Help Iranians Fight Their Dictatorship by Providing Pied Piper's New Internet | Hacker News Reader

Help Iranians Fight Their Dictatorship by Providing Pied Piper's New Internet

7 points319e82aff5224 comments

You might have heard about it in the news (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-protests-specialreport/special-report-irans-leader-ordered-crackdown-on-unrest-do-whatever-it-takes-to-end-it-idUSKBN1YR0QR).

The Iranian Islamic regime has killed about 1500 people in the last month while the world was in absolute silence. Why? Because the first thing the regime did was to shutdown the internet access.

They shutdown the Internet not only to hide what they're doing to the people form the world but also to prevent people from joining the protests by knowing what's going on and prevent organizing protests using the Social networks, etc.

However, they kept the Interanet online. So the services hosted inside Iran were available to people.

Now my question is, what are the available solutions to provide people a secure and reliable communication channel (probably through the same Interanet)? Something like Pied Piper's New Internet?

I was thinking it should meet the following requirements:

- Should be easy to use for non-tech users - It shouldn't be centralized (like Git, https://beakerbrowser.com/ or https://zeronet.io/) - Should be secure (everything encrypted p2p) - As long as it provides highest level of availability the latency doesn't matter (e.g. A newsletter or website that can be updated by getting a file via Bluetooth) - Should work on mobile devices 5. (Nice to have) should provide some other network physical channels (Wifi Adhoc or whatever, satelite, p2p via phone/modem, etc.)

There might be other stuff that I'm missing like making sure that the bridges (or/and servers provided by users) are not going to reveal the users' identity.

That's a great question, and I hope you find some relevant solutions.

I would discourage you from using the "pied piper" metaphor to describe this. In the original legend from Germany, the pied piper uses his magic powers to steal the children of the town, and they never come back!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin

It's easy to imagine Internet censors loving this metaphor for uncensored Internet access: the thing that controls young people's minds and steals them away from the society.

So you may want to use a different legend as your metaphor for describing what you're looking for.

I see and completely understand the need for having, let's say, a decentralized (from the Iranian) Internet. However, this requires resources, time and most likely money. I don't think you will be able to bypass/piggyback the Iranian Intranet or their Internet firewall, it will also make it easier for the Iranian government to track you if you try. The way I see it is trying to find your own Internet access. That sounds easy, but I can definitely see it not being the case. Maybe through satellite, maybe someone living close to a border and being able to use an Internet line from the neighboring country, there are more possibilities, I'm sure, but these come into my mind at the moment.

Let's say you manage to get independent Internet access, now you will have to find a way to get this Internet to all the people that want to use it, setting up the necessary network for that and keeping it hidden is another major task, will you risk using WiFi? If not, how will you get cable to necessary hubs? Can you trust all the people involved in setting this up or will someone inform the government because they love the current regime so much?

That being said, I'm sure that with enough money, motivation and maybe mobilization of help from people you can trust it is in theory, difficult, but doable.

Thanks for the comment. I wasn't clear enough so I added a reply since can't update the original post.

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To be clear this secure network doesn't have to be open to the world. As long as it provides a network for the people and especially activists inside Iran to communicate and be aware of the news (there are many independent and fair reporters who are sharing the news from inside Iran targeted Iranian audience). It just needs to be secured from the government. Think of it as a Git repository that can be updated either p2p, offline using patches (via anything let's say even Bluetooth) or using the government intranet. This repository can give the activist a platform to share the news and probably lead the protests without being revealed or shutdown.

About a decade ago videos were going viral the same way, using just Bluetooth. So if in the worse case government shuts down even the Intranet, then people can switch back to that old way of sharing.

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