Psiphon Helps Iranians Stay Connected

Yesterday I wrote about Nokia Siemens Networks and how the company has been accused of selling the Iranian government communications equipment that can be used to censor and monitor communications of Iranian citizens.

This morning, as I listened to the BBC World Service on my way to work, I was surprised to hear Business Daily tacking the same topic. But after the segment on Nokia Siemens, host Stephen Evans had a talk with Rafal Rohozinski, the cofounder and CEO of Psiphon, as well as the principal of the SecDev Group, an organization that works with parts of the world that are affected by insecurity and violence.

What’s is Psiphon? Good question. It’s a company based in Ottawa, Canada that uses technology developed by the CitizenLab at the University of Toronto. What Psiphon does is pretty amazing, though. It’s a proxy that helps people who are behind massive firewalls get around them. It’s called circumvention technology.

Basically, individuals who live in areas on the other side of the firewall download and install the software on their computers. The person who is being blocked from the Internet doesn’t need to install anything, all they need is the address of the computer running the Psiphon software — that negotiates the connection for them, and the government (or other establishment running the firewall) can’t block them from using the proxy to access prohibited sites. At least, that is, if the organization doesn’t know about the Psiphon server.

Rohozinski told the BBC that the Iranian firewall isn’t nearly as tough an obstacle to surmount as the Great Firewall of China, and the government isn’t trying to block as much content, although it is targeting certain types of content.

Want to learn more? This video provides a great tutorial on using Psiphon:

Rohozinski said the Iranian government is blocking ports used by clients such as instant messengers to keep them from working. For Web sites, the government prevents Web addresses it doesn’t like from resolving — if you try to go, the Web site will never load.

In the aftermath of the Iranian election, Rohozinski said, Psiphon has been using Twitter to distribute addresses of computers running Psiphon to people who want to get to the BBC. As Rohozinski said, Psiphon essentially puts lots of little holes in the firewall — the goal is to do that so often that there’s just no point in trying to shut it all down.

So if you’re in Iran and you want to get to the BBC, how do you find out about this firewall-bypassing URL? Social networking. There are lots of people in other countries willing to help and they’re sharing the addresses via their different social media accounts. Rohozinski said that more than one person per minute has been signing on to the Psiphon service over the past few weeks.

Perhaps being blocked out from the Internet will just cause Iranians to become more determined to find new ways around the firewall, and they’ll continue to speak out that much harder against the current administration.

For more on firewalls, proxies and related stuff, take a look at these links:

How Firewalls Work
How to Surf the Web Anonymously
How to Clean Your Computer’s Registry