2 v quickly. Only way stay ahead basij #gr88 #iranelection

The time has come 2 organise, oganise, organise . V imp info flow 2 Iran, Mousavi says prepare mailing lists #gr88 #neda #Iran

or talk about what the Iranian government may be up to

RT Sources say Islamic Guard not coming to Tehran, Basij is in charge and IG are not 100% behind Ahmadi #iranelection #revolution #Tehran

WARNING! IDs in the form of xyz123 are Iran regime’s bots. Avoid clicking on any links provided by them. #IranElection #gr88 Tehran Neda RT

or pass on the latest word from Mousavi

Mousavi: In a trip, a 19-year-old gave me a green scarf & we thought this might work. #iranelection
17 minutes ago from web

…Mousavi: The green colour of election was from the people themselves not by us. #iranelection
17 minutes ago from web

Mousavi: My presence may decrease the violence OR they might beat me as well. #iranelection
17 minutes ago from web

mousvi:We objected the shut down of SMS but telecom leaders said they didn’t order it. #iranelection
18 minutes ago from web

mousavi:Things happened before, during & after the election process that each could “paralyse” us! #iranelection
19 minutes ago from web

Mousavi: I didn’t know the leader likes AN so much. If I was told from the start, I’d think of another way. #iranelection
20 minutes ago from web

mousavi:I wasn’t expecting the election fraud to be this widespread. It has surprised not only me but everyone else. #iranelection

Mousavi: Presence of plain cloths is illegal. #iranelection

Note: For this post I’ve copy/pasted Tweets from several people who appear to be Tweeting from Iran, not necessarily in chronological order, and not all from the same person for any particular block quote set. I have made no attempt to confirm the information in the Tweets I’m quoting; some are from people who have been reliable in the past, but others are from people I don’t know and got off the hashtag search.

It’s Quaker practice that each month we, as meetings, consider a set of queries, on a different subject each month. Meetings vary in how they consider the Queries; ours reads them after meeting for worship on the First Sunday and provides time for people to speak to them. The queries are set by each Yearly Meeting, and so, though both topics and specific queries resemble each other from one Yearly Meeting to another, they also evolve in slightly different directions. Here are the advices and queries for Pacific Yearly Meeting, the one to which I belong. This month, the advices and queries are on social and civic responsibility. And the queries are:

What am I doing to carry my share of responsibility for the government of our community, nation, and world?

Am I persistent in my efforts to promote constructive change?

How do we attend to the suffering of others in our local community, in our state and nation, and in the world community?

Do we try to understand the causes of suffering, and do we address them as a Meeting?

How do we, individually and as a Meeting, support the organizations that work to bring the testimonies of Friends into reality in our society?

As is usual with the queries, we begin with ones directed at the individual and move on to ones that speak to what the meeting as a whole is doing.

So, how do I as an individual, and how does my meeting as a Quaker meeting, act on issues of social and civic responsibility? Since not all of my readers are Friends, I’ll start with what our structure looks like. Like other Quaker meetings, we have a committee that concerns itself with these issues; it’s called Peace and Social Concerns Committee. Sometimes in larger meetings this committee will form subcommittees, or even split off separate committees; at one point, when I was part of Palo Alto Friends Meeting, we had a Peace and Social Action Committee, a committee that dealt more with local hunger and homelessness, and a Sanctuary Committee, for assisting refugees from the civil war that was then going on in El Salvador. Orange County Friends Meeting is smaller, and we only have the Peace and Social Concerns Committee. There’s also an outreach budget, where we as a meeting donate to organizations (both Quaker organizations and other organizations) that share our concerns. Or in theory we do. Unfortunately, Orange County Friends hasn’t made its budget the past couple of years, and our ability to meet our outreach budget has suffered; in our last meeting for business we discussed what to do about this issue.

In addition to standing committees, there are things that come up as matters of individual concern. One of our older members has been active for years in social service activities in the San Clemente area. Some of us have been involved with the Catholic Worker house in Santa Ana, Isaiah House, to various degrees and in various ways. One Friend has been particularly engaged with what’s happened in Sri Lanka, and has been informing the rest of us, both via Facebook and in real life.

When I considered these queries this month, what came to my mind when I thought of what I do individually was that actually a lot of my concern about issues of social and civic responsibility is expressed online. And, on the one hand, there are some situations where blogging can be a real form of activism; you can see that both in the way countries like Iran try to contain their bloggers, and in the way politicians in the US try to appeal to netroots. But, on the other hand, for a small time blogger like myself, a lot of the time it feels more like a hobby, even a time sink, chatting with online friends, than real activism. Should I sometimes be getting off the blog, and doing other things?

I’m going to start this one by giving my relevant professional background. I spent over a decade in the computer security field; most of this time was, actually, spent providing technical support for products related to software protection, but some of it involved working in sustaining engineering and maintenance for a cryptographic accelerator that worked with SSL traffic. At the time, I was on OpenSSL and Apache mailing lists, and regularly did bandwidth tests with new Apache releases. Since switching to a job in a completely different part of the computer business, I’ve occasionally continued to follow computer security web sites, but as a hobby, without any current professional tie.

Because of this, I’m a bit embarrassed not to have heard, before, of some of the applications that are being used in #iranelection cyber warfare. Tor and onion routing were new to me; so is Slowloris. I guess that shows how easy it is to fall behind in your technical knowledge of one part of the computer business after you’ve shifted to another part.

I didn’t want to trust a blog on the functioning of Slowloris unless I knew the background and technical expertise of the blogger; Bruce Schneier, for instance, is someone whom I’d trust highly on any computer security matter, but a random Iran cyber warfare site could be getting its facts wrong. So I’ve spent some time Googling to see what other sites, of known reliability, might have to say about the program. It turns out that Slowloris does, in fact, work as advertised: it is a slow DDOS attack, to which many web servers are vulnerable.

The difficulty with DDOS attacks, in a cyber warfare context, is that if you attack bandwidth, you risk bogging down the whole network. Which means, if you’re attacking the bandwidth of an Iranian government site, you’re also using up Iranian Internet bandwidth in general, and bogging down the very resource that protesters are using to communicate.

Enter Slowloris: Web servers are vulnerable to an attack where you telnet to port 80, issue a partial HTTP request, and then bg the process, then do it again. In this way, you bog down the server, which uses up threads waiting for each connection to time out. Slowloris automates this process; it repeatedly, but slowly, issues partial HTTP requests. And now Twitter uses are attempting to make a distributed denial of service attack on the Iranian government web site that’s attempting to use crowd sourcing to identify protesters, by encouraging other Twitter users to install Slowloris and use it to bog the site down.

I have no report on how effective this effort has been so far; its effectiveness as a tactic will depend on several factors: what web server the Iranian government is using, how its settings have been tuned (some ways of configuring your web server make it more resistant to such DDOS attacks than others), how many people join in the Slowloris attacks, what operating systems they run Slowloris from, etc.

Just a few things, because, as always, others are blogging this better, and some of this stuff I’ve already passed on to my Facebook friends …

Today, as you may know if you’ve checked the news on Iran (somewhat overshadowed though it is at the moment by the news of today’s coup in Honduras, and, even more, by the continuing coverage of MJ’s death), the first officially permitted demonstration in days took place in Tehran; much of the #iranelection Twittering has concerned this demonstration. Others are Tweeting about maneuverings among Iran’s leaders, some of them confirmed accounts of actual speeches, but some definitely NOT confirmed. Recent examples of the latter:

First, Tehran Bureau recently blogged, on their web site, a rumor of a possible compromise in the works, that Rafsanjani was supposed to be negotiating behind the scenes, that would have led to a run off between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad. They then blogged that a source had told them the deal had fallen through. (For all I know, their sources may both have been true, and the deal may really have been in the works and now called off, but as it stands, it’s just something that’s been reported by one sometimes well connected Iranian-American site, and not confirmed.)

Second, there are Tweets right now saying both that Mousavi has been arrested, and that his arrest is NOT confirmed. Since you may well read this hours or days after I post it, depending on how often you look at my blog, it’s likely that, by the time you read this post, you’ll know which story is true. I don’t.

What I do know:

Photos of recent events have been posted, among other places, to a Flickr group on Tehran; the group is also getting plenty of other Tehran photos posted, so you have to hunt to find the ones posted by protesters.

There’s a Neda Soltan channel on Youtube with protest footage, including footage of today’s Ghoba mosque protest. Yesterday there were also protest montages up set to Michael Jackson’s songs “Beat It” and “They Don’t Really Care About Us,” something you can take as either a marketing ploy not to have the Iranian protester message lost in that competing story (the videos were, at the time, showing up in Michael Jackson searches), or a sign of the breadth of the world popularity of US pop music, or, perhaps, both.

Also on Youtube, Joan Baez has posted a video of herself singing “We Shall Overcome,” with some lyrics in Farsi, for the Iranian people:

The cyber war between Iranian protesters and the Iranian government continues, with each side attempting to use the net to its advantage. As Steve has mentioned, while the Iranian protesters use Tor’s onion routing to evade Iran’s filtering, the Iranian government has set up a web site using crowd sourcing to attempt to identify Iranian demonstrators. In turn, a cyberwar4iran blog has posted instructions for how to use Slowloris to join in a DDOS attack on the crowd sourcing site, instructions that it says will tie up server threads, not bandwidth, thereby bringing that site down while leaving the rest of the net open (never having heard of Slowloris before this weekend, I’m not prepared to offer an opinion one way or the other on the accuracy of this analysis, but as a computer professional I’m curious about all this cyber warfare stuff, and will be reading up on all this stuff later). Others interested in the technical side of things are referred to A Deeper Look at The Iranian Firewall (via Bruce Schneier).

Also prominent among the weekend’s Tweets is the story of persiankiwi. No, I’m not going to mask his name, though it turns out I was mistaken in my belief some days ago that he was someone like TehranBureau, posting from outside Iran (I initially thought the “kiwi” in his username meant that he was an Iranian in New Zealand with good contacts within Iran). He does appear to be coming from inside Iran, but I’m not masking his account name because, aside from any general debate about how identifying such an online pseudonym actually is, if there’s one thing that’s clear, at this point, about persiankiwi’s status, it’s that the Iranian government darn well already knows about the account.

The rest is a muddle. A few days ago, persiankiwi posted (the last thing he said is at the top):

Allah - you are the creator of all and all must return to you - Allah Akbar - #Iranelection Sea of Green
8:39 AM Jun 24th from web
thank you ppls 4 supporting Sea of Green - pls remember always our martyrs - Allah Akbar - Allah Akbar - Allah Akbar #Iranelection
8:36 AM Jun 24th from web
we must go - dont know when we can get internet - they take 1 of us, they will torture and get names - now we must move fast - #Iranelection
8:34 AM Jun 24th from web
Everybody is under arrest & cant move - Mousavi - Karroubi even rumour Khatami is in house guard - #Iranelection -
8:28 AM Jun 24th from web
they pull away the dead into trucks - like factory - no human can do this - we beg Allah for save us - #Iranelection
8:23 AM Jun 24th from web

Some people found this sequence of posts ominous, and, as the days passed, there were worried Tweets, both from people apparently inside Iran and from people outside, wondering about persiankiwi’s status. In the meantime, persiankiwi was among the people attacked by name by @Vagheeiat, an account by someone claiming to be part of the Iran Revolutionary Guard. Discussion of persiankiwi reached the point where a #persiankiwi hashtag joined the assortment of hashtags that cover Iran election traffic (which tags at this point include #iranelection, #gr88, #Iran09, and #Neda).

Then, yesterday, a new account surfaced, claiming to be the old persiankiwi (again, most recent Tweets on top):

… all free iranians: in the name of allah I confirm that I’m the old persiankiwi

…

they have tortured us - police very agressive the last days - Allah Akbar #Iranelection
4:05 AM Jun 27th from web
Account is controlled - they know my password #Iranelection Twitter

Today, some people are Tweeting that persiankiwi has been arrested

heard about @PersianKiwi I have no idea how they captured him/her, he/she was using freegate I guess

while others caution that it may be a false rumor

I would not believe everything on internet sites about persiankiwi, trying mk ppl fightened and stop tweeting #IranElection #iran #gr88

Finally, I’ll note that someone posted to #iranelection a link to Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy, an analysis of how to realistically organize nonviolent resistance to dictatorships.

It’s funny; it seems like so long since I’ve read about him and had it be about his talent, and not his brokenness. But just the other day, one of my Twitter friends posted linkgs to a couple of Michael Jackson accounts on his blip playlist: Farewell My Summer Love and She’s Out of My Life. It was the latter that caught my attention - it had been a favorite of mine when I was younger - and so I played it. There’s Michael Jackson, good looking actually before all the plastic surgery, and with the voice of an angel, singing as if to express all the heartbreak in the world. And I noted it, and had at set aside, as something I was going to blog about, later in the week, when I felt back in a writing mood.

What I meant to write was about what that particular song brought up for me. How I hear

Damned indecision, and cursed pride,
I kept my love for her locked deep inside.
And it cuts like a knife,
She’s out of my life.

and it brings back what I’ve felt so intensely, at the loss of several people, and never quite believed they felt, at the loss of me. About how it left me wondering, was I really always so much the one more vulnerable in a relationship? Or was it just that much easier to see my own vulnerability than that of the other person? And do I want someone, somewhere, that I once loved, to have felt that at the loss of me, or do I want him not to have hurt that much? It’s kind of double edged - you don’t exactly want pain for people you once cared about, but you don’t exactly want indifference, either.

But of course, events moved on while I was still pulling together the words, and now instead I’m writing about the death of the singer - who was a child star when I was a child, and who, however strangely he may have grown up, seems way too young to die.

One of my coworkers, when I told him, quipped, “But who will we make fun of now.” But this evening I see oxfordgirl Tweeting from Iran

Many ppl in Iran loved young man who died 2nite, I remember pasdaran arresting men dressing lk him. #IranElection

It occurs to me, seeing this child star from my childhood already dead, that some day the famous person whose death is being announced will be someone I’ve actually known in real life, and I’ll be remembering Joan’s story about the upside down Christmas ornament, or Kathy’s craving for barely popped popcorn, as I read the official accounts of their lives and deaths. But not too soon, Joan and Kathy, please not too soon.

I’m watching Twitter, waiting for clothes to dry for work, that I forgot to start drying sooner. @mattyglesias says “Hey internet, do more interesting stuff for me to write about.” I consider pointing him to the apparent Iranian government agent threatening Iranian opposition activists on Twitter a couple of hours ago, but The Lede already wrote about that.

Iranian opposition activists have been scarce on Twitter for the past day or so, at least the big name familiar ones that people have grown used to following. I hope it’s simply that the Internet in Iran is more slowed down and filtered right now, and not that they’ve been arrested. I’m relieved to see @oxfordgirl back, warning people about the likely government agent, encouraging Iranians to send photos and videos that show a newspaper first to establish the date, and announcing that

MOUSAVI: Friday, We all are going to send GREEN BALLOONS to the sky to show that now ALL PEOPLE OF THE WORLD ARE IRANIAN.

@persiankiwi, though, hasn’t been heard from in nearly 24 hours, and one of his last Tweets spoke of someone in his group being arrested who would likely be tortured and name names.

I’m not able to bring myself to write this morning, whether more about South Africa or about anything else. Maybe tomorrow. Trying to unstall myself on the novel after setting it aside for the last couple of weeks of my class.

Link of the day: Ta-Nehisi Coates strikes, to my mind, just the right balance in talking about fatherhood in Obama and Father’s Day.

One of the bloggers on the “stay out of the Iran election” side (whose link I of course misplaced, sorry), looked back to 1994 to make a point about the limits of our knowledge of foreign countries. Would anyone in the US have guessed, he said, that it would be Rwanda, and not South Africa, that would see the bloodbath?

1994 was the year of South Africa’s first multi-racial elections. And, no, people I personally knew here in the US weren’t expecting a blood bath. We were celebrating, the way we’d celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall. But at the same time, I know where he’s coming from, because I remember, at the time of the last divestment demonstrations at Stanford about South Africa, the way some of the responses on the right showed a wariness of the ANC; no one could actually say that apartheid was right, but to some conservatives, change was still scary.

In fact, like Spain’s transition from Franco to democracy in Europe, South Africa’s transition to multi-racial democracy has been a success story: a thriving democracy, one of the strongest economies in Africa, none of the feared backlash against white people, etc. But it’s also, like any country, one with its own problem spots: a history of AIDS denialism, recent problems with xenophobia, etc. I’d like to do a blog series on some of South Africa’s recent ups and downs, but for today, not having much time left, I’ll just point out this Economist article on President Jacob Zuma’s relationship with trade unions.

HAVING helped catapult Jacob Zuma into the presidency, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the country’s biggest trade union federation, is flexing its muscles. Zwelinzima Vavi, the secretary-general, has declared that the country’s policies are determined not by the government alone, but by the ruling tripartite alliance, which includes COSATU along with the African National Congress (ANC) and the Communist Party. “We are the policymakers,” he said on June 4th, “and the government implements. The government doesn’t lead any more.”

In normal times, this might be dismissed as so much posturing. But South Africa is suffering its first recession for 17 years, and the trade unions want to spare their members from having to bear the brunt of the downturn. The official unemployment rate has already risen to 23.5%; the real rate is much higher. And with nearly 2m members (about 11% of the workforce), most of them in the public sector, COSATU has the power to insist on being taken seriously….

A new, apparently Iranian account popped up last night and sent me a link to this video - actually the upload comment says it was posted in 2007 and is “a new political song by the Persian legend Dariush”. I can’t, of course, understand any of the words, but the images are critical of the mullahs and the new Tweeter adds “Commemorate the killed Youth of Iran wherever you are!!”

Latest comments from various Iranian Tweeters include (doing a blanket removal of names this time rather than taking the time to sort which people are OK to identify):

all shops was closed - nowhere to go - they follow ppls with helicopters - smoke and fire is everywhere #Iranelection

U can always @ me, some of my contacts/friends picked up last night, but I am safe. #IranElection #Iran
about 4 hours ago from web

Mousavi is free, he is closely monitored by security agents, but he is free and will try and appear at rally. #Iranelection #Iran

A special tribunal will be setup to try those arrested in recent day. Wonder what will go on in there. #neda #iranelection #gr88
about 15 hours ago from web

Mohsen Rezaee has decided to side with the regime than to follow his complaints. He withdrew them from Guardian Council. #neda #iranelection
about 15 hours ago from web

Families of detainees have assembled in front of the revolutionary court, surrounded by police. #iranelection
about 2 hours ago from web

M B Ghalibaf, Tehran’s pragmatic conservative mayor : “You can’t solve the election problem with force” #iranelection
about 2 hours ago from web

Ppl gathered in Baharestan but police & plain cloths don’t let the core of the rally to form. #iranelection #gr88 #neda
about 2 hours ago from web

Military helicopters flying over Tehran. Scattered conflicts in Baharestan continues. #iranelection #gr88

just in from Baharestan Sq - situation today is terrible - they beat the ppls like animals - #Iranelection#iran#neda#mousavi#tehran RT RT

From Tehran: People are being warned not to use ambulances, but to take the injured to other hospitals in their private cars. #iranelection

Keep an eye on Citizen Tube for the latest #iranelection video http://bit.ly/QaZPN

How to handle the police! This might save your life! http://tinyurl.com/luex5x #IranElection #Iran

People have been using onion routing to get around filtering.

A few words about the whole “What should Obama do” debate. Scott Lemieux writes that Foreign Policy Isn’t About Your Feelings.

… what’s most striking is that Treacher et al. have yet to even attempt an argument explaining, in concrete terms, what more forceful rhetoric or more private dessert eating would accomplish.

I’m with him. Look, we as private citizens can afford essentially empty gestures like turning our avatars green (and I’m not saying that’s a bad gesture). While letting the protesters know that people outside Iran sympathize with them, they also do no harm. But more forceful rhetoric from a President has the potential for doing harm - if it makes it easier for the regime to paint its critics as American tools, or simply if it raises expectations for US government action that aren’t going to be filled. I think Obama’s response so far has been spot on - careful rhetoric and the suggestion made by the State Department to shift Twitter maintenance are just about right. Acting like my little dog when he sees a German shepherd, with lots of loud but ultimately empty barking, wouldn’t be. (Yes, we’re a big dog and he’s a little one, but even big dog countries have their limits, and shouldn’t promise or threaten more than they’ll actually be prepared to deliver.)

If you want to help the Iranian protesters, you’d be better off working on proxies so they can keep communicating than complaining about Obama not denouncing the Iranian government loudly enough.

The other day, Steve S. talked about a Guardian article on a study of sexual violence in South Africa, which produced the shocking result that of those surveyed, 28% said they had raped a woman or girl. It occurred to me that it might be a good time to do a little more South Africa blogging, to give a kind of general background on what’s been going on lately in that country, for good or ill. I hope to have time for more of a background post tomorrow, but I’ll start today with just a quick post of some recent South African headlines.

An article about a man who saved a 13-year-old girl from getting raped, but denies he’s a hero.

Techno hubs planned for townships.

How much trust do South African’s have in their health care system?

A great week for soccer in Africa.

More on South Africa tomorrow.

Andre Braugher, my current favorite actor, will guest star on House, Joel’s current favorite TV show. He will be playing Dr. Nolan, who treats House after he goes into rehabilitation.

Paging Dr. Nolan: Who has the lucky job of diagnosing one of the most famous diagnosticians in the world? That job is left up to Dr. Nolan, played by Andre Braugher, whom you may remember from Gideon’s Crossing. Katie describes the surely to butt heads pair: “House’s version of how well he needs to be to go back to work and Nolan’s version of how well he needs to be to go back to work is very different. You can check yourself in voluntarily, and you can leave voluntarily, but whether or not he’s going to be permitted to practice medicine is another story. Before he is going to be allowed to practice medicine, Dr. Nolan needs to make sure House is on much sturdier ground than at the end of the season.”

Natalia Antonova on “Converting on Paper”: Faith vs. Warm Bodies.

This post on Muslimah Media Watch caught my eye, because it reminded me of one of my favourite topics – converting on paper. I think the subject is pertinent. I disagree with Yusra’s assertion that for Muslim women, marrying non-Muslims is not an issue, because, as she puts it, “Muslim women believe that their freedom lies within the teachings of Islam.” I rather view this as a minority issue – no more irrelevant than the issues the GLBT community faces when trying to carve out its own space within a particular religion. I also think that this issue will continue to grow in importance, because, crisis or no crisis, the world is progressively getting smaller. More and more people are leaving their communities, or stretching the concept of what “community” means in the first place. As their numbers continue to grow, so will the issue of “mixed” marriage.

What do I mean by the phrase “conversion on paper”? Let’s put it this way – We all know people who had to convert to a particular religion because of their prospective spouse. Whether due to religious law, family pressure, inheritance issues, etc., people convert in order to get hitched all the time. While some are sincere in their conversions, others view it purely as an issue of convenience….

Some thoughts on heroes and clay feet … Ta-Nehisi Coates had a couple of posts up about Martin Luther King, one that talks about his getting taped cheating on his wife (with some interesting bedroom talk), and another in which he clarifies that MLK, flaws and all, is still a hero to him.

Decades ago, I was at Pacific Yearly Meeting, talking to a couple of people about Joan Baez. (For those readers who don’t already know this, Pacific Yearly Meeting is a Quaker Yearly Meeting, and Joan Baez comes from a Quaker family; at the time this conversation took place she was occasionally attending Palo Alto Friends Meeting.) One of them was a young man who was deeply disappointed in meeting her. She’d sung about casual sex (I think it must have been one of the two “Love Song to a Stranger” songs); he’d met her after the show and thought (rightly or wrongly) that she’d made a pass at him. I think he may also have been disappointed to learn that she and David Harris had (long since) gotten divorced. He’d been expecting St. Joan the Peace Activist, and instead he encountered a human being.

I thought she was all the more inspiring as a human being, that seeing her as an imperfect person like myself who still did great things was better inspiration than imagining her to be somehow way more perfect and flawless than me. And, as some of TNC’s commenters point out (not in contradiction to anything TNC said), the same goes for MLK. Goes double for MLK, really, because if getting caught at hidden affairs comes off worse than an open divorce (much less having lovers when you’re not married at the time you have them), MLK’s accomplishments are also greater, and he didn’t, after all, quit when the FBI tried to blackmail him with the tapes. Knowing that flawed people can also be heroes is a good kick in the butt to the rest of us.

While TNC writes about realizing the humanity of our heroes, the Economist has a short post on Humanising Iran.

ONE thing seems certain to emerge from the chaos in Iran. Whether it becomes the next revolution or the next Tiananmen, Iran has been humanised to Americans—and to many others around the world—to a degree not possible in the earlier era of “mad mullahs” versus “Great Satan”. For a long time, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad *was* the face of Iran for those in the West who feared it (or wanted to engender fear of it). Now, that face may as well be Neda Soltani (pictured), the young woman shot dead on the street while she spoke on her mobile phone….

figleaf critiques reporting of a study of macaques in Foreplay as “Payment” for Sex? Seriously?

Christy of Dry Bones Dance talks more about her evolving views about nonviolence in Peace, Love & Ass-kicking.

Picking just one Tweeter here (name removed):

yesterday we saw a 10 years old child die from teargas in his face - #Iranelection - could not film becos militia everywhere
less than 20 seconds ago from web

travelling thru Tehran now is worse than Bagdad - any moment u can be beaten or arrested - #Iranelection
1 minute ago from web

some embassys provided protection b4 but now they are all surrounded by militia - also if u are injured then they arrest u - #Iranelection
4 minutes ago from web

also one of us is badly injured and we cannot take to hospital - treating with trusted doctor contacts but needs hosp - #Iranelection
25 minutes ago from web

We are having difficulty getting updates to u as so many of our contacts been arrested - life here is v/v/dangerous now #Iranelection RT RT

Also, some links on how Iranian Internet censorship works:

NY Times: Web Pries Lid of Censorship by Iranian Government.

Democracy Now: Deep Packet Inspection: Telecoms Aided Iran Government to Censor Internet, Technology Widely Used in U.S.

(Both of these via Twitter, one of them via @mattbastard and I forget who I got the other from.)

I’ve mentioned a few of these before, but maybe not all of them, and I wanted to stick them all in one post.

People who are live blogging and keeping up with the Tweets:

The Lede blog at the New York Times.

Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic.

Nico Pitney at the Huffington Post.

Other Internet sources:

Images from Iran.

Some more images from Iran at Twitpic.

iran.twazzup.com.

Iran Updates at Tehran Bureau.

Here’s a blogger attempting to summarize the weekend’s Tweets.

Bella Crow is an Iranian-American blogger who has been tracking the protests.

Wondering who actually won that Iranian election? Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com has some of the most detailed analysis of the evidence.

On the whole Twitter cyber war business:

The BoingBoing cyber war guide for the Iran elections.

See Austin Heap for instructions on setting up and testing proxies. Do not Tweet any proxy information openly on Twitter. If you let Austin Heap know directly about your proxy, he’ll get the information distributed more privately. I gather from @MidgetQueen on Twitter that there’s also an effort to set up Torrent seeds (@grossi on Twitter is said to be coordinating this) and Tor relays (torir.org), which I presume are other ways to get around the blocking (I know about proxies, but not about these other things). Here’s a site to download Iran-related Torrents and seed them.

Note: This cyber war stuff that I’m passing on is geared toward keeping communication open for the activists, not toward DDOS attacks on Iranian government sites. I gather some people have attempted such DDOS attacks, but I don’t myself advise it; my feeling is that any attempt to overwhelm computers in Iran will also have the side effect of bogging down the Iranian Internet in general, and making it harder for people to communicate.

Several takes a stand against the practice of removing Iranian Twitter names when retweeting (with the notable exception of those Iranian Tweeters whose updates are protected). I’ve had some of the same doubts about the usefulness of the practice, but, whether you believe the Several article or not, you can at least get from it the names of several actual Iranian activist Tweeters who have explicitly given permission for their Twitter names to be retained in retweets. Because of this, I feel confident I’m not putting them at any risk they’re not willing to take when I suggest that you follow @Change_for_Iran, @oxfordgirl, and @IranStreetNews. I’d been following oxfordgirl already, and plan to make sure I’m also following the others.

You can see everything Tweeted with the #iranelection tag here; this inevitably includes duplicates, spam, and misinformation. Other hashtags currently in use are #gr88 and #Neda (the name of a young woman who was shot over the weekend). Another, more filtered way to search is this FriendFeed search which only displays items that have received at least 10 likes on FriendFeed.

Again, here’s the Twitspam list of fake Iran election Tweeters.

There’s still some unclarity on the question of embassies helping injured protestors; Nico Pitney wrote yesterday at the Huffington Post:

3:07 PM ET — Are European embassies in Tehran helping the injured? It’s still unclear. It may be that activists outside Iran are relying too heavily on unconfirmed reports, or it may be that the embassies are simply not admitting it publicly for fear of ‘foreign involvement’ tainting the demonstrators. AFP has some reporting:
European embassies in Tehran addressed Sunday what officials said were concerted email calls for them to offer refuge to Iranian democracy protesters, diplomats said.

Talks amid heightened tensions between Tehran and Western nations over post-election violence followed a string of messages sent to embassies and an Internet circular listing overseas missions willing to accept “wounded refugees.”

No request for asylum at a European embassy has yet been confirmed, the diplomats added.

UPDATE: A major Italian paper Repubblica reports that Italy’s Foreign Minister has instructed its Iran embassy to “‘accommodate and assist the injured demonstrators’ where there is demand.”

There are conflicting reports about whether the Canadian embassy turned people away over the weekend or accepted some of them.

A Google map is being maintained of locations in Tehran of embassies reported to be taking injured people (I don’t know who’s maintaining it, or what sources they’re using, beyond what’s stated on the map).

The other issue with embassies is that, in some cases, even if they’re taking injured people, access to the embassy is currently blocked. I had found a blog that was attempting to track which embassies were currently blocked, but can no longer load it, so have no viable resource here.

There has also been an effort to collect and pass on first aid information to protestors. @MidgetQueen recommends following @herdarkeyes for medical advice in English and in Farsi (I’m presuming, since @MidgetQueen seems on top of things enough to know this, that this recommendation made publically on Twitter means its OK to identify that Twitter account publically - either outside Iran or OK with being identified - updates for the account are not protected). http://gr88.tumblr.com/ has first aid information in Farsi.

Here’s a Persian-English translation tool.

Here’s a link to BBC Persian TV.

That’s all I’ve got for now. I’m not going to make any attempt to summarize the actual news (I was busy with my class final project yesterday, anyway, and you can check The Lede or one of the other sources I gave for the latest).

Since other people are more on top of Iran than me, I plan to take a break from Iran news tomorrow for one of my regular African news round ups.

The rule on Twitter is that you should source your re-tweets, so that people know who said it and how reliable it is. Except when you shouldn’t. Which is, right now, any time it’s from anyone who’s actually in Iran. As one recent Tweet put it:

EVERYONE change your time and location to Tehran. Basij is locating twitter profiles to be marked for arrest. Please RT!! #IR #Iranelection 4 minutes ago

The Basij are an Iranian paramilitary force, one that many Tweets are pointing to right now as involved in the violent suppression of protests.

Having dutifully changed my time and location to Tehran days ago, I’ve been trying to selectively retweet information, saving names of Tweeters working from outside Iran, and removing those inside Iran. This, in itself, proves trickier than you might expect. This morning, I first retweeting a couple of Tweets from someone I take to be in the Iranian diaspora, and got, in response, a CAPITAL LETTER admonishment that I should not Tweet such names, had better delete those Tweets right away, and was endangering lives. I thought I was right about this particular account: a) the name suggested to me a non-Iran location, b) the account had been named as a source by The Lede blog at the New York Times, which routinely reports much of its information as from “a source in Iran” (suggesting that The Lede doesn’t take this account to be within Iran), and, c) in any case, given that the account has been named in The New York Times, if the Iranian govenrment is technically competent, they likely know about it already. But better safe than sorry; I deleted the Tweets. A few minutes later, I was chided by @asteris for removing sourcing (involving Twitter accounts outside Iran, so he’s right that I should have left it) from some reports he’d Tweeted about, but not yet confirmed, and had to correct that.

@asteris is a Twitter account that I’ve been following for around six months, a Greek leftist who was one of the best Twitter sources during the December unrest in Greece. With both more time for monitoring and a better grasp of Twitter activism than I have, he seems to be one of the more reliable people following the Twitter feed from outside Iran (and, since he’s not Iranian, I can actually name him). This doesn’t mean he doesn’t tweet things that haven’t been confirmed; he does, as does practically everyone else. What it does mean is that he seems to have some idea of how to confirm things, and I’m inclined to believe his statement about a source and whether something’s been confirmed or not. Similarly, @Marawitch, based in Australia, seems to be more on top of things than most of us non-Iranians, and of course @TehranBureau, an Iranian diaspora news organization that I’ve already mentioned, is working at confirming information.

Confirming anything, though, proves difficult. The broad outline, of course, is clear from many Tweets: a huge demonstation in Tehran today that was met with violence. The details of Tweets, though, in some cases contradicted each other. When I was on a few hours ago, there were reports that: a) helicopters were dropping water on demonstrators, or, b) helicopters were dropping boiling water on demonstrators, or c) helicopters were dropping acid on demonstrators. There seemed agreement, at least, about the tear gas. Numerous Tweets said that hospitals were not a safe place to bring people, and one from @TehranBureau even said that police had been observed taking names of injured brought to a particular hospital. Other numerous Tweets urged that the injured be brought to embassies that had agreed to take the wounded. There was some uncertainty, though, about which embassies those were.

The United States does not have an embassy in Tehran; its interests are handled by the Swiss embassy. Several European and other embassies are accepting wounded; a Google map of the locations of these embassies in Tehran can be found here. Which embassies, though, are not accepting wounded? One report, by @PCZ (whom I believe to be a non-Iranian, and therefore identifiable) was that the Italian embassy was not accepting wounded. I have not seen any reliable confirmation of that report. Another report, widely Tweeted by numerous people, and reported on multiple blogs, is that the Canadian embassy in Tehran is not accepting wounded. People are distributing a phone number to complain about this. I am unsure, though, of the original source of the report. As of a few hours ago, I saw no one reporting it as confirmed, except for one Tweet quoted at Andrew Sullivan’s blog, which Tweet wasn’t terribly useful as confirmation, since the name of the Tweeter had been stripped to protect his or her safety. I do see, though, looking at @Marawitch’s feed, that she repors it seven hours ago as confirmed.

Another Tweet claimed that the British embassy was not accepting wounded, and had a number to complain to; this seems to me likely to be false, since the British embassy is listed on the Google map as accepting wounded and was explicitly reported by someone else as doing so. I’m not particularly eager personally to call all the embassies that probably are accepting wounded to confirm that they really are - presumably they have enough on their hands without answering calls from every Twitterer in the world - but I hope some single person - maybe a reporter - is verifying the accuracy of the information on that Google map.

There are Tweets about tanks, Tweets reporting that the tanks have not been confirmed, and this is a rumor from the government, a Tweet reporting that yes, the tanks are confirmed, and Tweets saying that the army is not willing to kill people. On that score, Robert Mackey at The Lede relays a report by New York Times op ed columnist Roger Cohen, after speaking with people in the streets of Tehran, that

I don’t know where this uprising is leading. I do know some police units are wavering. That commander talking about his family was not alone. There were other policemen complaining about the unruly Basij. Some security forces just stood and watched. “All together, all together, don’t be scared,” the crowd shouted….

The #iranelection Twitter feed has definitely been set upon both by spammers (I’ve seen people using it to post links to porn) and accounts sending out pro-government propaganda. Among the latter is @jimjones45, an account that appears to be a bot, set up to repeat the same Tweets over and over. I saw this account earlier repeatedly saying that Ahmadinejad had won, and that 99% of the Twitter traffic supporting the protests came from people in the US. The latter is, of course, certainly false; in the first place, there’s a huge Twitter traffic from within Iran, and in the second place, the Twitter traffic in support from outside Iran (not counting Iranian diaspora traffic) is coming from numerous countries, nowhere near 99% from the US. But believability is, perhaps, not the point here; the account managed to spam up the #iranelection feed by getting real people to argue with it, and, since its repetitive Tweets suggest it to be a bot, probably with less time spent by the person setting it up than got sucked up by the people arguing. Twitspam continues to track such fake Iran election Tweeters.

At this point, I’m trying to limit what I retweet to things like first aid information, locations of embassies, and sites which purport to have photos from Iran, since I don’t feel competent to source real from false information when it comes to reports about tanks that may or may not be on their way, or acid that may or may not have been dropped from helicopters. People with more experience with online Twitter activism than I have (like @asteris) may be able to be useful there, but I’m best off recognizing my limitations.

From TehranBureau, an independent Iranian-American news organization (newest Tweets on top):

reports of some Iranians protesting with Qurans in their hand.
2 minutes ago from web

from FB: Chants of “Down with Khameini” occurring
3 minutes ago from web

Eye Witness: At Least 20 injured Protesters transfred to Loghman Hospital in last 30 [now 50] mins.
5 minutes ago from web

Got A Call: Many People Injured By Police and Militia Near Tohid SQ.
6 minutes ago from web

more from Omid007: Gunfire at Satarkhan St.
6 minutes ago from web

end quote
9 minutes ago from web

Gunshots continuously heard from Ghasr-ol-dasht street
9 minutes ago from web

reports from Azadi square and that whole area say very brutal clashes taking place
11 minutes ago from web

Enghelaab Sq is full of smoke/gas
14 minutes ago from web

lower streets
15 minutes ago from web

forces dressed as civilians are beating on people and using tear gas to keep them from entering the square, they are being dispersed into
15 minutes ago from web

pedestrians have filled up Qods street and the square
17 minutes ago from web

there are massive amounts of people at Enghelaab Sq
18 minutes ago from web

i’m dying with worry. please pray for us.
19 minutes ago from web

i’m worried
19 minutes ago from web

she hasn’t returned
19 minutes ago from web

my young sister has taken to the streets as well
19 minutes ago from web

things are horrible, please pray for us
20 minutes ago from web

another friend’s arm has broken
20 minutes ago from web

one of my friends got smacked so hard she has lost hearing in one ear
21 minutes ago from web

A few other sample Tweets from various people (all account names removed):

RT DON’T LISTEN to state media reporting at this moment or anything downplaying events in Iran right now. It’s all lies #IranElection
less than 20 seconds ago from web

RT Very critical situation in Tehran now; tear gas & riot polices everywhere #iranelection #gr88
less than 20 seconds ago from TwitterBerry

General strike. Don’t go to work monday. . #IranElection #Tehran
less than 20 seconds ago from web

“Two reports coming from Tehran about helicopters pouring boiling water on protesters” #iranelection
less than 20 seconds ago from TweetDeck

RT “Two reports coming from Tehran about helicopters pouring boiling water on protesters” #iranelection

The Tweets are coming in fast; I just refreshed and got hundreds more. They report that tear gas, water cannons and violence are being used against protestors, they report that 85,000 people are gathered in Paris to support the brave Iranians, they ask whether a blast at a shrine was to prevent Mousavi from taking refuge there, someone passes on a homemade recipe for pepper spray, someone else tells TehranBureau that there are clashes in Isfahan, and there are more photos.

The Lede notes that

BBC’s Jon Leyne notes from Tehran that there is no evidence yet to support the reports from Iranian government-controlled news organizations of a suicide bombing in Tehran.

and produces videos of what are said to be clashes between opposition protestors and government forces.

Andrew Sullivan has lots more Tweets, though, as he says, “The tweets should be taken provisionally until confirmed.”

First, images from Iran here.

Second, since I’m a techie, a couple of techie items that caught my interest. First, The Lede had an update that quoted a correspondent from Iran:

Tonight I was arrested by police, and they get my camera, and my I.D. card, and my car, and then released me. Since those movies are inside my camera yet, if they watch one of them … they will judge me as I’m a spy, and maybe they gonna execute me. I asked some friends inside government to help me, and I’m waiting for their response. As newest news, all secure connections (SSL, SSH, etc) are now rate limited in Iran, so from now on, even our emails and chats are not safe. Today I should go back to police and they will hand me to the judge. Just pray for me, 10 years ago … I was arrested, and it’s a nightmare for me to repeat my memories.

So, a new way for the Iranian government to strike a balance between disrupting the activists’ use of the Internet while leaving it open enough for, as far as is possible, the usual economic stuff. (Also, if I’m not being so detached and techie, more evidence that their correspondent is way braver than I am.)

Next, there’s the following Tweet:

If you use a cellphone in Iran,remove battery after call.have battery installed for one call at a time #iranelection#tehran#green4iran#gr88

Evidently, the Iranian government is using cell phones to track protestors.

First, some of the #iranelection tweets this morning (I’m editing out comments about green avatars and such, also duplicate Re-Tweets of the same thing, and also those account names that sound possibly Iranian or simply vague enough that I can’t be sure, though I suspect the don’t pass on account names thing is kind of closing the barn door after the cows leave given that the Iranian government’s monitoring the same public channel):

Steve_Schippert: RT @NYkrinDC: RT @GlobalPost Rockers from Iran find their voice opposing the Iranian government. http://cli.gs/YPJQrZ #IranElection
4 minutes ago from UberTwitter

sioushie: RT from iran: Confirmed - Mousavi calls on people of the world to march on SUNDAY in support of Sea of Green - #Iranelection RT RT RT
4 minutes ago from TweetDeck

justinjap: RT @waynemarkle: Moussavi Green Wave Part 1 http://bit.ly/9prbq - #Iranelection RT RT RT
4 minutes ago from TwitterFon

eurodog: @ramonesNL #iranelection Ik snap je punt, maar vind het vreemd dat je onderscheid maakt. Steun = steun. Of heb je een Orwelliaans idee?
4 minutes ago from web

SweetSumo: Plus de 250 Twitt / minutes sur #Iranelection !! L’Iran explose après le crachat de Khomenei, et twitter avec.
4 minutes ago from web

TopArgument: Any official news from Mousavi? #iranelection
4 minutes ago from web

Late4WorkAgain: Really Great Video on Youtube About What Is Happening in Iran - http://bit.ly/17kmgj #iranelection Please RT
4 minutes ago from web

[deleted]: Twitition: Google Earth to update satellite images of Tehran #Iranelection http://twitition.com/csfeo @patrickaltoft
4 minutes ago from Twitition

[deleted]: It seems like we should better watch out for what happens in Tehran on Saturday. Things seem to be coming to a boil. #iranelection #gr88
4 minutes ago from Witty

chico_motta: Khamenei”Ahmadinejad foi eleito sem dúvidas. Gente na rua, só para celebrar a reeleição. O resto terá que se ver com a lei” #iranelection
4 minutes ago from web

mikecantone: First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. Mahatma Gandhi #iranelection
4 minutes ago from web

square006: unconfirmed reports - Revolutionary Guard has been mobilised to secure Tehran - #Iranelection #gr88
4 minutes ago from Twitterrific

ChinasTankMan: @bobakm Thank you Pres Bush for showed IRAN and the Middle East the path to freedom #iranelection
4 minutes ago from web

lizfeldman: “#IranElection” rendered graphically http://tinyurl.com/l8jl5x #IranElection
4 minutes ago from TweetDeck

Kat0074: RT @Alyssa_Milano RT disturbed by Ayatollah Khamenei’s speech this morning http://bit.ly/ezAtG #iranelection (via @amnesty)

TehranBureau and PersianKiwi appear to be among the more reliable Iranian Tweeters who aren’t (I think) actually based in Iran at the moment (and so I presume I can say they’re reliable without sending the wrath of Khamenei after them). Tehran Bureau is an independent news source on Iran and the Iranian diaspora that, in addition to Twittering, posts longer articles on their web site. Yesterday, for example, they had these articles:

Rafsanjani’s next move.

Grand Ayatollah rejects election results.

Iran updates.

From source: “I have now received e-mails from totally trustworthy sources within Iran that many Sepaah commanders [Sepaph is IRGC] have been arrested, because they are opposed to what is going on and in particular to the plan for tomorrow.

“This had been talked about for the past few days, but my source confirmed it.” end quote

Clarification for plans for tomorrow: “Apparently, the plan is to create chaos and bloody confrontation between Basij and Karroubi and Mousavi demonstrators, in order to justify hard crack down and have Khamenei announce the end of “soft” confrontation in the Friday prayers.”

…

Among Western bloggers, one of the most active on the Iran election issue has been Andrew Sullivan. Today his posts are all about Khamenei’s speech, in which he basically doubled down, said that there had been no cheating in the election and people had better accept the results, and attributed criticism to “Zionist corruption.”

The Lede, meanwhile, points, among other things, to this look at Iran’s Internet dilemma.

Arbor collects and analyses internet traffic data from 100 ISPs around the world. This graphic shows internet traffic to Iran - and you can see what happened at 1330 GMT on Saturday, the day after the election. The state-owned telecoms company simply pulled the plug, halting all internet communication with the outside world. Then, over the following days, traffic was gradually allowed through again, albeit at a much reduced level.

I spoke to Craig Labovitz of Arbor Networks, in whose blog this graphic appeared, and he had an interesting interpretation of what was going on. Why, for instance, had Iran not simply kept the tap turned off? Craig believes the authorities were buying time to install the filtering tools they needed to have a functioning internet infrastructure, but one over which they had some measure of control. So he reckons they gradually turned the tap back on as they put the filters in….

I had been meaning to talk a bit about this myself, since, as an early Internet adopter, I was one of the people actually following what Chinese students were doing on the Internet when Tiananmen Square came down. I meant to save an archive of that discussion, but lost it in Loma Prieta; I do still have one old post, which I may find and blog later as an example. Anyway, at the time of Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government shut down its Internet connection promptly, and kept it down for rather longer than the net’s ever been down in Iran; Chinese students responded by using the net to organize in the West, and then faxing into China. Now, of course, we have the Great Firewall of China.

Why was the Internet so readily shut down when the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square? There were several factors:

1. It was really easy; the Internet into China was centralized through a single connection.
2. It was really easy; the Internet still wasn’t a big commercial deal in China (as in most of the world), so there wasn’t much cost (or even, particularly, much publicity about the fact that China had shut it down). The connection, if I remember right, was a university to university one, still in research mode. As Internet use spreads, the cost of keeping the net down increases.
3. Filtering software was pretty much nonexistent; without the option of a Great Firewall of China, the only effective way for the Chinese government to interfere with students using the Internet against it was to shut the net down.

The first factor may still hold in many parts of the world (though not in all countries), but the other two no longer really hold. Doesn’t mean the Internet will never be shut down to cover a political crackdown, but it means that the cost/benefit analysis has shifted.

Twitspam has split its tracking of fake #iranelection accounts into ones spreading disinformation and spam and trolls.

Protestor vs. regime scenarios, in Iran and other countries where unrest has either succeeded or failed in bringing down a govenrment. Via Matt Yglesias.

publius at Obsidian Wings on The Revolutionary Non-Revolution.

Non-Iran-related links:

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been on a roll lately. For just one example: Thank Him For Taking The Pistol From You, one of two posts about a letter from an ex-slave to his ex-master. Or just check out his blog as a whole.

Michael Bérubé at Crooked Timber takes on David Brooks on the culture war.

More importantly: to revive an argument I made in What’s Liberal and have been repeating ever since (like right now!), this kind of sober centrism doesn’t explain why seventy-something percent of Americans disagreed with the Supreme Court’s rejection of state bans on interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia in 1967, but only about seventy-something people consider this a “hot-button social issue” now. (For those of you who still haven’t read What’s Liberal despite my most earnest entreaties: I note in the epilogue that TV’s first interracial kiss occurred the next year, in 1968, on Star Trek—and that the episode was widely banned in the South. This despite the fact that (a) Uhura and Kirk, the kissers in question, were not acting under their own power at the time, and (b) Kirk kisses every woman in the galaxy eventually. Not to mention the ancillary fact that since this is Star Trek we’re talking about, the kiss took place in the twenty-third century, so even in 1968 it hadn’t really happened yet, which should have reassured Southerners and racists everywhere that their unspoken communal understandings about such matters would persist for quite some time….

An old one that I forgot to get around to posting: Amnesty International on Obama’s Speech and the Arab Reaction.

@latimes In Iran, another day of mass protests begins: http://bit.ly/12XyX4 [RT@latimesworld in Tehran] More at http://latimes.com/iran #iranelection 5 minutes ago (LG: Leaving this name on, because the LA Times clearly isn’t someone in Iran who needs protecting.)

#IRANELECTION (LG: Thanks two Tweeters for translation, I’m deleting just in case the one with the Iranian name is someone actually in Iran who needs protecting.) 5 minutes ago

@gzbbpc (LG: Leaving name and deleting Tweet; this one looks fake, as it segues strangely from talking about Iran to claiming Steven Jobs is dead, and links to a site trying to raise money for something totally unrelated.)

Mousavi speech: #Iranelection - I have come due to concerns of current political and social conditions - to defend the rights of the nation 5 minutes ago

Iranian proverb: You can close the city gates, but you can’t close the people’s mouths. #iranelection 5 minutes ago

#iranelection #gr88 Up to 37 martyrs.Updated list of revolution martyrs. RT. Don’t let them be forgotten. http://bit.ly/20lqx 5 minutes ago

Dejemos que Iran Hable!!! Haz tu donacion… http://tinyurl.com/nx6bke ((RT@Avaaz ) #iranelection 12 minutes ago

MOUSAVI - What have you done with $300 BILLION in last 4 years - where is the wealth of the nation? #Iranelection 12 minutes ago

RT @jeanettejoy : RT @AkisamexAmaya #greengoogle #iranelection #gr88 @google CHANGE GOOGLE TO GREEN FOR A DAY! please re tweet 12 minutes ago

(LG: Another thanks Tweet, that I’ll delete on the off chance that it would reveal someone’s identity in Iran.)
#greenhelp #iranelection 13 minutes ago

Huffpost: Rep. Pence and Repubs. to hold press event supporting rallies - Tell him why this will backfire! http://bit.ly/TDZaF #iranelection 13 minutes ago

This used to be a dorm. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hu84MihcOU #iranelection 13 minutes ago

RT IRIB.ir said that we are all violent thugs - we are showing you everyday that we are peaceful Sea of Green - #Iranelection

This is just a small sample of what the feed looks like. In only a few cases do I personally have an idea whether a Tweeter’s reliable or not; for actual sifting of what information is real, you can look at http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/, which reports that Mousavi has called for a candlelight vigil tonight.

Being almost entirely lacking in green clothing, I bought green nail polish, the night before last, and applied it yesterday morning, after my morning re-Tweeting of Iran election related Tweets. The nail polish color met the approval of the Iranian-American woman at the pharmacy where I bought it (but I think she was appreciating it for its color, rather than its political statement). However, never having applied nail polish before in my life (really!), I did the official Worst Job Ever at it, and so my nails now make a bold statement to the world that I can apply nail polish approximately as well as a five-year-old. This is after cleaning up some; initially they proclaimed to the world that I can apply nail polish as well as a three-year-old. It seems a kind of metaphor for how little I can actually do, from a distance: pray, change your Twitter settings to Tehran and GMT +3:30, pass a little on here and there, but mostly just watch brave people from a distance, and hope it’s their Velvet Revolution and not their Prague Spring.

There’s been talk about how this election aftermath reflects on the “rational Iran” argument. Would a “rational Iran” clumsily steal an election? Ignore, for the moment, all arguments for why Ahmadinejad might have won; assume the election really is stolen, and furthermore stolen in a way that’s particularly unsubtle; does that really counter the “Iran is rational” argument?

Here, it’s important to remember what kind of a foreign policy argument “rational Iran” always was. It was never an argument that Iran’s leadership was bound to be sweetly reasonable. It was a rational and calculating Machiavelli who wrote that it can be better for a prince to be feared than loved. It was a rational and pragmatic Chinese government that sent the tanks into Tiananmen Square. Nor was it ever an argument that Iran’s government was bound to show particular wisdom and foresight (does our government?). No, “rational,” in this sense, means “not suicidal, acting in your own interest in a somewhat predictable way.” “Rational” means, “capable of being negotiated with in a hard-headed way, if you have the right carrot or stick.” Even Stalin was “rational” in this sense (the Unabomber, not so much).

Nothing about a clumsily stolen election (which, in world terms, isn’t a particularly rare event) says that a government can’t be “rational” in this sense. There are all kinds of reasons an election can be rigged without particular skill - probably the most common one is that you expected not to have to rig the election, and didn’t leave yourself enough time to steal it well (and if lack of foresight means not being “rational” then few people in the world are always rational).

Joe Volk of Friends Committee on National Legislation argues that diplomacy is still the strong hand with Iran.

In the last two years, I’ve met three times with the current Iranian president (both in Iran and here in the United States) and with opposition leaders. In my experience, Iranian leaders from across that political spectrum have demonstrated an interest in improving relations with the United States and in reducing the tensions between our two countries. President Barack Obama has begun an important process of reaching out to develop better diplomatic ties between our two countries, and I would urge him to stay the course.

Of course, opponents of improved relations between the United States and Iran will argue that now is the moment for more threats, more sanctions, and more confrontation. We at FCNL will be urging the president, the Congress, and the American people to continue to test the possibility that, by working together, Iran and the United States can reduce tensions between our two countries, address the reasonable concerns in Iran about security and in the United States about nuclear weapons proliferation and, perhaps, even work together to promote peace in the greater Middle East.

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The “tough” U.S. position on negotiations is really a gift to the dictator and the “soft” approach is the winning strategy. The Nixon-Kissinger opening to China led to China opening to the world. That opening began an internal change process which has yet to reach a conclusion; however, the arc of that change process points in the direction of human rights and freedom for the people of China. De-linking the peace and disarmament agenda from the human rights and freedom agenda in negotiations actually results in an amalgam of those important agendas, the cause of human security is well served. These examples demonstrate that diplomacy is still the U.S. strong hand from the deck of options of what to do with Iran.

#iranelection cyberwar guide for beginners.

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Do NOT publicise proxy IP’s over twitter, and especially not using the #iranelection hashtag. Security forces are monitoring this hashtag, and the moment they identify a proxy IP they will block it in Iran. If you are creating new proxies for the Iranian bloggers, DM them to @stopAhmadi or @iran09 and they will distributed them discretely to bloggers in Iran.

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Help cover the bloggers: change your twitter settings so that your location is TEHRAN and your time zone is GMT +3.30. Security forces are hunting for bloggers using location and timezone searches. If we all become ‘Iranians’ it becomes much harder to find them.

Don’t blow their cover! If you discover a genuine source, please don’t publicise their name or location on a website. These bloggers are in REAL danger. Spread the word discretely through your own networks but don’t signpost them to the security forces. People are dying there, for real, please keep that in mind.

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And other tips.

Austinheap is posting instructions on setting up proxy servers to help Iranians get the word out; here, for example, are proxy instructions for the Mac. The site was hit by a DOS attack earlier, but seems to be back up.

Joel (EmperorNorton on Twitter has been focusing on publicizing a Persian-to-English translation engine.

As of 7am Pacific Time, the latest three #iranelection Tweets are:

XXXXX: All foreign media has been banned from covering the rallies in Tehran. #iranelection
less than 5 seconds ago from web

XXXXX: rt @XXXXX RT IMPORTANT & URGENT: Army forces entering Tehran. Barricade streets where protests are on. Now #iranelection
less than 10 seconds ago from web

XXXXXX: RT @XXXXXX CONFIRMED! Army moving into Tehran against protestors! PLEASE RT! URGENT! #IranElection. WHAT IS THE SOURCE?

UPDATE: Deleted all Twitter account names.

Before I get to the lighter topic, here’s a blog that’s tracking developments in Iran. Also, if you want, here’s a link to search for the Twitter #iranelection hashtag, which will get you the latest Tweets on the topic. Right now, as of 7:19am Pacific Time, the latest is that there’s a huge demonstration in Tehran, with 1000s defying the ban on a post-election protest. CNN is reporting that Moussavi appeared at a protest rally, that reporters are being arrested, and that Iran’s election authorities are expected to probe allegations of ballot fraud. UPDATE: Here’s a New York Times blog that’s keeping track of the situation (hat tip to Kenneth).

Now for the movie blogging …

Forgiving the Franklins: The Franklins are a pious family in a sort of Southern Baptist style, whose lives get turned around after a car accident sends them into a coma for a few days. They emerge from the coma with radically different ideas about faith and sex. An R for depictions of gay and somewhat kinky heterosexual sex (the latter within marriage), this comedy makes its stand on “culture war” issues clear.

The heart of the movie, though, is the daughter of the family, the one person who missed th