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"As a matter of principal I had to do something to help. It was critically important for me, " explained Mr Colascione.

"We want to make the world a better place and make sure the people who died there didn't die in vain."

Together the two 20-year-old somethings developed some anti-filtering software called Haystack. In lofty terms, Mr Heap said it "is designed to honestly uphold human rights via technology."

Less prosaically it is meant to help people inside Iran circumvent their own government's filtering system.

"That means whenever someone inside the country gets a page saying 'access denied' when they try to use Twitter or Facebook, if they run Haystack Twitter is back, Facebook is back.

" It's completely secure for the user so the government can't snoop on them. We use many anonymising steps so that identities are masked and it is as safe as possible so people have a safe way to communicate with the world," explained Mr Heap.