Tor bridges help Iranian protesters to bypass censors

WIRED:THE IRANIAN election and its protests continue to have ramifications throughout the world of technology, writes DANNY O'BRIEN

Earlier this week, the Washington Timesreported that Nokia Siemens had sold the Iranian government hardware that would allow them to intercept local telephone calls. Nokia Siemens pointed out that it is exactly the same hardware that they sell in the EU and the US, with surveillance capabilities built-in.

Is that an excuse? Nokia Siemens’ own code of conduct states that the company views human rights as “fundamental and universal”. Presumably, when that statement was made, the intent was to place human rights above business decisions.

It was well known that the Iranian government used surveillance in ways that were opposed to human rights in a manner that, say, Belgium’s law enforcement is not. Last week, I spoke of the problems of too cumbersome a set of sanctions against the Iranians, and how that could restrict free communication. But shouldn’t the flip-side of that be that companies such as Nokia Siemens have a responsibility to guard against misuse when they are selling equipment specifically designed for a repressive purpose?

Off the mobile phones, and back on the internet, it’s a different matter. On the internet, technologies are quickly commandeered for new purposes, or rolled out without a thought of a business deal. Within the last few weeks, hundreds of new nodes in the anonymising network Tor have sprung up, created by volunteers to help relay information and hide sources in Iran.

Setting up a Tor bridge is relatively simple for a technically-knowledgeable net user, and can be used by Iranians to bypass their country’s censorship system and cover their tracks.

But the Tor network is not just used by Iranians, and not just in the last week. Originally funded by both the United States’ Naval Research lab and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (a civil rights group, and home of my day job), Tor is highly agnostic about who it helps. Anecdotes and somewhat underhanded academic research showed it to be used by diplomats and website defacers, Chinese dissidents and whistleblowers.

Now it’s being used by Iranians. The principle of Tor works well for both the problems faced by net-using protesters in the country. Tor anonymises net users by shuttling their communications through many different computers across the world. Each trip is encrypted, and every hop works to throw any snooper off the Tor user’s trail.

As a side-effect, Tor can also cut through national censorship systems. Selective web filtering relies on knowing what websites its local citizenry are visiting, so they can block only the visits to prohibited sites. But Tor traffic passes encrypted through those national boundaries, so no such subtlety is possible.

Of course, that just can mean that the national guards of a country’s internet simply become more brutal. And so, rumours suggest, they have in Iran been blocking access even to financial sites in an attempt to stamp out any encryption crossing their borders.

But Tor can evade even such blanket blackouts. In the meantime, Iran’s business is suffering. There’s a reason why the Iranian government has not (at time of writing) taken down the internet entirely: and that’s because it’s too important an economic resource to lose.

To cancel the net in any modern wired society, even Iran’s, would be like bringing down a combination of universal sanctions and a general strike. Perhaps it will come; but for now, the economic calculus argues against it.

The Iranian protests have certainly prompted a powerful reaction amongst net users in the rest of the world. I think that’s because, when you see the protesters in the eye of webcams, cameraphones and grimy YouTube video, they look like the average net user anywhere else in the world. Affluent but not too affluent, vocal but not always coherent, emotional and calling for an emotional response.

As net users respond to that and build out networks like Tor, I do hope the tools and the volunteers who help support them stick around longer than this particular turmoil.

The same week that Iran hit the headlines, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in the city of Shishou in the Chinese province of Hubei. Camphone footage from Saturday showed riot police being faced off by angry residents, who suspected foul play in the death of a hotel chef. Internet access to the area was blocked, and the city of Shishou placed under a media blackout. By Monday, state-run media reported that the protests had ended. In the same week in Germany, the federal government decided to force all ISPs to block a centralised blacklist of websites deemed to be unacceptable.

As more citizens in Hubei get connected, it will be distributed, decentralised anonymising services like Tor that will help Chinese protesters safely report and organise. And if – or when – Germany’s compulsory block list grows out of control, it would be anti-censorship systems like Tor that will allow Germans to find out what is being hidden from them. The system we build for Iran now may well be a system we ourselves will find useful in our own uncertain future.