Libertarian hacker Eric S. Raymond, author of the wonderful book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, is heading up NedaNet, a decentralized network of hackers set up to support protesters in Iran. This is a great example of voluntary cooperation across borders and outside existing political structures working to achieve social change (even though many of us won’t be completely happy with the government Iran gets if the protesters do manage to overthrow the Theocracy).
Here are the details, explaining how you can help by donating bandwidth:
Welcome to NedaNet
This is the resource page for NedaNet, a network of hackers formed to support the democratic revolution in Iran. Our mission is to help the Iranian people by setting up networks of proxy severs, anonymizers, and any other appropriate technologies that can enable them to communicate and organize — a network beyond the censorship or control of the Iranian regime.
NedaNet doesn’t have leaders or a manifesto or even much in the way of organization. We’re not affiliated with any nation or religion. We’re just computer hackers and computer users from all over the planet doing what we can to help the Iranian people in their struggle for freedom.
NedaNet does have contacts on the ground in Iran. We are actively and directly cooperating with the revolutionaries (though for obvious security reasons most of us don’t know who the contacts are). By helping us, you can help them.
(Note: we have belatedly discovered that there is a Silicon Vally consulting company called NedaNet. We have nothing to do with them, nor they with us.)
Who was Neda?
At 19:05 on the 20th of June, 2009, on Karekar Ave in Tehran, at the corner of Khosravi St. and Salehi Street, a young woman named Neda Agha Soltani who was peacefully watching a popular demonstration in progress was shot and killed. Her murderer was almost certainly a basij, a member of the paramilitary auxiliary of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Her death was accidentally caught on video. Neda, an innocent woman at the wrong place and the wrong time, became the first martyr of the new Iranian revolution. We honor her memory.
You can help!
You can help by adding bandwidth and computing power to our network. It is still forming and growing; the more widely dispersed it gets, the less vulnerable it will be to denial-of-service attacks, blacklisting, or physical action by the Iranian government and its terrorist allies.
If you are a Linux or *BSD or Mac OS/X user, we have a detailed recipe for setting up and registering a Squid proxy for the revolutionaries’ use.
Instructions for Windows users are under development.
Alternatively, there’s a bootable CD called rbox that sets up a NedaNet site in a box. I’m told it’s usable but still being polished. Windows users (especially) may want to go that route to avoid security issues.
We have an IRC channel, #irantech on freenode.net, where we gather to help each other help the Iranians.
Other people are pursuing different approaches. Anonymous Iran supports anonymized chat communication and offers advice on secure communications.
Doing the right thing
Core members of NedaNet have already received death threats from persons plausibly believed to be agents of the Iranian regime or allied terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah. We expect more of us to be targets of threats, intimidations, and possibly actual violence before the crisis resolves. Be aware of that risk if you choose to join us.
But today in Iran, thousands of people are putting their lives on the line every day in direct confrontation with the Iranian regime’s thugs, facing danger that reduces any risks we run to a triviality. They’re not running away. We won’t either.
Public contact and operational security
I’m Eric S. Raymond. Some of you will know me from the open-source movement as “ESR”. Because of the real threat of terrorist action against us, most of NedaNet is keeping a low profile. I have volunteered to be a visible public contact because (a) I’ve done this sort of public-face work before, (b) I already got my jihadi death threat from Iran in 2006 before NedaNet, and (c) I’m not easily intimidated.
Think of me as a cut-out. I have very carefully not asked who our contacts in Iran are. I don’t even know who most of the rest of the NedaNet people are, and don’t intend to try to find out; they’re basically just handles on an IRC channel from whom I get URLs and files. And for any jihadi interested in asking me questions face to face, I’ve got some bullets slathered in pork fat to make you feel extra special welcome.
Brad Taylor is a graduate student in Political Science at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He blogs at 
Several things disturb me about this – all the Neda-logos appeared too quickly, and (as I’ve mentioned elsewhere) the whole ‘Green Revolution’ thing smells like a scam.
Also, an awful lot of the ‘early’ twitter traffic emanates from non-Iranian locations… and of course only wealthy urban Iranians have mobile (or even fixed) phones and internet access.
I certainly would not squid them preferentially (although I run a freenet supernode); how come they can’t use JonDoNym, or JAP, or TOR?
Maybe the story is genuine…. but anything like this that appears on every station (France 2 through to Australian news) within one cycle, is more than likely planted.
The whole thing reminds me of the heart-rending tales told by “Nayirah” – supposedly a nurse as a hospital in Kuwait – about how invading Iraqi soldiers were chucking babies out of incubators onto the cold, hard floor (sniff, weep) and taking the incubators back to Saddam.
Oh how everybody came alive to how horrid Saddam was… a baby-killer, thehorrible man. AS if having amoustachewas’t bad enough.
Nayirah’s testimony did the TV circuit, and it was the seminal event in the movement to war.
YEARS later, it was revealed that Nayirah was the daughter of a Kuwaiti emir, had never been a nurse, and the whole thing was a psy-op orchestrated by Hill & Knowlton to ’sell’ the Gulf War.
By all means, give aid to an Iranian anarchist movement – but until I see dossiers of Iranian internal security personnel on the darker corners of the intartubes, I’m a doubter.
(The presence of the dossiers would mean that a concerted private-sector effort had been made to degrade the operational effectiveness of the security forces BEFORE the ‘uprising’. Without operational degradation, EVERY dissident action would have been squashed before it got a chance to get mobilised).
And let’s not be naive – although Mousavi is less of a bumpkin that Ahmedinijad, he is more conservative. Plus, the president of Iran HAS NO POWER.
I doubt the mullahs (who are bickering amongst themselves) are worried.
Cheers
GT
Oh – one more thing… ESR ought to recognise that the US government has killed far more folks than the post-revolutionary Iranian government.
Not sure what metric one ought to use to quantify ‘badness’, but I reckon dropping 2000lb bombs on mud-hutted peasant children is trumps.
Also, the US government is second only to the government of ‘Israel’ in their penchant for extrajudicial killings… another black mark.
And lastly, anyone who refers to Hizbullah as a ‘terrorist organisation’ has a slanted view of he right of the occupied to resist occupation, which is enshrined in international law.
Cheerio
GT
I see it more about circumventing the Iranian government’s efforts to stop the flow of information to the outside world than about supporting the revolution. Sure, the new government is still going to be very repressive and the Mullahs will retain their position, but successful popular uprising at the very least limits their options for further repression out of fear that they’ll be the next up against the wall.
On US versus Iran – US foreign policy may well be worse, but there’s no contest when it comes to domestic repression.
I too worry that current problems will prompt calls for US intervention, which would be very bad.
Hi again Brad,
I don’t think the US government’s commitment to internal repression has been tested since Kent State in ‘68 – at which time they were only to ready to kill their own citizens in the name of ‘public order’… although Lon Horiuchi’s commitment to baby-killing for the state was proved at both Waco and Ruby Ridge.
Recently, it was the Pommie shitbag who attacked Ian Tomlinson from behind with a truncheon and killed him (and was not charged with his murder), or the Yank shitbag who attacked a barmaid when she told him to leave her bar. Or the Pommie assassination team who blew Jean-Charles de Menezes’ head to bits.
And that’s all verified, no bullshit stuff, not unverified agitprop from Iranian groups with the same agenda as Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress pre-2003. Remember Chalabi and his line of crap? Saddam had a giant ‘human shredder’ that he would feed people into feet first… yadda yadda yadda.
The message from ALL governments to their livestock is clear – disobey and we will kill you, then our media will make it look like you deserved it.
One thing that the recent wave of popular outbursts has shown, is how we should be ashamed at how cowed and gutless Western citizens have become.
Where were the same per-capita protests (that would require 2-3million people) when Scalia and his cronies gave the White House to George the Turd? (Shrubbie was the third president called George… the second George the Third was as bad as the first, but tax rates in 2004 were ten times as high as they were in 1776).
Americans (and soon, Australians) are now so docile that they are prepared to be corralled when they protest: the machinery of domestic tyranny is FAR more developed and FAR more pernicious in the US than in Iran.
Also, the Iranian government simply cannot afford to have anywhere near the same per-capita expenditure on internal tyranny that the US has: they have no access to international debt markets, and they have huge expenditures on internal welfare… the sums simply don’t permit a large, well-resourced internal oppression-machine (that said, it only needs to operate in Teheran, really).
I have a few folks in Iran wih whom I correspond – middle class people who are no fans of the regime. They see the stink of the west all over the ‘colour coded’ media frenzy.
They have no problem getting their information out (but they’re not trying to get their hobby-horse on CNN or the BBC).
I go back to “South Park” every time: if it is just a question of he Giant Douche supporters wanting to overthrow the Turd Sandwich, I wouldn’t bother giving bandwidth. ESR’s campaign seems to want something even worse – American-style party-political democracy (yet he self-defines as ‘libertarian’).
FreeNet, JAP, JonDoNym, TOR, TrueCrypt, gnuPG… using these FREE tools, my more-radical alter-ego exchanges information with people every single day – people from Myanmar to Thailand to the former Eastern bloc, to sub-Saharan Africa. People on the ground, in some cases doing things that would get them executed if they did them in the US.
This is our best opportunity since the Great Depression – the State (globally) is suffering from massive falls in revenue collection, and its armed thugs and their masturbatory-fantasy warrior toys cost a lot.
Anyway – I don’t want to be too much of a wet blanket, and we are certainly on the same side. Just make sure any squidding you do is not giving you away to US/NZ/Pommie/Strayan government snoops.
Cheerio
GT
Color revolution has been debunked and disected by Webster Griffin Tarpley.
GT is right on the money.
Incidentally, #irantech is opped by a technocracy loving little mental midget named Stryker45.
Don’t talk about depleted uranium, renaissance (pre-post-revolutionary) politics, or you’ll be kicked out.
This article has been linked to by an editorial at the Washington Post online: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/23/AR2009062303176.html
“Her murderer was almost certainly a basij.”
I make no excuse for any regime on earth, but one needs questioning on what basis this assertion is made. If I were the Iranian regime the last thing I would do is pointlessly murder a bystander and create a martyr for people to rally around. But people drunk with power are known to do stupider things. OTOH, if I were the opposition it would make perfect sense for me to create a poster child, especially when the whole world is watching. This not unheard of, and I don’t put a hardened politician like Mousavi above it. I don’t know what happened and I doubt anybody does. Neda’s death, if an accident was a preventable tragedy; if a murder then most reprehensible, no matter who did it. Which brings me to agree with Geoffrey Transom’s comments above. Let’s wish the Iranians well. But let’s be cautious that we don’t become unwitting tools of some political faction.
I had a smoke earlier and even I think Geoff Transom is paranoid. I mean really, do you have sufficient evidence to really believe half of what you are saying?
Hear, hear, Andrew C. If Geoff Transom had spent a day watching Twitter traffic, seeing corroborating videos, watching Iranian govt infiltrate the traffic, watch the cat-and-mouse, he wouldn’t have a doubt.
I applaud this effort. wish I could help.
The Red Revolution, The Orange Revolution… all these have managed to install a Washington DC / Wall Street puppet in every case.
These crazies love colors – brown shirts, silver shirts, etc.
Look it up. Mousavi for crying out loud has been exposed as the Butcher of Beirut by the same guy Syriana was based on.
This article has been linked to by an editorial at the Washington Post online
w00t! Great job, Brad.
NedaNet now has its own domain NedaNet.org
Twitter are 100% the way to go