International Law

Tor relays and exit nodes for Iran, and for the rest of us

The Twitterverse and the mainstream media seem to be convinced that Twitter and Facebook etc. are important in getting first hand reports and images and videoclips, past the Iranian government censors.

Others acknowledge that these have helped to spread the story in the West, but are a bit more sceptical about what is actually being used successfully in Iran at the moment, They are also rightly critical of the pointless attempts at Denial of Service attacks on Iranian government websites etc.- see Ethan Zuckerman: Iran, citizen media and media attention

What then, can the more than merely internet literate readers of Spy Blog do, to help ?

If you are not doing so already, then you could help Iranian democracy, and similarly repressed people in Burma, China, Tibet, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Cuba etc. by running a Tor Relay or even a Tor Exit node.

You would be giving something back to the community, which you yourselves will increasingly have to make use of,in order to escape from the Labour Government's "Eye of Sauron" Intercept Modernisation Programme / Communications Data Bill plans for retaining and snooping on your Communications Traffic Data etc. .

There is evidence that Tor is being used in Iran, even though various internet ports may have been temporarily blocked by the Iranian regime.

The official Tor blog has some details about Measuring Tor and Iran

See also the Renesys blog, for details of the temporary outages and congestion of Iranian international internet connections: Iran and the Internet: Uneasy Standoff

Download the Tor / Vidalia software bundle from:

https://www.torproject.org/easy-download.html.en

Spy Blog, whilst not yet hosting a full mirror, is hosting a copy of the Tor download mirror sites information page.

If you are desperate, here is a copy of the Tor / Vidalia / Tor Button / Privoxy bundle for Windows (approximately 8Mb) - currently version 0.2.0.34.

Remember to read and understand the warnings about the ways in which you can still betray your real IP address, even if you are using Tor.

Some discussions about setting up Tor and other proxy servers, and other advice for Iranian election protestors:

http://iran.whyweprotest.net/ discussion forums.

Feel free to ask Spy Blog questions about the use of Tor, or other technologies to help preserve your anonymity, and to circumvent internet censorship by repressive regimes, either in the comments or via email (or via PGP encrypted email)

A few tips about Tor:

• TOR Bridge relays
• ADSL broadband Bandwidth issues
• Tor relay exit policies

Full post as published by Spy Blog on June 21, 2009 (boomark / email).