Libtech, Small Media released its Election Edition of the ongoing Infrastructure series. It should make for a quick read, but lend a great deal of technical and political insight into the fairly aggressive campaign against access that occurred in the final days of the lead up to the first round of voting .
Cordially, Collin --- * * *Introduction* The behavior of Iranian telecommunication regulators and government officials follows a recurrent, predictable formula: the extent to which the Internet is accessible and stable is directly connected to the security of the political status quo. The full technical capacity and socioeconomic considerations of authorities for the interference of the flow of communications is never truly known until moments of uncertainty, the exact moment when the state intervenes. Despite this pattern, spanning at least four years, international civil society has rarely kept an institutional knowledge accounting for how disruptions occur, more often focusing on the effects and outcomes; particularly, in a manner that enables the articulation of the threat model of a government challenged by its people. Iran has caught the attention of the international public for more often than not reasons of international politics. However, for advocates of the free flow of information, history has shown that as Iran goes, so does much of the rest of the world. In consideration of the prospect of observing such rare window, timed with the first Presidential election since the Green Movement, for seven months we have sought to document the shifts of the country’s Internet. The May edition of our report set the stage, describing an aggressive and accelerated campaign against anti-filtering tools, bloggers and communications services. These technical impediments were creative in a manner that few developers or researchers appeared to have ever predicted. In the fol- lowing weeks after publication, Iranians were subject to a continually compounding set of restrictions, attacks and crackdowns, both online and offline. In the spirit of our mission and these circumstances, we offer in this, the June election edition, a timelines of the events that ensued, accounted for with technical evidence and external verification. Colloquially known as the Filternet, within the course of six weeks, Iran’s Internet progressed from its relative sense of normality, to a nearly unusable network, whitelisted and throttling, and then overnight back to a routine set of restrictions. Such a narrative is sensational in its extremity and interesting technically, however, focusing solely on the struggle between the user and a firewall paints only a fraction of the picture. In the same period, the public learned of links between malware campaigns targeting journalists and prior state-sponsored attacks on Google, informal actors used filtered social media to intimate and identify street protesters, blocking of websites and SMS messages appeared to foreshadow the results of the vetting process, and reformists sites were compromised on an eleventh hour hacking spree. State-vetted candidates not only criticized the filtering regime, but were blocked by it and used international platforms to bypass it. The surprise first round victory of the moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani held a lesson that applies to the Internet as well -- the politics and actions of any system are complex to a point that understanding how it functions requires a deeper knowledge and constant reevaluations of one’s presumptions. -- *Collin David Anderson* averysmallbird.com | @cda | Washington, D.C.
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