Illustration by the author
Mention “Internet censorship,” and Google’s recent fracas with the Chinese government immediately comes to mind (Tanaka). However, China has plenty of company not only in censoring the Internet, but in punishing those who try to speak critically about their country using the Internet. Iran joins China and 10 other countries currently listed by Reporters Without Borders — an advocacy group for press freedoms worldwide — as “Internet ennemies,” using the French word for “enemies” (Reporters Without Borders is based in Paris) (Reporters). People both in and outside of Iran have been threatened by the Iranian government for speaking critically about them on the Internet ever since large protests organized against the suspicious reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the Iranian presidency in 2009. However, there may now be a way to sneak past the censors, courtesy of a San Francisco-based company that has software letting Iranians safely communicate on an Internet heavily monitored and censored by the Iranian government.
The software, called Haystack, comes from the non-profit Censorship Research Center (CRC) founded by Austin Heap and Daniel Colascione, and whose mission is to give tools and information to people so they can communicate without censorship. Haystack hides and encrypts Internet data so that those censoring and monitoring the Internet won’t see anything remarkable about the data and will pass it as benign. This allows people in Iran to communicate as freely in Iran as they would in a country without Internet censors.
Getting Haystack to people in Iran not only took technical expertise, but legal expertise as well. “One can be put in jail for ten years just for sending an iPod to Iran” because of a ban on exports from the United States to Iran, writes Heap in a blog post (Heap). The CRC applied for a license from the US Treasury department to distribute Haystack, and announced today on Austin Heap’s blog that this license has been granted, allowing the CRC to legally distribute Haystack in Iran (Heap).
The threat of the Iranian government’s monitoring of speech critical of them even goes beyond Iran’s borders. The Wall Street Journal this past December reported on an Iranian-American student who had received an email threatening to harm his family in Iran if he didn’t stop criticizing the Iranian government. They made good on their threat, arresting this student’s father (Fassihi).
If Haystack is successful, the reaction of the Iranian government remains to be seen. The CRC makes no secret about Haystack’s existence — only its algorithms, allowing them to stay a step ahead of censors and monitors.
Haystack is free software, so the CRC accepts donations from the public for Haystack through its main Web site.
Comments (3)
so where do we get this software from? Why is the link to downloading it to be found nowhere? Is this a joke?!!
this hay stack softwares HEAP have talk about since july and never release, no way to download
my friend think it is scam to get donation,,, many iranian say same on facebook!
because they say,,, have anyone SEE the hay stack softwares? NO!
It's certainly wise to be wary of a scam, especially considering that, for all intents, this is vaporware until it's seen in public. Some vaporware are from scams, some simply never see the light despite the best intentions of good people, and some eventually become real. It may well be wise to wait until this software is available and shown to work before doing anything related to it.
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