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Iran's Web Spying Aided By Western Technology
European Gear Used in Vast Effort to Monitor Communications By CHRISTOPHER RHOADS in New York and LORETTA CHAO in Beijing 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. Interviews with technology experts in Iran and outside the country say Iranian efforts at monitoring Internet information go well beyond blocking access to Web sites or severing Internet connections. Warning: This YouTube video contains graphic images. It purports to show a woman dying after being shot in an Iran street protest. The Wall Street Journal has not independently verified its contents. Instead, in confronting the political turmoil that has consumed the country this past week, the Iranian government appears to be engaging in a practice often called deep packet inspection, which enables authorities to not only block communication but to monitor it to gather information about individuals, as well as alter it for disinformation purposes, according to these experts. The monitoring capability was provided, at least in part, by a joint venture of Siemens AG, the German conglomerate, and Nokia Corp., the Finnish cellphone company, in the second half of 2008, Ben Roome, a spokesman for the joint venture, confirmed. The "monitoring center," installed within the government's telecom monopoly, was part of a larger contract with Iran that included mobile-phone networking technology, Mr. Roome said. "If you sell networks, you also, intrinsically, sell the capability to intercept any communication that runs over them," said Mr. Roome. The sale of the equipment to Iran by the joint venture, called Nokia Siemens Networks, was previously reported last year by the editor of an Austrian information-technology Web site called Futurezone. The Iranian government had experimented with the equipment for brief periods in recent months, but it had not been used extensively, and therefore its capabilities weren't fully displayed -- until during the recent unrest, the Internet experts interviewed said. "We didn't know they could do this much," said a network engineer in Tehran. "Now we know they have powerful things that allow them to do very complex tracking on the network." Deep packet inspection involves inserting equipment into a flow of online data, from emails and Internet phone calls to images and messages on social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Every digitized packet of online data is deconstructed, examined for keywords and reconstructed within milliseconds. In Iran's case, this is done for the entire country at a single choke point, according to networking engineers familiar with the country's system. It couldn't be determined whether the equipment from Nokia Siemens Networks is used specifically for deep packet inspection. All eyes have been on the Internet amid the crisis in Iran, and government attempts to crack down on information. The infiltration of Iranian online traffic could explain why the government has allowed the Internet to continue to function -- and also why it has been running at such slow speeds in the days since the results of the presidential vote spurred unrest. Users in the country report the Internet having slowed to less than a tenth of normal speeds. Deep packet inspection delays the transmission of online data unless it is offset by a huge increase in processing power, according to Internet experts. Iran is "now drilling into what the population is trying to say," said Bradley Anstis, director of technical strategy with Marshal8e6 Inc., an Internet security company in Orange, Calif. He and other experts interviewed have examined Internet traffic flows in and out of Iran that show characteristics of content inspection, among other measures. "This looks like a step beyond what any other country is doing, including China." China's vaunted "Great Firewall," which is widely considered the most advanced and extensive Internet censoring in the world, is believed also to involve deep packet inspection. But China appears to be developing this capability in a more decentralized manner, at the level of its Internet service providers rather than through a single hub, according to experts. That suggests its implementation might not be as uniform as that in Iran, they said, as the arrangement depends on the cooperation of all the service providers. Checks and Balances Iran's government is a combination of democracy and Islamic theocracy. Take a look at the power structure. View Interactive The difference, at least in part, has to do with scale: China has about 300 million Internet users, the most of any country. Iran, which has an estimated 23 million users, can track all online communication through a single location called the Telecommunication Infrastructure Co., part of the government's telecom monopoly. All of the country's international links run through the company. Separately, officials from the U.S. embassy in Beijing on Friday met with Chinese officials to express concerns about a new requirement that all PCs sold in the China starting July 1 be installed with Web-filtering software. If a government wants to control the flow of information across its borders it's no longer enough to block access to Web sites hosted elsewhere. Now, as sharing online images and messages through social-networking sites has become easy and popular, repressive regimes are turning to technologies that allow them to scan such content from their own citizens, message by message. Human-rights groups have criticized the selling of such equipment to Iran and other regimes considered repressive, because it can be used to crack down on dissent, as evidenced in the Iran crisis. Asked about selling such equipment to a government like Iran's, Mr. Roome of Nokia Siemens Networks said the company "does have a choice about whether to do business in any country. We believe providing people, wherever they are, with the ability to communicate is preferable to leaving them without the choice to be heard." Countries with repressive governments aren't the only ones interested in such technology. Britain has a list of blocked sites, and the German government is considering similar measures. In the U.S., the National Security Agency has such capability, which was employed as part of the Bush administration's "Terrorist Surveillance Program." A White House official wouldn't comment on if or how this is being used under the Obama administration. The Australian government is experimenting with Web-site filtering to protect its youth from online pornography, an undertaking that has triggered criticism that it amounts to government-backed censorship. Content inspection and filtering technology are already common among corporations, schools and other institutions, as part of efforts to block spam and viruses, as well as to ensure that employees and students comply with computer-use guidelines. Families use filtering on their home computers to protect their children from undesirable sites, such as pornography and gambling. Internet censoring in Iran was developed with the initial justification of blocking online pornography, among other material considered offensive by the regime, according to those who have studied the country's censoring. Iran has been grappling with controlling the Internet since its use moved beyond universities and government agencies in the late 1990s. At times, the government has tried to limit the country's vibrant blogosphere -- for instance, requiring bloggers to obtain licenses from the government, a directive that has proved difficult to enforce, according to the OpenNet Initiative, a partnership of universities that study Internet filtering and surveillance. (The partners are Harvard University, the University of Toronto, the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford.) Beginning in 2001, the government required Internet service providers to install filtering systems, and also that all international connections link to a single gateway controlled by the country's telecom monopoly, according to an OpenNet study. Iran has since blocked Internet users in the country from more than five million sites in recent years, according to estimates from the press-freedom group Reporters Without Borders. View Slideshow In the 2005 presidential election, the government shut down the Internet for hours, blaming it on a cyberattack from abroad, a claim that proved false, according to several Tehran engineers. Several years ago, research by OpenNet discovered the government using filtering equipment from a U.S. company, Secure Computing Corp. Due to the U.S. trade embargo on Iran, in place since the 1979 Islamic revolution overthrew the U.S.-backed shah, that was illegal. Secure Computing, now owned by McAfee Inc., at the time denied any knowledge of the use of its products in Iran. McAfee said due diligence before the acquisition revealed no contract or support being provided in Iran. Building online-content inspection on a national scale and coordinated at a single location requires hefty resources, including manpower, processing power and technical expertise, Internet experts said. Nokia Siemens Networks provided equipment to Iran last year under the internationally recognized concept of "lawful intercept," said Mr. Roome. That relates to intercepting data for the purposes of combating terrorism, child pornography, drug trafficking and other criminal activities carried out online, a capability that most if not all telecom companies have, he said. The monitoring center that Nokia Siemens Networks sold to Iran was described in a company brochure as allowing "the monitoring and interception of all types of voice and data communication on all networks." The joint venture exited the business that included the monitoring equipment, what it called "intelligence solutions," at the end of March, by selling it to Perusa Partners Fund 1 LP, a Munich-based investment firm, Mr. Roome said. He said the company determined it was no longer part of its core business. -- Ben Worthen in San Francisco, Mike Esterl in Atlanta and Siobhan Gorman in Washington contributed to this article. Write to Christopher Rhoads at christopher.rhoads@wsj.com and Loretta Chao at loretta.chao@wsj.com Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A1 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1245..._whats_news_us
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Death toll: These freshly dug graves are destined for the bodies of protesters shot during election rallies, according to Neda's fiance Caspian Makan
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Israeli Radio Show Captivates Iranians
By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV
JERUSALEM—In his Friday sermon, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reserved special wrath for "Zionist radio" that he said tried to drive a wedge between the Iranian people and the Islamic Republic. Such attention from Iran's supreme leader was music to the ears of Menashe Amir, a bespectacled Iranian-born Israeli who has been broadcasting in Persian from Jerusalem for the past five decades. "We're listened to in Iran and considered very credible and effective," Mr. Amir says with pride. "We're close to the Iranian people, we know what they want, and we have our sources that give us detailed news about everything that's going on in Iran." The spread of the Internet and satellite television in Iran over the past decade seemed to eclipse the prominence of Mr. Amir's old-fashioned shortwave broadcasts on Kol Israel, Israel's public radio. But now, as the Web in Iran is either blocked or dramatically slowed and satellite-TV channels are jammed by the government amid spreading unrest, Mr. Amir has suddenly become relevant again. "Today we have many more listeners inside the country because Iranians are thirsty for any information" about the unrest, the 69-year-old Mr. Amir says. He estimates the Iranian audience for Kol Israel's 85-minute daily show in Persian is between two million and six million people. Independent audience numbers, for obvious reasons, are impossible to come by. Though semiretired, Mr. Amir has been hosting the show every day since Iran's controversial June 12 elections, narrating news summaries and taking live telephone calls from listeners within Iran. The call-in part of the broadcast, normally a weekly feature, is now on air daily due to the current unrest. Because Iran bans phone and postal links with Israel, Iranian callers dial a special number in Germany; as a precaution, Mr. Amir asks them not to mention their names or hometowns. On a recent day, as Mr. Amir sat in his tiny studio in Kol Israel's Jerusalem offices, one caller from Iran, his voice trembling with emotion, recounted how "there's blood on the streets and people are being killed like butterflies." Another urged the world to help the protesters—reminding that Persian emperor Cyrus the Great protected and aided the Jews two and a half millennia ago, and asking the Jewish state to repay the favor by supporting Iranian demonstrators today. Mr. Amir hasn't made any calls to sources inside Iran for decades, he says, fearing his voice would be recognizable to anyone who may be monitoring his contacts' phones. But he and other journalists at the service keep in touch via email and other means of electronic communications with local sources. He boasts of being able to beat the competition on anything from the latest price of cheese in Tehran to confidential discussions within the Islamic Republic's establishment. Neatly dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and a tie despite Jerusalem's sweltering heat, Mr. Amir embodies the golden age in Israel's relationship with Iran, the Jewish state's closest regional ally until the shah was overthrown in 1979's Islamic revolution. "I am 100% Iranian, and I wish the best to Iran. Israel and Iran are natural friends," he says, his studio decorated with posters of Iranian movie stars, a printout of an Iranian flag and a family photograph of Prince Reza Pahlavi, the late shah's exiled son and heir. "There are still many who remember the period of fruitful cooperation between Israel and Iran, and they want it back," Mr. Amir adds. Still, Israeli analysts caution, Mr. Amir's vision of renewed Israeli-Iranian friendship is unlikely to materialize in the foreseeable future, even if the protesters, led by former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, somehow gain the upper hand in Tehran. "The entire population has been raised for the past 30 years with the cultic mantra of "death to Israel," " says Prof. Ze'ev Maghen, a Persian speaker who heads the Middle East Studies department at Israel's Bar Ilan University. "It's almost impossible to conceive of a positive outlook on peace between Israel and Iran." Born into a Jewish family in Tehran, Mr. Amir worked for Iran's Kayhan newspaper—now the mouthpiece of the Islamic regime—before he moved to Israel in 1960. He is one of some 60,000 such immigrants—a community that still maintains close contact with the estimated 15,000 Jews who remain inside Iran. The community plans a demonstration of support for Tehran protesters on Tel Aviv's seafront promenade Tuesday. Iranian-born Israelis include Shaul Mofaz, until earlier this year Israel's minister of defense, who is often heard in Mr. Amir's broadcasts. An institution in Israel, Mr. Amir, who also edits the Israeli foreign ministry's Persian-language Web site, bristles at suggestions that he must be coordinating his programming with Israeli government officials because Kol Israel is a public broadcaster that targets a strategic foe. "Nobody gives us advice—we're the ones who give advice" to the government, he says indignantly. "We know the Iranian psychology, and can tell exactly what's happened there and what the news means." Mr. Amir minces no word in expressing his outrage over a statement by Meir Dagan, the chief of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, who told a parliamentary committee last week that the extent of fraud in Iran's contested presidential elections was no worse than what happens in liberal democracies. "If that's what Mossad really thinks, they don't have any idea of what's going on in Iran," Mr. Amir said. Kol Israel, of course, isn't the only foreign radio station broadcasting in Persian. The British Broadcasting Corporation, the Voice of America and U.S.-funded Radio Farda also beam into the Islamic Republic. Ayatollah Khamenei, however, on Friday singled out Kol Israel, naming it first in his tirade against alleged foreign interference in Iranian affairs. "The enemies are trying through their media, which is controlled by dirty Zionists. The Zionist, U.S. and U.K. radio are all trying to say that there was a competition between those who supported and those who didn't support the state," the ayatollah said, insisting that all presidential candidates fully accepted the Islamic Republic and its government system. "Accusing the government of corruption because of Zionist reports is not the right thing." Ayatollah Khamenei's diatribes are likely to lure new listeners to Mr. Amir's program, Israeli analysts say. "The enemy of my enemy may not be my friend," explains Shmuel Bar, director of studies at the Institute for Policy and Strategy in Herzliya. "But, if the regime is so much against it, you have to listen to it." Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124571901245939581.html
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The murder of Neda Agah-Soltan is very likely to be the shot seen around the world. I mean she dies right on cell phone video and it is all too real, very real. The death throws have volumes of blood coming out her nose and mouth, eyes going blank, all of it; not for the timid to see. The reality of brutal Islamic maniacs is seen right there and then. The most revealing part of it all is that Neda was the only women within a group of men and was cut down by what is reported to be a sniper. I saw the video, and there were no other women. And I see no evidence that Neda was actively being aggressive toward any Iranian security forces, and perhaps just there out of curiosity and in support of rejecting a rigged and fraudulent election. Actually, she died with her father trying his best to save her, but no hope; she was shot right through the heart. Evidently the two had ventured out to see what was going on.
There was absolutely no reason to murder her and the Iranian Ayatollah anointed version of “Papa Doc” now stands clearly visible, is responsible and has sent a strong message. My take is that the Iranian Ayatollah decides who gets elected, vote count is irrelevant, and anyone who objects to vote fraud will be brutalized, murdered, etc., especially women. Scamp
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6 Mousavi supporters reportedly hanged
Jul. 1, 2009 SABINA AMIDI, Special to The Jerusalem Post , THE JERUSALEM POST As the Iranian authorities warned the opposition on Tuesday that they would tolerate no further protests over the disputed June 12 presidential elections, a report emerged of the hangings of six supporters of defeated candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. Speaking after Iran's top legislative body upheld the election victory of incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sources in Iran told this reporter in a telephone interview that the hangings took place in the holy city of Mashhad on Monday. There was no independent confirmation of the report. Underlining the climate of fear among direct and even indirect supporters of Mousavi's campaign for the election to be annulled, the sources also reported that a prominent cleric gave a speech to opposition protesters in Teheran earlier this week in which he publicly acknowledged that the very act of speaking at the gathering would likely cost him his life. "Ayatollah Hadi Gafouri said that the Imam [Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini] never wanted [current supreme Leader] Ali Khamenei to succeed him. He even went to say that the Islamic republic died the day the Imam did," one source said. Other criticisms from senior clerics over the regime's handling of the elections and subsequent protests included a report from a Persian news agency, which on Tuesday quoted a senior cleric from the city of Esfahan, Ayatollah Seyyed Jalaleddin Taheri-Esfahani, defending Mousavi against the regime's criticisms. The ayatollah was quoted as saying: "Is it a case of justice to see that an honorable and modest Seyyed [a descendant of the household of the prophet Muhammad], who until the last moments of Khomeini's life was a dear and close companion of that grand leader, is now considered to be a rioter and an agent of arrogance who must be punished?" On Monday, witnesses said thousands of policemen and Basij militiamen carrying batons were deployed in Teheran's main squares to prevent any recurrence of the opposition protests. Drivers who so much as shouted "Allahu Akbar" or beeped their horns had their windows smashed by the Basiji and riot police. Women police, better known as the Sisters of Zeynab, are also now out in force, the witnesses said. "Some people are still going out into the streets, but there is despair and sadness," said one source. "Now we are told that [pro-Mousavi] green bands are illegal, which is ironic because it symbolizes the color of Islam." On Monday, the daughter of former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, spoke a gathering of opposition protesters in Teheran's Enqelab Square, sources said. "Mrs. Faezeh Hashemi arrived and tried to give the people some words of encouragement," said one, "but the police broke up the rally within minutes." He added, "My nephew saw one of these Sisters of Zeynab beat down an elderly woman with no mercy. When he tried to intervene, saying to her, 'Miss, she is like your grandmother,' the woman turned around to get a Basiji to deal with him." Mousavi's Facebook page is still carrying messages aimed at quashing the notion that he is caving in. "He did not give in to the Guardians Council," runs one new message. "Mir Hossein Mousavi is not under house arrest, he is not about to leave the country, he is under strong pressure to end this, but he always said he will stand up for the people's will to the end! He is from and with the people." Amid the talk of despair and quashed protests, one defiant reformist supporter told this reporter: "The regime wants the world to think they have won. Don't believe it... Even if this regime is about to collapse, they would not let anybody know until their final hour." This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1246296541275&pagename=JPArticle%2FS howFull
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Video of Iranian Regime Using Lebanese Hezbollah To Attack Demonstrators
Sent to WorldThreats.com. We cannot confirm this, but the Iranian who sent us this tape claims that it shows Arabic-speaking, Lebanese Hezbollah members working for the regime to attack Iranian demonstrators.
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Iranian Protesters Defy Regime's Crackdown Threats
Opponents of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Ayatollah Ali Khamenei aren't giving up so easily. They've once again taken to the streets in demonstrations. For days, supporters of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi have been calling for new protests in Tehran and other cities on Thursday, their first significant attempt to get back on the streets since security forces crushed massive demonstrations nearly two weeks ago in Iran's postelection turmoil.As I've noted, the situation in Iran will continue to ebb and flow as the regime tries to maintain its grip on power and the opposition looks for ways to organize just beyond the regime's grasp. The regime has continued making threats against the opposition, claiming that they are working at the behest of the US, the West, and/or Israel. It's a tried and true formula in the Middle East, but it's not going to fool many this time around, not when so many people see the regime for what it is - a fraudulent attempt to remain in power. http://lawhawk.blogspot.com/2009/07/...y-regimes.html
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live blogging ...
Copyright © 2009 RRblog Mirdamad ST. >>My twitter account name is BISTOON ,please ignore anything else as that is fake and not mine.Thanks<<
Copyright © 2009 RRblog
Chants against Khamenei's Son, Mojtaba! 9 july Tehran! Taleqni-valiasr,tehran 8:00 pm.9july!
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