All Blog Posts from World Watch

A joint venture of Siemens AG and Nokia Corp., the two large European technology firms, is denying reports that Iran uses its Web-monitoring technology to censor and spy on its citizens' online activities.

Nokia Siemens Networks said on Monday that it has sold telecommunications systems to the Iranian government, but that any built-in monitoring technology was for voice communications and not the Internet. "The lawful intercept capability is purely for local voice calls," spokesman Ben Roome told CBSNews.com. "We don't know who may have provided other Internet technologies to Iran."

The company's denial comes as protests over Iran's disputed election enter their second week, amplified by Twitter-ing from the Iranian diaspora, and cell phone videos showing ongoing street conflicts and the apparent death of young Iranian woman called Neda.

Images and video clips trickling in from the streets of Tehran -- even ones whose authenticity may never be established -- have electrified the West and demonstrated the limits of power that the government is able to wield. Because foreign correspondents are being pressured by authorities and forced to leave, according to journalist advocacy groups, the country's relatively tiny Internet pipe to the outside world is offering a unique glimpse of the situation on the streets.

Iran's Internet restrictions are no secret, of course. As CBSNews.com reported last week, Web sites including Facebook, YouTube.com, and the BBC have been deemed off-limits by government censors, and there have been recurring reports that Twitter.com and Yahoo Messenger have been blocked as well. Except for some hiccups, though, Iran's Internet authorities have chosen not to pull the plug on the nation's connections to the outside world.

The source of the surveillance technology used by Iran's Internet service providers remains an unresolved political question that could prove an embarrassment for any western company linked to Tehran's censorial regime. Few technology executives have forgotten the spectacle of Washington politicians calling Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to a hearing and denouncing him as "spineless" for doing business in China, or Cisco being dubbed as "collaborating with the Chinese government" for supplying Internet switches and routers.

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The Iranian government has done an effective job of putting a veil over what is happening on the streets of Tehran. Yet, tech-savvy Iranians are finding ways to bypass the shutdown of cell phones and the Internet, passing Tweets, photos and videos to the outside world.

Because of restrictions placed on the media by Iranian authorities, radio and television outlets and Web sites searching for the latest news are sifting through tens of thousands of fragments — text messages, photos, videos and phone calls — that show up on Twitter, FriendFeed, YouTube, Facebook and other sites, trying to piece together a picture of what is happening on the ground in Iran.

The few foreign correspondents left in Tehran are confined to their hotel rooms and watched over by Iranian government officials. Without eyewitness reporting from journalists, nearly every fragment of information carries the caveat, "We can't confirm the authenticity of anything we are showing."

It remains unclear just how many people were in the streets of Tehran and other cities, or how many protesters were killed or injured. But despite the fragmentary nature of the information, a basic picture emerges.

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A new generation of Iranians has found ways to bypass the country's notoriously censorial Internet restrictions and disseminate details about Iran's internal turmoil in the wake of the recent election.

In technical circles, at least, Iran is well-known for erecting one of the world's most restrictive Internet blockades, second only to China in its scope. Certain blogs are cordoned off, politically-unacceptable keywords are blocked, and Web sites like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, the BBC, and YouTube remain -- at least at the moment -- off-limits.

That has complicated the task of distributing videos and e-mail descriptions of the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators marching in the streets to protest the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Supporters of reformist leader Mir Hossein Mousavi have alleged that the election was a fraud.

But the government's censors have been unable to staunch every data leak. "The bottom line is that a lot of information is still getting out," says Zahir Janmohamed, advocacy director of the Middle East and North Africa for Amnesty International USA.

Some of the online restrictions appeared around the time of the election: that's when Facebook, BBC English (BBC Persia was already blocked), Technorati.com, and YouTube were added to the verboten-in-Iran list. One report says that YouTube's traffic from Iran has dropped by 90 percent in the last few days, and another says that Yahoo Messenger was blocked early Wednesday. Unconfirmed reports from Iran say Twitter.com is also blocked.

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Even as the Iranian government clamps down on media access and makes it difficult to access Web sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, the Internet underground continues to transmit photos, videos and blog posts about the ongoing political drama surrounding the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Several sites are offering information on what is happening on the ground in Tehran, piecing together and triangulating data to create almost real-time snapshots of the scene in Tehran and other parts of the world. Of course, on the wild Web it's not easy to verify the authenticity of the information. Many of the sites and much of the chatter on the Internet that is attracting attention is questioning the legitimacy of the outcome of the Iranian election. With that background in mind, we have assembled and linked to some of recent video and images covering the aftermath of the election.

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Twenty years ago – before Twitter, before Facebook and even before the Internet was widely used at all – anti-government protests broke out in China. Though the grievance was different, the participants were similar: students, intellectuals and young people who took to the streets to demand reform. And in Beijing, as in Tehran, some of them ended up dead.

There are no clear numbers on how many died in the Tiananmen Square massacre, but it is believed to be in the thousands – far more than have been killed so far in Iran. Yet the government was essentially successful: The regime stayed in power, dissidents were arrested, and limits on free speech became even more deeply ingrained in the culture.

Could they have done the same today? The Iranian government has similarly tried to censor media coverage, yet the world has had access to an intimate and immediate accounting of the protests, the subsequent killings and the palpable anger in Tehran's streets. And while the situations are not identical, it's certainly notable that after initially backing the election results, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei changed course and said there would be an investigation.

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Even by the extremes of the Middle East, Jordan is an unusual place.

Unlike its neighbors to the south and east, it enjoys no vast oil wealth. It shares the region's longest border with Israel, about 150 miles, and signed a peace treaty with its neighbor in 1994. Although the northern third of the country benefits from a Mediterranean climate, the rest is largely desert.

That leaves outsourcing and other businesses as one obvious bright spot, and Jordan is hoping to enlist computer technology and the Internet to fight an unemployment rate that probably hovers around 30 percent, thanks in part to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Palestinian refugees the country has taken in.

Embracing the Internet also means trying to reconcile its rollicking, unruly culture of free expression with a population that's about 92 percent Muslim and a society that's far from as strict as neighboring Saudi Arabia -- but nevertheless conservative enough to prompt most women to wear hijab head scarves.

Jordan has had flare-ups of offline and online censorship, including imprisoning a female member of Parliament (since pardoned by King Abdullah) and encouraging bloggers to self-censor. Reporters Without Borders says that even though a law providing for prison terms for press offenses was canceled, journalists remain under pressure.

Then there are the less expected obstacles, like a proposed tax earlier this year of about 1.5 cents per minute on wireless calls, with the proceeds going to the livestock industry to subsidize animal feed.

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The FBI and British law enforcement authorities are trying to hunt down hackers responsible for the largest botnet (robot network) ever known to the IT world, according to a California-based Internet security company.

Finjan's Chief Technology Officer has told the Financial Times that six people based in Ukraine are suspected of compromising 1.9 million computers worldwide in just two months — many of them in the U.S.

"With this many computers affected, everyone was there on the list – the U.S. Federal government, big universities, very large public companies," the Chief Technology Officer Yuval Ben-Itzhak told the FT.

However, Rupert Goodwins editor of CBSNews.com's sister site ZDNet.com, says Finjan has offered no hard evidence to back up their claim of discovering the world's largest-ever botnet.

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Piracy was dealt a blow on Friday in an unusual place. No, not off the coast of Somalia but in a Stockholm courtroom, as four Swedes who run ThePirateBay.org were found guilty of infringing copyright law by assisting in making movies, music, and television shows available for free download. Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Carl Lundström were sentenced to one year in prison each and ordered to pay damages of $3.6 million to several entertainment companies in both a criminal and civil case.

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Like millions of other people around the world, supporters of global Jihad on the Internet are finding inspiration in Barack Obama’s inauguration, though perhaps not in exactly the same way. Some cyber-Jihadis are hoping for catastrophe, others are pretty sure change is not in the making.

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