By Fester:
Co-opition and selective denial seems to be the information sharing strategy that both the Iranian protesters and the Iranian government has adapted. Both sides want to maintain the internal Iranian communication networks up and running to some degree while denying effective communication capacity to their opponents. Danger Room is passing along some communications security and denial advice from that emphasizes this co-opition profile:
But the tactic of launching these distributed denial of service, or DDOS, attacks remains hugely controversial. The author of one-web based tool, �Page Rebooter,� used by opposition supporters to send massive amounts of traffic to Iranian government sites, has temporarily shut the service down. Others worry that the DDOS strikes could eat up the limited amount of bandwidth available inside Iran � bandwidth being used by the opposition to spread its message by Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. �Quit with the DDOS attacks � they�re just slowing down Iranian traffic and making it more difficult for the protesters to Tweet,� says one online activist....Denial of Service attacks. If you don�t know what you are doing, stay out of this game. Only target those sites the legitimate Iranian bloggers are designating. Be aware that these attacks can have detrimental effects to the network the protesters are relying on. Keep monitoring their traffic to note when you should turn the taps on or off.
Help cover the bloggers: change your twitter settings so that your location is TEHRAN and your time zone is GMT +3.30. Security forces are hunting for bloggers using location and timezone searches. If we all become �Iranians� it becomes much harder to find them.
The Iranian government is trying to interdict activist communication to other activists and to external actors while maintaining connectivity to the rest of the world. The protesters are attempting to maintain their rat lines to each other as well as self-organizing groups and external message amplifiers while attempting to knock back Iranian government connectivity through DDoS attacks on external news agencies.
At the current level of confrontation where the Iranian state still has the loyalty of its security forces as well as the loyalty of non-state, but state interest aligned paramilitary forces, this co-opitition framework will continue. We will know that the protestors are about to be crushed if Iran decides that the value of connectivity to the rest of the world is outweighed by its costs and cuts its internet connections to the major fiber trunk lines.
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