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Authors, sign in!Despite the Iranian government's blockage of cell phones and certain internet sites, the word is getting out. Search Youtube for "Iran protest" and you get over 4,000 videos. In the past two days, over 1900 photographs have been posted on Flickr.
Iran has more blogs per capita than any other country in the world, and Iranian bloggers are managing to get the word out about conditions within the country. In the past week, there have been nearly 5000 blog posts in Farsi! Thousands of Twitter feeds have come from Iran. In fact, at the encouragement of the US State Department today, Twitter has re-scheduled its planned maintenance by one day because of "the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran." AP:
"The fact that the government is not able to stop all of the information is really key," said Robin Gross, executive director of IP Justice, a San Francisco-based digital rights group. "They can only sort of censor in a patchwork way, and censorship by its nature has to be all or nothing."One third of Iranians are between the ages of 15 and 29, and they are tech-savvy.
Many are using "proxy servers" and are managing, so far, to stay one step ahead of the government's attempts to restrict them. Some have "cyber-attacked" the government's websites. (Perhaps this is why Ahmadinijad's personal website gives the message: "Server too busy.") Government censorship, so far, has proven to be a "leaky bucket."
Published June 16, 2009 by John Petty |
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| Tags:
Citizenship
Grassroots Organizing
Internet
Iran
Online Organizing
Protest
