Israel Matzav

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Iranian internet access recovering

I hope that the picture at the top of this post is visible - if not, you can find it here.

Some of you may recall that I reported on Saturday night that internet access in Iran had been cut off. As you can see from the graph above of gmail access from Iran, things are improving.

The country is preparing to hold parliamentary elections on March 2, the first time Iranians will go to the polls since President Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election. The government denied any fraud in the vote, which ignited street protests that were crushed violently by security services after eight months.

The new Internet blockade affected the most common form of secure connections from Friday, according to outside experts and Iranian bloggers. Traffic was said to have returned to normal on Monday. "I haven't been able to open pages for days but now it's working again, although slowly," said Hamid Reza, a 20-year-old student in Tehran, who was reluctant to give his surname.

The cut-off appeared to target all encrypted international websites outside Iran that depend on the Secure Sockets Layer protocol, which display addresses beginning with https, according to Earl Zmijewski of Renesys, a US company that tracks Internet traffic worldwide.

Google, which uses SSL for its Gmail service, reported that traffic from Iran to its email system fell precipitously.

Iran's Ministry of Communications and Technology denied knowing of the disruption, saying the origin was elsewhere.

"The government is testing different tools," said Hamed Behravan, who reports on Iranian technology issues for the US government-funded Voice of America. "They might have wanted to see the public reaction."

...

Opposition supporters believe Iranian authorities were targeting their attempts to hold a rally calling on the government to release leaders of the opposition Green movement, Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi.

The two leaders were placed under house arrest on Feb. 14 last year after they urged their supporters to join a rally in support of uprisings across the Arab world.

Iranian authorities have vowed to quell any public protest against the protracted house arrest of Mousavi and Karoubi.

I'll bet they now wish they had gone the North Korean route. In North Korea, there is no internet.

Labels: internet shutdown, Iran elections, Iran protests

Monday, February 07, 2011

US company assisted Egyptian internet shutdown

Al-Jazeera reports that a California-based company assisted the Egyptian government in shutting down the internet in Egypt.

Let's go to the videotape.

Here's more from Free Press:

Network providers have used so-called “deep packet inspection” (DPI) software for years in order to examine the bits of digital information, called packets, that make up an email or other transmission, in order to find spam, computer viruses, and other malicious code on their systems.

“Anything that comes through (an Internet protocol network), we can record. We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their [Voice Over Internet Protocol] calls," the Vice President of Marketing for the company, Steve Bannerman, told Wired Magazine.

Free Press claims the Egyptian government's alleged use of such technology to read messages and even track cellphone users via GPS coordinates and SMS messaging was an infraction of the protesters' human rights.

“What we are seeing in Egypt is a frightening example of how the power of technology can be abused,” Free Press Campaign Director Timothy Karr said.

“Commercial operators trafficking in Deep Packet Inspection technology to violate Internet users’ privacy is bad enough; in government hands, that same invasion of privacy can quickly lead to stark human rights violations,” Karr said, and demanded that “companies that profit from sales of this technology … be held to a higher standard.”

Kerr warned that such commercial software systems are “being used by regimes in Iran, China, Burma and others for far more suspicious, and possibly brutal, purposes.”

It's surprising that the US doesn't (apparently) restrict the export of this kind of technology.

Labels: deep packet inspection, Egyptian riots, internet shutdown, Narus