Khatami's website 'blocked'

AFP: Iran blocks ex-president Khatami's website: report, 19 Oct 2010 "Kaleme.com, the mouthpiece of main opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, said "governmental committee has ordered the filtering on Khatami.ir," which carries news and comments of Iran's former president."

Iran: Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

LA Times, Powerful Iranian cleric barred from delivering Quds Day prayers, 16 Sep 09 "Supporters of Mousavi's Green Path of Hope movement responded defiantly to the news that Rafsanjani had been pushed aside, calling on demonstrators to take to the streets anyway while boycotting the prayer sermon after the rally.

""They kept Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani from leading this week's Friday Prayers clearly out of fear," said a statement posted at the reformist website Mowjcamp.com. "This badly thought-out gesture will certainly elicit an appropriate response from the understanding and green-thinking nation of Iran.""

Iran and the net

Mousavi

AP, Signs Mousavi's rebel stature being eroded in Iran, 23 Jun 09, "Mousavi says he only wants to rattle the country's Islamic rulers, not take them down. In messages posted on his Web site in recent days, he groped for some common ground in a nation increasingly polarized."

Iran, Twitter, Web 2.0+ Neda

CNN, Iran media: Council rejects claims of voting irregularities, On Web site, purported message from Moussavi supports protests, urges caution , 22 Jun 09, ""The country belongs to you. The revolution and the system is your heritage," the statement attributed to Moussavi said in a statement posted on his Web site. "Protesting against lies and cheating is your right. Be hopeful about regaining your rights. Do not allow anyone who tries to make you lose hope and frighten you make you lose your temper.""



YouTube, "Basiji sniper takes out teenage Iranian girl amid protest, Tehran, Saturday 20 June" [warning, graphic content]



CNN, "Neda" had become one of top "trending topics" on Twitter by late Saturday, 20 Jun 09

Wall Street Journal, Iran's Web Spying Aided By Western Technology, 22 Jun 09 "The Iranian regime has developed, with the assistance of European telecommunications companies, one of the world's most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale."

Telegraph, Tehran protest diary: an angry Muslim mother reports from inside Iran, 21 Jun 09 "Hanieh has always considered herself a good Muslim and a good Iranian. She prays five times a day, works as a manager at a company in Tehran and after her divorce is bringing up a young daughter alone. She was among the millions who voted for Mir Hussein Mousavi in the belief he could bring change and has shared with The Sunday Telegraph her diary entries, detailing her reaction to the last nine days of protests."

Andrew Sullivan, Times Online, Twitter ripped the veil off ‘the other’ – and we saw ourselves, 21 Jun 09 "When you review the Twitter stream of the past week, it reads like a stream of constantly shifting consciousness. It is a kind of journalistic pointillism. From a distance it gains heft. It is history rendered in the collective, scattered mind and it has never happened before - millions upon millions of tiny telegram messages sent to the world.

"I don’t know where this media revolution is headed any more than I know where the Iranian uprising is headed. What I do know is that something changed last week - something we will not forget and that will transform the way we cover and consume breaking news."

Wall Street Journal, Iran Cracks Down on Internet Use, Foreign Media, 17 Jun 09

CNN, Iran accuses Western media of ‘cyber war’, 22 Jun 09 "Iran on Monday stepped up allegations against the West of “meddling” in its affairs, with the foreign ministry accusing media outlets abroad of conducting a cyber war to sow discord in the country following its disputed presidential election."

Iran, Twitter, Web 2.0+

Plenty of comment and coverage re the impact of the net in Iran - I'm only touching on issues here (hope to engage more in due course). Here's what I have scooped up this morning:

The above also features in: Hamid Tehrani, globalvoicesonline.org, Iran: Protests and Repression "Although Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are currently blocked in Iran, many Iranians have been using proxies to bypass filters and report up-to-the-minute news. Iranian authorities have also blocked SMS text messages, and are also filtering several news websites reflecting reformist opinions." [article contains numerous useful links, some of which I am looking at now)

Ali Akbar Dareini, AP, Iran's Revolutionary Guard warns online media, 17 Jun 09 "The Revolutionary Guard, an elite military force answering to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei , said through the state news service that Iranian Web sites and bloggers must remove any materials that "create tension" or face legal action."

TehranLive, Daily Photos From Tehran photo blog

flickr, Agha Hadi's photostream photos from riots

IranEvents photo blog

A twitter RSS feed for 'Iran election'

Loft965, Picture that proves Iran election rigging

TheStar.com, Twitter tells the world as Iran slams the door, 17 Jun 09

Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, Live-Tweeting The Revolution

Evgeny Morozov, Net Effect, More on Twitter and protests in Tehran, 16 Jun 09, "Overall, I am skeptical about the claims that Twitter has been instrumental in organizing the protests. I grant that it may have been very influential in publicizing them. But I'd like to see tangible evidence that 10 random Iranians found each other via Twitter and – communicating in Farsi –actually planned a rally. I think we are still short of this – most of the reports I've seen about the use of Twitter have focused mostly on the role it played in publicizing the violence or the already planned protests and rallies. "

Chris Lefkow, The Age, From Time to Oprah to Iran: Twitter comes of age, 17 Jun 09 " ... the importance of the San Francisco-based startup was underlined by the US State Department, which asked Twitter to postpone a planned maintenance shutdown on Monday because of the situation in Iran."

Lev Grossman, Time, Iran's Protests: Why Twitter is the Medium of the Movement "On Saturday, when protests started to escalate, and the Iranian government moved to suppress dissent both on- and off-line, the Twitterverse exploded with tweets from people who weren't having it, both in English and in Farsi. While the front pages of Iranian newspapers were full of blank space where censors had whited-out news stories, Twitter was delivering information from street level, in real time: "

Internet & Democracy Blog, Cracking Down on Digital Communication and Political Organizing in Iran, 15 Jun 09 "The Internet and mobile phones have taken on a major role in Iranian politics over the last several months. As protests over the contested election results continue in Iran, the government has dramatically increased its control over digital technologies. Many important Web sites have been blocked over the past couple of days, including the Web sites of the opposition parties in Iran, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. While political organizers have learned to leverage the organizing power of Web 2.0 tools, government censors in Iran are quick to shut them down when they are most effective. None of this is surprising; it reflects similar events seen in many places around the world." Also see their Keeping an Eye on Iran's Post-Election Protests, June 16, 2009

3news.co.nz, Twitter used to combat limited press freedom in Iran, 17 Jun 09 "Iran's leadership is growing increasingly sensitive to international press on the election protests, with foreign journalists being ordered out and mobile phone networks and newspapers being shut down."

Huffington Post, Live feed extremely useful and comprehensive, including related links to Twitter, etc.

Guardian, Iran's post-election unrest: live [ongoing feed] includes references to Twitter feeds being used to gather data on opposition supporters, and fake news... "Mousavi's purported twitter feed warns supporters to stay away from www.mirhoseyn.ir and www.mirhoseyn.com, which it says are fake."

Tech stuff (update) Renesys, Iran and the Internet: Uneasy Standoff "In short: Iran is still on the Internet. As the crisis deepens, people are literally risking their lives by continuing to use the Internet for coordination and communication. Iran's physical connectivity to the Internet is so centralized, and so fragile, that it's within the power of the government to simply "turn it off" if they so desired. And yet, they have not done so."

Esther Addley, Guardian, The Twitter crisis: how site became voice of resistance in Iran, 16 Jun 09 "At about 3.30pm Iranian time today, an Iranian student calling himself Fair_vote_Iran wrote the following breathless post on his Twitter page. "Basij [the government paramilitary force] is after us. Slept in the streets last night. Internet is down in most of the city." Moments later he added: "5 killed in the girl's dorm," and then, "Asad is dead & I don't know where is Mohsen, lost him in the crowd yesterday.""

Bernd Kaussler, FPIP, Ahmadinejad's Coup D'Etat, 16 Jun 09 "Three days after the presidential elections in Iran and over 48 hours after violent clashes between crowds and security forces across Tehran, it's evident that what happened was a coup d'état. The military-security establishment and certain elements in Iran's clerical nomenclature carefully planned a large-scale manipulation of the election. They were evidently prepared for the riots and protest that followed. Anticipating a high voter turnout and victory for reformist challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi, security forces blatantly took control of the entire election process and virtually declared martial law in Tehran."

Footage & Facebook: Iran Election

Guardian, Iranian election: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei orders investigation into claims of vote-rigging, 15 Jun 09

Raw footage : YouTube, Protests in Tehran after election - Riot police caught by crowd [also links to other footage]




See cell phone footage

FP, Net Effect, Iran: still online, despite media reports citing Renesys, Strange Changes in Iranian Transit, 14 Jun 09 "There's no question that something large happened in the Iranian telecom space, and that the timing aligns with the close of voting and the emerging controversy. Iran typically has a fairly high baseline level of sporadic route instability, due to the country's highly centralized incumbent transit through DCI (Data Communications Iran, AS12880) and DCI's somewhat peripheral connectivity to the main east-west conduits for data. Even so, we started seeing spikes of route instability (changes in the paths to Iranian IP space) starting around 08:05 UTC on Saturday (just after noon in Tehran) that were significantly larger than normally expected. These bursts affected as many as 400 prefixes (blocks of IP addresses) — the majority of Iran's Internet presence."

Mark Almond, Daily Mail, Iran's hardliners pulled the plug on the great Facebook Revolution, 15 Jun 09 "What is clear is that his candidacy polarised the cultural gulf between those with access to the world of Facebook and those who wouldn’t access the web even if they could."

Times Online, The Facebook revolt of Iran's youth isn't over yet, 14 Jun 09 "The beatings by riot police, closure of universities and clampdown on foreign news websites yesterday, after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed an overwhelming victory, were targeted at the Facebook generation."

AP, Iran supreme leader orders probe of vote fraud, 15 Jun 09 "State television quoted Ayatollah Ali Khamenei directing a high-level clerical panel, the Guardian Council, to look into charges by pro-reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, who has said he is the rightful winner of Friday's presidential election."

Iran: Mousavi and Karroubi campaigns online

Hamid Tehrani, Iran: Movement of 1000 bloggers supports Mousavi for presidency, 6 May 09"Supporters of two leading reformist presidential candidates, former prime minister Mir Hussein Mousavi and former parliament speaker, Mehdi Karroubi are using the internet, including blogs and Facebook, to beef up their chances of being selected as presidential candidates by the Guardian Council in June's election."