Iran vs. the Internet

June 12, 2009 will go down in history as one of the great moments in history, if only because the Internet demonstrated it could not only withstand nuclear wars and natural catastrophes, but also deliberate attempts by governments to exercise absolute control over its workings.

On that day Iran held allegedly democratic presidential elections between incumbent both President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and moderate rival Mir Hossein Mousavi. Both claimed victory almost immediately. The apparent landslide results for Ahmadinejad has spurred charges of voting fraud, protests worldwide, and riots across Iran, which in turn has led the Iranian government to order international news organizations not to broadcast any of the livelier activities, and attempt to cut off the nation’s Internet and cellular access by powering down gateways/routers to international networks, removing satellite dishes, and cutting off their version of the PSTN.

On June 13th at 6:00 p.m. in Tehran, all 6 of Iran’s regional and global providers connecting Iran to the outside world simply disappeared off of the net. The state-owned Data communication Company of Iran (DCI), normally the gateway for all Internet traffic entering or leaving the country (normally about 5 Gbps upstream) apparently started suffering from some “problems”. Iran’s primary connections are from CDI through the Asia Pacific region undersea cable operator Reliance Telecom, along with Singtel and Türk Telekom.

By doing this, of course, Iran’s government was simply be “shooting itself in the foot”. Credit card systems, ATMs, electronic commerce of various sorts and even power utilities increasingly rely on the communications infrastructure. Indeed, one pundit has suggested that a recent power outage in Tehran was caused by “unpluging” critical points in Iran’s communications networks which carry messages over control channels between power generating and switching equipment.

Interestingly, a few hours after cutting the connections, a dribble of traffic (less than 1 Gbps) again appeared across TeliaSonera (News - Alert), Reliance and SignTel. By June 16, traffic was back to 70 percent of normal.

So what’s going on?

According to Dr. Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Arbor Networks (www.arborneworks.com) says, “DCI’s Internet changes suggest piecemeal migration of traffic flows. Typically off the shelf / inexpensive Internet proxy and filtering appliances can support 1 Gbps or lower. If DCI needed to support higher throughput (say, all Iranian Internet traffic), then redirecting subsets of traffic as the filtering infrastructure comes online would make sense. Unlike Burma, Iran has significant commercial and technological relationships with the rest of the world. In other words, the government cannot turn off the Internet without impacting business and perhaps generating further social unrest. In all, this represents a delicate balance for the Iranian government and a test case for the Internet to impact democratic change. Events are still unfolding in Iran, but some reports are saying the Internet has already won.”

The Iranian protests, armed with nothing more than Twitter, Facebook (News - Alert), cell phone cameras and some email, are employing proxy servers to get around government cyber-blockades. Some software to accomplish this was developed by a group of Chinese computer engineers in America called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, now used by over 400,000 people in Iran. Ironically, this free software – called Freegate, appropriately enough (as well as its variant, Ultrasurf) – was originally designed to penetrate the cyber-barriers erected not by Iran, but those of the Chinese Communist Party as part of their censorship of the Falun Gong, a repressed Chinese spiritual meditation group. The software can be transported via a flash drive in one’s pocket. When run, it calls upon the Consortium’s overseas server that changes its IP address at time intervals too quickly to be blocked, then connects the user to a banned site. Freegate can encrypt emails and it can remove any traces of itself or its activities from a computer. IT

It’s all great – but too bad the other side has guns.

Richard Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC (News - Alert)’s IP Communications Group.

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