Exposing the murder of Neda

NY Times:

Shortly after Neda Agha-Soltan bled her life out on the Tehran pavement, the man whose 40-second video of her death has ricocheted around the world made a somber calculation in what has become the cat-and-mouse game of evading Iran’s censors. He knew that the government had been blocking Web sites like YouTube and Facebook. Trying to send the video there could have exposed him and his family.

Instead, he e-mailed the two-megabyte video to a nearby friend, who quickly forwarded it to the Voice of America, the newspaper The Guardian in London and five online friends in Europe, with a message that read, “Please let the world know.” It was one of those friends, an Iranian expatriate in the Netherlands, who posted it on Facebook, weeping as he did so, he recalled.

Copies of the video, as well as a shorter one shot by another witness, spread almost instantly to YouTube and were televised within hours by CNN. Despite a prolonged effort by Iran’s government to keep a media lid on the violent events unfolding on the streets, Ms. Agha-Soltan was transformed on the Web from a nameless victim into an icon of the Iranian protest movement.

At one time, authoritarian regimes could draw a shroud around the events in their countries by simply snipping the long-distance phone lines and restricting a few foreigners. But this is the new arena of censorship in the 21st century, a world where cellphone cameras, Twitter accounts and all the trappings of the World Wide Web have changed the ancient calculus of how much power governments actually have to sequester their nations from the eyes of the world and make it difficult for their own people to gather, dissent and rebel.

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One early lesson is that it is easier for Iranian authorities to limit images and information within their own country than it is to stop them from spreading rapidly to the outside world. While Iran has severely restricted Internet access, a loose worldwide network of sympathizers has risen up to help keep activists and spontaneous filmmakers connected.

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Threatening people who have cameras is only the latest in a series of steps by the authorities. On June 12, the day a disputed presidential election set off the protests, the government summarily shut down all text messaging in the country — the prime tool that government opponents had been using to keep in touch — making new tools like Twitter and old techniques like word of mouth more important for organizing.

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Some Iranians have harnessed ways to bypass the system, relying in part on supporters around the world who are offering their computers as so-called proxy servers, which are digital safe houses that can strip out identifying information and allow Iranians to view blocked Web sites. Tor, a volunteer-run tool for masking Internet traffic that bounces Internet connections off three separate computers, said the traffic emanating from Iran over the course of the week increased tenfold.

Despite the crackdown, the videos and tweets indicate to many that broadly distributed Internet tools — and the spirit of young, tech-savvy people — cannot be completely repressed by an authoritarian government.

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While suppression of the truth is harder now, the regime still has the ability to ignore it and that is what it is doing with the results of the election and with the demonstrations that followed the election.

Thus we have the world outside of Iran getting peeks at the use of instruments of the state to try to stay in power through intimidation and outright murder, but inside Iran the regime continues its oppression unfazed.

The regime just ignores what it does not like and it has to be heartened by Obama's willingness to continue business as usual. The regime sees no consequences for its repression and murder.