i'm just a tad confused. if all internet and mobile lines are cut, how can they use twitter?
that said, i'm sure there are a lot of fakes out there right now, but there are those who do seem legitimate enough that the information from them is worth weighing against everything else as we try to understand this situation for ourselves.
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as with all news stories involving dubious sources, it's important that you establish a set of baseline facts of the situation that you can use to help evaluate the credibility of what you see. for example, if they mention eating breakfast, make sure it's not 6pm where they claim to be. if they mention locations, do what you can to verify them. fact check to the extent that you can. this won't keep you from being duped by a motivated person, but it can help you establish a comfort level with respect to how far you are willing to trust what you've learned. if something doesn't seem right, it probably isn't, but keep in mind that cultural and language barriers can dull your sense of deception.
Christiane Amanpour asked M. Ahmedinejad if he would guarantee the safety of his rival. He said everyone is equal under the law, Mousavi would get a fine just like anyone else. Which is a strange answer to that question, almost like he was answering a different question. At any rate, CNN reported it as "Ahmedinejad declines to guarantee rival's safety".
Well, I speak a lot of languages, one of them is French. A while later I was bouncing around lemonde.fr and got to another version of the same exchange. Only this time the translations were audible. The translation for safety was strange, it was not safety, it was a phrase akin to 'safety from law'. Now my Farsi is terrible, so maybe 'safety' is always translated this way. I would need more info to know, just like you said.
It does leave me with troubling questions though. Why does CNN not air the translations? It's probably perfectly innocent because Christiane Amanpour looked confused as well. So I wonder, was the translator making translations that confused more than just me? Given the confusion evident in this whole exchange, why did CNN report it as it did?
I think this is a textbook case of what you are talking about. Because, for me, the '... cultural and language barriers...' are dulling my sense of deception. That said, I can tell that something is out of place with a lot of the reporting around this issue.
The article seems a bit hyper. "As the regime shut down other forms of communication, Twitter survived." - does Sullivan think Twitter has some uniquely resilient technology? Twitter will survive right until whoever's in charge takes the 10 seconds to put twitter.com into Iran's blocked sites list (or, you know, the next the fail whale)
But in a country where people live on roughly $2 a day (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/25/afghanistan.terr...) I doubt many have $1,400 satellite phones that cost $6 a day to use.
Other methods are impossible...
Twitter is blocked through regular internet (see Michael C. McHugh comment here: http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0609/The_stakes_in_Ir... )
Cell phone towers are what's been cut so no SMS (http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jSPlmVgh-...)
Satellite dishes have been banned since '94 (http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=34407) so no highspeed internet that way.
I believe there was an article in the NY Times about this exact issue. Everybody "middle-class" and up has a satellite dish. Every few months the government confiscates them, at which point everybody goes to the local black market dealer, buys a new one and puts it back up. Quite often the new one is their old one because usually the black market dealer is whoever is in charge of the local branch of the satellite dish confiscation agency.
Ah, reminds me of the bad old days in the Soviet Union.
Not so much directed at the parent as all the responses.
"I am accessing twitter from 148.233.239.24 Port:80 in tehran. you can avoid gov filters from here. spread to others. #Iranelection"