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Up Against Tehran’s Firewall Iranian protesters battle Internet censors as well as police. How can America help?

By Jessica Ramirez | Newsweek Web Exclusive 

Jan 26, 2010

At an undisclosed location in North Carolina, Bill Xia worked desperately to keep his servers from crashing. More than 6,000 miles away, the streets of Tehran were thronged with protesters, police, and pro-government thugs. With independent media coverage blocked, the regime was bent on cutting off the protesters' access to critical Web sites as well. The result would be a near-total news blackout. Iranian activists were counting on Xia and a handful of other U.S.-based programmers to keep their lines open to the rest of the world.

Xia and his partners in the U.S.-based Global Internet Freedom Consortium produce some of the most powerful circumvention software available: "filter-buster" programs designed to help users break through the online barriers erected by authoritarian regimes. On a single day following Iran's disputed presidential election last June, GIFC's Farsi-language interface logged more than 400 million hits from 1 million distinct users, Xia says. The overwhelming traffic caused their systems to go down not once but twice. The only way GIFC could handle such a crush was by turning ma... >>>