Zitat At the heart of the disputed Iranian elections, a group of Canadians is helping Iranian activists gain access to what has become the most precious and tightly controlled commodity in Iran: information.
The Canadian researchers behind Psiphon, an online censorship avoidance tool, have begun a massive grassroots campaign to give Iranians access to sites that the Iranian government has gone to great lengths to ban – including Facebook, Iranian opposition sites and international news networks. Psiphon has been “pushing” that content to Iranians, giving them a glimpse of the outside world that has been largely blocked since the elections began.
But Psiphon's founders are walking a tightrope in their attempts to empower Iranians, as they try to simultaneously offer activists unfettered access to the Internet and dissuade those same activists from launching cyberattacks on the government institutions that took that access away in the first place.
“Thousands of people are arguing for [cyberattacks against government infrastructure],” said Greg Walton, editor of the Information Warfare Monitor and a research fellow at the Citizen Lab in the University of Toronto's Munk Centre, where Psiphon was first developed. “We're concerned that if people launch [denial of service attacks] – the Iranian government is already throttling [down] bandwidth – this may take up the remaining bandwidth.”
Mr. Walton said some government sites have been defaced, including the site for a government-run radio station, and that others had gone down, possibly as a result of cyberattacks.
Iran's biggest mass protest since the 1979 Islamic revolution – sparked by what is seen by many Iranians as a sham election – has become a full-fledged global movement, fought on and fuelled by the World Wide Web.
The cyberrevolution's epicentre is the microblogging site Twitter. Often disparaged as trivial because of its 140-character limit on posts, the site has proved to be an extremely effective way for activists to post rapid-fire updates on the situation on the ground in Iran.
Das Kanada Forum
Thema drucken
17.06.2009 20:23
Antworten
