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On day two, it dawned: someone over there could get hurt if the regime decided to crack down on bloggers, activists, and anyone having a Twitter handle. On day three, Twitter and Iran speed-trained thousands of people in complex computing techniques to circumvent censorship and cyber surveillance such as proxies, anonymisers, and Virtual Private Networks.

On day four, the first tweets about arrested Iranians bloggers and journalists came through. The Twitter and Iranian revolutions are happening side by side. But veteran Twitterers, who lived and tweeted through the uprising in Burma, the war in Gaza, riots in Madagascar, and the Karachi and Bombay suicide attacks, fear what will come next if large-scale repression takes place in Iran. With Twitter, we share the days of fellow men and women all over the world. We see (videos, photos), we hear, we feel, we look over their shoulders. But when policemen, floods, bombs and bullets strike, we are powerless to help. Let’s hope we will not experience that feeling for Iran through Twitter.

The fact that Iran’s protesters are clinging to Twitter as the last channel to reach out to the world should prompt Twitter users to ask a few question about web censorship and filtering in Iran. Western Twitterers often assume than the Iranian government knows nothing about technology and relies on tight police surveillance. In fact, the Iranian regime is extremely tech savvy. Starting in the 1990s, enormous funds where invested into new technologies by the Shia clergy. Shia sacred scriptures and religious material were scanned and digitised, and clergymen and seminarians were trained to blog. The Iranian government is a world leader in web censorship. The weekly meeting at the Tehran Ministry of the interior, to set the agenda for blocking and filtering the Internet, is hardly a secret.

But what lies at the core of the Iranian Internet censorship system, or any government filtering policy, nowadays? Filtering and surveillance software. Who manufactures those? Western companies.

The software of US companies Secure Computing and Websense has been used to filter the Internet in Iran as well as in authoritarian regimes in North Africa and the Middle East. Secure Computing management has vigorously denied licensing its use when confronted, accusing Iran of “illegal use of its software”. There is nothing wrong or illegal with selling network security software to business companies, schools, libraries, as those companies do. But selling filtering software to governments means that any regime or government, nowadays, can monitor, censor, and even cut off communications on the web with a few clicks. It is also of course illegal for US companies to do business with Iran. Isn’t it time to confront American and European software companies on their contracts with foreign governments and the part they play in censorship in Iran, and worldwide?

Claire Ulrich is a contributor to Le Monde weekend supplement, and editor of Global Voices in French

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However, the upcoming Iranian elections have led to the Iranian press having one of its most open periods. This is thanks to the controversial presidential debates held on national television. The fact that politicians such as Mousavi and Karoubi have openly accused the Ahmadinejad government of acting irresponsibly in its foreign policy, as well as denouncing its management of the problem of corruption, has emboldened many in the Iranian press. When publications such as the conservative pro-Mohsen Rezai Ayande News, or the pro-Rafsanjani Shahab News hear powerful candidates such as Mehdi Karroubi asking the president on national television about what happened to $300m which went missing during his term as mayor of Tehran, they feel that this gives them enough leeway to criticise Ahmadinejad without fear of being punished.

Another important factor which has led to an impressive array of open discussions and criticism in the Iranian press of candidates, especially Ahmadinejad, is the behaviour of his supporters. A notable example was when Hossein Shariatmadari, the editor of the right-wing publication Keyhan, said after Benazir Bhuto’s assassination that the same could happen to Ayatollah Khatami. Many reformist politicians considered this a direct threat and declared open season on Ahmadinejad. The very fact that that the president has been such a divisive figure, who has alienated his own right-wing supporters, has emboldened many in their criticism of the government prior to the elections.

The elections have had a very positive impact on the Iranian press and its ability to exercise more freedom in its writing. Whether such openness continues after the elections depends on who is elected, and how threatened the authorities feel by the possibility of a velvet revolution.

Meir Javedanfar is the coauthor of The nuclear sphinx of Tehran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and The State of Iran

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