Iranian protesters avoid censorship with Navy technology

Iranians seeking to share videos and other eyewitness accounts of the demonstrations that have roiled their country since disputed elections two weeks ago are using an Internet encryption program originally developed by and for the U.S. Navy.

Designed a decade ago to secure Internet communications between U.S. ships at sea, The Onion Router, or TOR, has become one of the most important proxies in Iran for gaining access to Web sites such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

The system of proxy servers that disguise a user’s Internet traffic is now operated by a nonprofit, the Tor Project, that is independent from the U.S. government and military and is used all over the world.

According to the Tor Project, connections to TOR have gone up by 600 percent since mass protests erupted after the June 12 vote, which gave a purported landslide victory to incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“Over the past two weeks, we have seen a doubling to tripling of new client connections,” Andrew Lewman, executive director of the Tor Project, told The Washington Times Thursday. “We are up to a thousand new clients a day.”

Tehran was relatively quiet on Thursday, but opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi vowed not to back down and Iranians found novel ways to continue their protests combining high and low technology.

An Iranian who asked not to be named to avoid government retribution told The Times that Iranians are writing protest slogans on their paper money. Mass e-mails have been sent out telling people approached by the authorities to say they got the money from someone else, he said.

Among the slogans the Iranian saw scrawled over the image of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution: “What happened to our vote, dictator?” “Death to the coup d’etat guard.” “Supreme leader equals Shah.” “The government cheats, the supreme leader approves.”

Iran, a country of 70 million people, has more than 20 million Internet users - the highest percentage in the region outside Israel - and a well-developed blogosphere.

For Iranian Internet users, TOR allows them to visit government-banned Web sites and avoid detection by the authorities. The Tor Project does this by routing Web requests among several different computer servers all over the world. While there are other proxy servers that “anonymize” Web surfing, TOR is considered the best product available on the Internet.

“There are plenty of programs political dissidents can use to route their Internet traffic through third parties and escape censorship and avoid monitoring,” said Noah Shachtman, the editor of Wired.com’s national security blog, Danger Room. “But TOR is different because it is an encrypted network of node after node, each one unlocking encryption to the next node. And because of this, it is all but impossible for governments to track Web sites a TOR user is visiting. TOR is a great way to give Ahmadinejad’s Web censors headaches.”

Since the mass demonstrations began, the Iranian government has tried to denigrate the protests as being instigated by the CIA and other foreign intelligence agencies - a charge that President Obama and other foreign leaders have repeatedly denied.

While U.S. officials and Iran specialists say that the demonstrations are homegrown and reflect pent-up Iranian frustration with the lack of liberty in their country, the U.S. government has in the past invested in communications technology to help Iranians organize and improve their access to the West.

In 2007, the State Department spent $31 million to promote democracy in Iran. An addiional $60 million was appropriated for the program in 2008, but much of it has not yet been spent, former State Department officials said.

Some Iran specialists have criticized the program, noting that it was used by the Iranian government to taint recipients as agents of the West.

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