We were “in on a moment of modern history”

It's a hark back to the pre internet reporting days.It's 1979 and a young Jon Snow is in Iran as the country prepares to shift from a monrachy to Islamic fundementalism

I was there! Thirty-one years ago, wedged amongst a chanting, seething sea of black-clad woman in chadors moving through downtown Tehran. So dense was the throng that even filming what we were witnessing proved almost impossible.
It was exciting, we knew the Islamic revolution – a people’s clamour for change, for spiritual renewal in the aftermath of the feeble fading of the Shah’s corrupt pro-Western regime – would change the balance of the world in which we lived, but we could not fathom how

.and he adds

We knew too that we were “in on a moment of modern history”.

47 journalists held in Iranian prisons

The Iranian authorities have set a new record.

Iranian authorities are now holding at least 47 journalists in prison, more than any single country has imprisoned since 1996

according to the Committee to protect journalists

While many of the detainees were arrested in the aftermath of the disputed June presidential election, CPJ’s survey found that authorities are continuing to wage an aggressive campaign to round up independent and opposition journalists. At least 26 journalists have been jailed in the last two months alone,

Crimes against God

Two Iranian bloggers face the death sentance reports Reporters without Frontiers

Mehrdad Rahimi and Kouhyar Goudarzi, have been accused of wanting to wage “a war against God,” in a similar manner to the two men who were executed this morning in Tehran on charges of “Mohareb” (being enemies of God). Both contributors to an opposition website, Rahimi and Goudarzi are also facing a possible death penalty.

adding that

Tehran state prosecutor Abass Jafari Dolatabadi declared on 22 January that this committee was an offshoot of the outlawed People's Mujahedeen Organisation and that any collaboration with its website was therefore banned.

Two can play at that game

It seems though that the Chinese are getting a taste of their own medicine,

This from the FT

An unlikely cyberwar broke out yesterday when Iranian hackers attacked China's leading search engine and Chinese counterparts retaliated against Iranian websites.
In the morning, the web page of Baidu, China's largest internet search engine, was covered with an Iranian flag and other symbols and the words "Iranian Cyber Army".
Not long after, a rallying cry for retaliation emerged in Chinese blogs and in the afternoon, Chinese flags and nationalist slogans started appearing on websites registered in Iran.

You Tube to the fore as Iran burns

The latest demonstrations in Iran are resulting in deaths tragically.

For some of the best round ups of the latest using social media especially You Tube-I heartily recommend Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish which is trawling the site for the latest You Tube videos and have been live blogging since Saturday night



In this one,a protestor raises a black helmet, a few protestors hold what appear to be photos of a bloody victim, and a protestor waves a green flag of victory.

In this video clip,as Khatami speaks, the thugs from the coup regime surround the meeting hall and chaos erupts.



And in this one,more clashes from the streets yesterday

Oceans no barrier for the Iranian authorities

It seems that even Iranians living abroad who go online to critisise their country's regime are under attack.

As the Wall Street journal reports

Tehran's leadership faces its biggest crisis since it first came to power in 1979, as Iranians at home and abroad attack its legitimacy in the wake of June's allegedly rigged presidential vote. An opposition effort, the "Green Movement," is gaining a global following of regular Iranians who say they never previously considered themselves activists.

and consequently the heat is being turned up on those use the medium of the internet

Dozens of individuals in the U.S. and Europe who criticized Iran on Facebook or Twitter said their relatives back in Iran were questioned or temporarily detained because of their postings. About three dozen individuals interviewed said that, when traveling this summer back to Iran, they were questioned about whether they hold a foreign passport, whether they possess Facebook accounts and why they were visiting Iran. The questioning, they said, took place at passport control upon their arrival at Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport.

Ht-Suw and Kevin Charman-Anderson

CPJ calls on Iran to release remaining 25 journalists being held

It was great news yesterday when Newsweek reporter Maziar Bahari was released from jail in Iran.

He was arrested on June 21, following the country’s June 12 presidential elections but was released on $300,000 bail on Saturday after spending almost four months in prison and arrived back in London yesterday.

However as CPJ reports there are still 25 journalists in prison in the country.

Among these journalists is Fariba Pajooh, a freelance reporter who has worked for outlets such as Itmad e Milli, the Iranian Labour News Agency, and the Persian service of Radio France International. She was arrested in mid-August and was charged with “propagating against the ‎‎ regime,” according Radio France International. The station reported that she has spent about a month in solitary confinement in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison and has been under pressure to make false confessions. The Human Rights Activists News Agency, a local watchdog group, reported on October 12 that ‎Pajooh has been under constant interrogation for weeks.

Beware technology in fervouring dissent in Iran

The surprise isn't that technology has given protesters a new voice. It's that, despite all the tech, they've been effectively silenced.

writes Farhad Manjoo over at Slate magazine.

He sees the technolgy as assisting the regime in Tehran

In many ways, modern communication tools are easier to suppress than organizing methods of the past

adding that

Through "deep packet inspection," the regime achieves omniscience—it has the technical capability to monitor every e-mail, tweet, blog post, and possibly even every phone call placed in Iran.

Reporting from Iran

Like other journalists who work for foreign media organizations, I was banned early on from reporting on the protests against the official victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. First, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance sent a fax prohibiting me from reporting on the streets. Then I got a call to return my already annulled press card in person. Next, I received an anonymous phone call from a person with a strangely friendly voice, telling me, "There are powerful forces out there that do not want you to continue your work."

Nahid Siamdoust tells Time the perils of reporting from Tehran at the present time and with many modern forms of communication shut down he had to resort to

regular phone calls and e-mail, then the only means of communication among the majority of Iranians, apart from word of mouth at rallies. I started to obtain information about events from family, friends and people on the streets and in shops and taxis.Re

A responsibilty on You Tube over Iran

I picked up Jeff Jarvis' tweet on the subject of Iran

YouTube knows which videos come from Iran. It should be curating & featuring those videos. It has a news responsibility in the ecosystem

which he further explains in another tweet

@ascheurer Responsibility meaning what YouTube can - by its position and knowledge - add.

But does that responsibility extend to getting the message correct.That in itself is an interesting concept.Does Twitter have that same responsibilty?

Technology is neutral remember

There is an interesting piece in this morning's FT by John Gapper who looks at the role of technology in Iran following this week's events.

He writes that

The events in Iran tempt us to view digital technology as a purely liberating force. Rupert Murdoch upset China in 1993 when he asserted that “advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere”, but that view is now accepted wisdom.

But a warning it can have the opposite effect

technology is neutral: the power it hands to citizens who twitter about their political activities could in future be used against them by governments. As they broadcast, they identify themselves as dissidents and leave digital fingerprints on networks.

Toby Young apologises for doubting the power of twitter

I would like to take this opportunity to apologise unreservedly to Twitter. Like many of my colleagues, I unfairly characterised it as a vacuous expression of our narcissistic age. In fact, it turns out to be the most effective tool for advancing freedom and democracy since the invention of the internet. In Iran, the anti-government protesters have been circumventing President Ahmadinejad’s efforts to stop them organising by communicating via Twitter. Not only that, but they have been using the social networking site to file pictures and news reports, documenting the government’s brutal attempt to suppress the protest. If President Ahmadinejad falls and Mousavi is installed in his place, this will surely come to be known as the Twitter Revolution.

writes Toby Young in the Spectator this week

An alternative view to Iran on Twitter

Unlike several other technology-friendly journalists, I've found it more noise than signal in understanding the Iranian upheaval. I'm not saying that there is no signal to be found; I'm just saying that my cognitive colander isn't big enough to strain out Iran information I can rely on.

writes Jack Shafer at Slate adding that

If we should be able to criticize Ayatollah Ali Khamenei without fear of being shot, so, too, should we be able to scrutinize Twitter.

Iran and the social media

Some amazing figures from Mashable on the effect of Iran on the blogosphere.

Yesterday saw a peak of 221,744 Iran tweets in a hour and the total figure is now approaching a million or 1 per cent of total traffic.

There are 19m blog posts discussing Iran,with over 2m in the last 24 hours and in the same period over 3,000 You Tube videos.

A twitter or an API revolution asks Jeff Jarvis?

Jeff Jarvis reflects on the so called Twitter revolution taking place in reporting from Iran.

He though prefers to call it the API revolution.

For it’s Twitter’s architecture - which enables anyone to create applications that call and feed into it - that makes it all but impervious from blocking by tyrants’ censors. Twitter is not a site or a blog at an address. You don’t have to go to it. It can come to you (as newspapers should). Twitter is an outpost in the cloud and there can be unlimited points of access from every application and site using its API, so the crowd can always stay ahead of the people formerly known as the authorities.

Who should control international news?

Is there too much international news to consume?

Well,Charlie Beckett reports from the BBC festival of international news,where he says

it took veteran BBC hack Frank Gardner to suggest that perhaps there is a limit to the number of people who want to devour detailed reports and analysis from far flung corners of the globe.

The truth he adds

is that we have more international news than ever before. Thanks to new media we can also make it and access it by ourselves.

But surrounded by old media executives he felt that there was a reluctance to accept that foriegn news could be entrusted to the new media arguing that

the evidence from Iran at the moment is that freedom of expression is, indeed, a fragile bloom. But the greatest protection for global connectivity and trans-national communication is to enpower the people to participate.

Iran A nation of bloggers

IRAN: A Nation Of Bloggers from ayrakus on Vimeo.

Ht-Andrew Sullivan

Sambrook on Iran and social media-you need an understanding of its power to interpret the facts

Richard Sambrook has been doing a grand job over the weekend monitoring cyberspace whilst watching the events in Tehran.

These are his initial thoughts on how twitter dealt with the weekend's events

If you, as an average news consumer, relied on Twitter you might believe all sorts of things had happened, which simply hadn't, running a high risk of being seriously misled about events on the ground. You might at best, have simply been confused. You probably wouldn't have thought Ahmadinejad enjoys much popular support at all.

but he continues

But if you had a reasonable understanding of social media, how to set up and assess feeds, how to compare and contrast information, if you had a reasonable understanding of news flows, a developed sense of scepticism, and an above average understanding of the political situation in Iran, you would have emerged much better informed than the lay viewer relying on TV or Radio news.

Iran is jamming the Beeb's signals

Peter Horrocks writes over at the BBC editors blog

BBC audiences in Iran, the Middle East and Europe may be experiencing disruption to their BBC TV or radio services today. That is because there is heavy electronic jamming of one of the satellites the BBC uses in the Middle East to broadcast the BBC Persian TV signal to Iran. Satellite technicians have traced that interference and it is coming from Iran. There has been intermittent interference from Iran since Friday but this is the heaviest yet.

Iranian blogger dies in prison

Global voices online are reporting that the Iranian blogger,Omid Reza Mir Sayafi has died in prison.

The 29 year old had been sentenced to two and half years in prison for allegedly insulting religious leaders, and engaging in propaganda against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

They report that

According to the Human Rights activists in Iran website, Omid Reza suffered from deep depression in jail and was prescribed medications of which he apparently took too many.