True North

Iran's mullahs, like President Ahmadinejad, once seemed too powerful to topple. Since the mullahs tried stealing the election for President Ahmadinejad, though, young people equipped with cell phones and Twitter accounts have brought the Iranian power structure to the brink of collapse.

While the outcome still hangs in the balance, there's no doubt but that the 'peasants' have the mullahs worrying. This article in the SF Chronicle raises a couple salient points:

This isn't the first uprising to tap the Internet, but it's the latest to test limits on controls and deploy new ideas to evade the government muzzle. Iran maybe the perfect place to beta-test attempts to fight a censorship lockdown. It has a lively blogger culture in a nation where two-thirds of the 70 million population are under 30 years of age. Some 45 million have cell phones and 23 million have Net access. Talk about ideal demographics.

This information is the mullahs' worst nightmare and the biggest weapon in the revolutionaries' arsenal. Because secular Iran is mostly comprised with people raised entirely in the internet age, this generation is perfectly equipped to outflanked the mullahs.

Here's more important information:

Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube are the new soapboxes and organizing centers. One sign of the times: a message from the U.S. State Department to Twitter's San Francisco headquarters to delay a maintenance shutdown to a late-night hour in Tehran so anti-government tweeting wasn't halted.

"These sites didn't create a revolution," said Leslie Harris, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C. "But they provide essential tools for civil rights and democracy."

Once Iran's leaders launched a crackdown on protests, a new game emerged. Twitter, with relatively few users inside Iran, became an international town square. Its avatars, the small, identifying pictures used on its pages, turned green to match the campaign color used by challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi.

The use of this technology has brought the revolution to the world. I have to believe that it's also giving Iranian patriots the understanding that they aren't alone, that the world is standing with them.

That isn't insignificant. All the proof we need is Natan Scharansky's book telling the world that Ronald Reagan's words spoke to the dissidents languishing in Soviet gulags gave the dissidents the will to keep fighting for freedom. Scharansky said that there were times when the dissidents felt so encouraged that they felt like the liberated and the guards were the prisoners.

Likewise, Facebook became a rallying point. The Palo Alto-based operation was safely outside the reach of government gumshoes. YouTube and Flickr are stocked with photos and videos that the mullahs would just as soon you don't see. These new uses showed that censorship and Internet controls had the main effect of producing ingenious ways of evading the crackdown.

This is a watershed moment in world history. From this moment forward, people with the will to stage revolutions will have the tools they need to rally the world to their cause.

It's also worth noting that there were reports that some of the forces sent in to break up the protests were turning a blind eye to the protests. This was the big question as recently as Friday. If more troops abandon the mullahs, chances that the revolution will be successful increase. While it's still a longshot, the revolutionaries' odds keep getting better.

Mousavi's declaration that he was willing to be a martyr for the cause has emboldened the Iranian revolutionaries, too. The young people are getting energized thanks in part to Twitter and Facebook but also by Mousavi's taking a stand.

People shouldn't underestimate what a lifechanger it is to have a shot at being liberated from oppression. For all his faults, President Bush got that part exactly right.

This article illustrates the important role that software technicians are playing in the revolution:

Rafal Rohozinski, CEO of Psiphon Inc., the man who recently led the team that busted an international cyber espionage network known as Ghostnet, and his team have been flooding Iran with secure network connections to servers located in other countries.

The Iranian government strictly monitors and filters Internet connections within Iran, blocking websites such as YouTube and Twitter as well as foreign sources of news.

Psiphon's unfiltered connections are allowing Iranian citizens to get news from outside sources such as the BBC and to connect to online social media services, including Twitter and Facebook, which are being used to arrange demonstrations against the Iranian government.

"We have gone on the offensive," said Rohozinski. "Ensuring that Iranians have access to the information they need and deserve so that they can make informed decisions for themselves during this time of crisis."

During the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, I left a comment on a blog called the Postmodern Slog. I said then that that revolution "will be blogged." (SIDENOTE: That's how I learned about a blogger on the SCSU campus named King Banaian.) It's appropriate to say that this revolution will be tweeted.

Let's hope that this revolution succeeds in ways that that revolution didn't. Most importantly, let's lend our support for the Iranian patriots flooding the streets and confusing the mullahs.

Comments welcome at LFR.