Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi also told the New York Times that Iran has "complete mastery" over the virus.

"This is not a stable virus. By the time we started to combat it, three new variants had been distributed."

It will take between a month and two months to counter the virus, he said.

Neither Moslehi nor any other Iranian spokesman gave any further information regarding the alleged spies or the alleged "mastery" over the worm.

The complexity of the virus and its focus on industrial computers has led many experts to believe the virus was a product of electronic warfare, produced by a nation-state. Given the likelihood of Iran's first nuclear power plant, Bushehr, coming online soon, many believe the U.S. or Israel to be involved. (Though some believe if Iran was a target, it was for its uranium refinery at Natanz.)

Given the frequency of such white-noise warfare, the number of players involved and the fact that over 45,000 systems have been affected, it's impossible to make a hard-and-fast judgment at this point. The elements of the code that indicated Israeli origin could be a false trail to lead observers to that conclusion, or it could be evidence. Iran is not short of enemies that would rather it not achieve membership in the nuclear community.

CNET has published a good fact vs. theory breakdown of Stuxnet.

The presidential elections in Iran are being held on June 12, 2009 and will be the country's 10th such election. There are 3 leading candidates right now. Incumbant Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is running against Iran Reform Movement candidate and former Prime Minister Mousavi. Former Speaker of the Majlis (Parliament) Mehdi Karroubi, another Reformist candidate, also intends to run.

As All Facebook's Nick O'Neill puts it, "unfortunately for the Iranians, they have a regime in place that doesn't support freedom of speech and would prefer to run a dictatorship". Those of us who enjoy such freedoms should do our part to make sure that censorship like this never happens to us. We wish our brothers and sisters in Iran the best of luck.

Facebook Response:

When we first learned of this story we immediately contacted Facebook to see what they had to say. They were gracious to respond swiftly with this comment from a Facebook spokesperson:

"We are disappointed to learn of reports that users in Iran may not have access to
Facebook, especially at a time when voters are turning to the Internet as a source
of information about election candidates and their positions. We are investigating
these reports.

We believe that people around the world should be able to use Facebook to
communicate and share information with their friends, family and coworkers. It is
always a shame when a countries' cultural and political concerns lead to limits
being placed on the opportunity for sharing and expression that the Internet
provides."

SMS service, which political dissidents had used to spread messages and organize protests, has been restricted since June 11, causing many Iranians to use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social sites to broadcast and communicate.

Iran's broken digital communication infrastructure caused many Iranians to turn to services such as Twitter, using proxies to work around government restrictions for web use. Twitter became so integral to Iranians' communication, particularly with the wider global community, that the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance which would have occurred in the immediate aftermath of the election and resultant protests. Other services rushed to add Persian translation features.

Hopefully, the unblocking of text messaging in Iran is a sign that communication channels are returning to normal. So, does this mean that everyone's new favorite color, "Solidarity Green," will begin to fade away from social web avatars sometime soon? Once the country and its government emerge from crisis mode, what news will come from Iran, and what will the Internet have to say about it?

Is it doing any good? Do our efforts, symbolic or concrete, have any impact? We don't really know. Critics will point out that, for the most part, people are jumping on a bandwagon. Very few of us have any real grasp of Iran's political or social complexities; we have no idea who the leading opposition candidate is or what kind of record he has (and most of us would recoil if we found out). All true.

What we do have, though, is a shared belief in human dignity, and a shared recognition that this is a chance for that cause to take a big step forward. Green avatars are, in a sense, a way of signaling as much to each other: "Yeah, I care about this, too." Perhaps we do this to show solidarity as much with each other as with the people of Iran.

More Noise to Signal.

The French Press Agency reported on the bill yesterday and according to The Committee to Protect Bloggers, the BBC's The World radio show will offer a more in depth report in the coming days.

Blogging is wildly popular in Iran, where a new generation of young people frequently challenge the old, hyper-conservative religious government. The Committe to Protect Bloggers says that Iran is "among the worst offenders in terms of harassing, arresting and imprisoning bloggers, as well as students." You can see the group's extensive coverage of Iranian cyber-censorship and harrasment of bloggers here. The Iranian government has blocked access to Facebook, Yahoo! and Flickr, among other sites.

We at ReadWriteWeb condemn the application of the death penalty to bloggers as itself an abhorent crime. Cultural relativism has its place, but this isn't it. We want to offer our support to the new generation of Iranian young people struggling for freedom online and elsewhere, in any way we can, short of a US invasion of the country.

In a blog post, Comodo explained that login information for an affiliate was obtained and used to break into the Comodo server and issue the certificates.

"The IP address of the initial attack was recorded and has been determined to be assigned to an ISP in Iran. A Web survey revealed one of the certificates deployed on another IP address assigned to an Iranian ISP. The server in question stopped responding to requests shortly after the certificate was revoked."

Hallam-Baker rightly points out that seizing entry to such high-traffic consumer sites, all of which are communications properties, would be of particular use to "a government attempting surveillance of Internet use by dissident groups."

The hackers could, with such access, intercept communications from individual users, plant malware on their accounts, harvest login information and block circumvention addons.

Was it Iran? Or was it a country Iran was helping? Or was it a false trail?

Cyber-warfare is becoming all too common. Iran has done a lot of it. But some of it, like the Stuxnet virus, has been done to Iran. Online connections and nodes are starting to assume the warfare importance radio stations had once upon a time.

Other sources: NYT Bits

Earlier this month, after the U.S. treasury department announced the end of these export restrictions, Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin rightly noted, "as recent events in Iran have shown, personal Internet-based communications like e-mail, instant messaging, and social networking are powerful tools. This software will foster and support the free flow of information--a basic human right--for all Iranians."

Image Credit: Ogle Earth

Twitter decided yesterday to delay a scheduled downtime for maintenance until the middle of the night, Iran time. CNN reports that the decision was made at the suggestion of the State Department, but a large number of users suggested it as well. Incidentally, open source Twitter alternative Identi.ca, which has the potential to be much more useful due to its decentralized nature, followed Twitter's lead and also made major changes at a time convenient for Iranians.

Some critics have argued that news of US government collaboration with Twitter will offer the Iranian government more leverage in calling them insurgent agents of the US. The CNN report was confirmed this afternoon by Reuters. BoingBoing has a good write up on how to help, not hurt, the efforts in Iran.

We've been following news from Iraq via this excellent aggregator built by Twitter search engine Twazzup, by watching the StopAhmadi account in particular and by reading Robert Fisk's excellent coverage for context.

Twitter cynics take note - this service is clearly not just for posting about what people ate for lunch anymore. We wish the Twitter team luck in fighting to keep the lines of communication open.

Now, at least one team - the minds behind BabelWith.me - has developed the functionality into a cool, useful chat application that capably (if not perfectly) translates chats in real time. The service enables simultaneous communication in up to 45 different languages. It's kind of like the U.N. of IM.

The chat dialog shows both the original text as well as the Google-powered translation. Granted, the translations aren't perfect; Google doesn't know how to deal with "pig latin" or "pommes frites." But it's manageable and functional, for the most part.

We tested it out and do wish the program had a timestamp feature and some kind of notification or alert. Unnoticed chats went ignored with nary a flash, blink, or beep until we came back to the window or tab containing the chat room. We did love that the program gave both the original text (in orange italics) underneath the translated version. And of course, all the static text in the chat is translated, as well.

We were also told by the BabelWith.me team, "The launch was moved up to offer free multilanguage communication with those in Iran." Check out this chat set up specifically for discussion of the Iran election and aftermath.

BabelWith.me is a product of the non-profit organization LifeChurch.tv.

"Derakhshan was convicted of collaborating with enemy states, propaganda against the Islamic Republic, propaganda in support of counter-revolutionary groups, 'insulting what is holy' and creating immoral websites. He can appeal against the verdict."

The sentence is the longest any blogger has ever received. The second longest also went to an Iranian blogger, Arash Sigarchi, in 2005. Sigarchi was sentenced to 14 years. The sentence was later reduced to three.

The blogger who has spent the longest time actually in jail is Kareem Amer of Egypt,who has spent three years and seven months in prison. (His release date is November 5.)

It may well be that this sentence will also be reduced, that making it public was another in a long line of "messages" the Iranian regime seems compelled to send.

Today, news surfaced that the country is blocking access to websites that use HTTPS. That means that a number of popular, secure websites like Google, Gmail, Yahoo and even online banking sites are inaccessible. Anything based outside the country that uses a secure connection via HTTPS is blocked, according to news reports and a thread on Hacker News. Secure sites based within Iran are reportedly still accessible.

Meanwhile, developers and members of the Hacker News community are brainstorming ways to help Iranians get around the limitations. Some have suggested setting up Tor bridges for Web users in Iran, although that presents its own logistical issues.

These measures come just as the Iranian government begins to roll out longer-term plans to effectively strangle the Internet to death and create a new, state-sponsored Web for citizens of that country to use. The government is even requiring Internet cafe owners to videotape all patrons so that Web surfers can be more easily identified by authorities.

If news reports are accurate, Iranians could be facing a level of Web censorship that approaches that which exists in North Korea, where public access to the Internet we all know and love is barely existent. Whether or not Iranians, who have already had a taste of what the Web can do, will tolerate such restrictions without a struggle, remains to be seen.

That the Iranian government is clamping down on Internet access is hardly a surprise. In 2009, they saw firsthand the kind of unrest that emerge amidst a well-connected and dissatisfied citizenry. Since then, governments in nearby countries have been overthrown or otherwise challenged in the so-called Arab Spring.

It's reminiscent of the recent film Persepolis and helps put "social media" in a much more serious context than people often presume it goes on in.

The short video was created by Aaron Chiesa, Hendy Sukarya, Lisa Temes and Toru Kageyama and written by Kate Tremills.

To learn more about the struggles, victories and defeats of bloggers around the world, check out The Committee to Protect Bloggers, Global Voices Online and Reporters Without Borders.

The sites were reported to have been restored to normal but at last check the main English language site was still hacked.

This is an important proof of concept for the idea that any tool a "dissident" group like Anonymous can use can be also be used by a government with the will and the know-how to do so.

According to Voice of America itself:

"VOA executives said the hackers did not penetrate any of the government-funded agency's computer networks. They did gain entry to an outside computer system that operates a domain name server - a database of Internet addresses available worldwide - and redirected VOA traffic to the hackers' own site."

It was done because of VOA's "anti-Islamic stand," claimed the Fars Agency.

"The move came in response to the false reports released by the VOA and other websites on the spread and progress of seditious moves in Iran. VOA and its affiliates have long been supporting anti-Islamic Republic groups and sought to provoke unrests in Iran."

The attack started Monday evening is lasting into today.

This is far from the first time this Iranian group has hacked a site. Last January, they broke into the Chinese search engine Baidu, also redirecting it to a political message. The month before, they broke into Twitter.

"Freedom on the Net 2011" determined that the five worst countries for online freedom - based on obstacles to access, limits on content and violations of user rights - are Iran, followed by Burma, China, Cuba and Tunisia. (The last entry is certainly changed somewhat by the uprising earlier this year.)

"Since the protests that followed disputed presidential elections in June 2009, the Iranian authorities have waged an active campaign against internet freedom, employing extensive and sophisticated methods of control that go well beyond simple content filtering, though this too has become more severe since the election. Tactics employed include deliberately slowing internet speeds at critical times to make basic online activities difficult and ordering blogging service providers inside Iran to remove 'offensive' posts. The regime has also sought to counter critical content and online organizing efforts by extending state propaganda into the digital sphere: over 400 news websites are either directly or indirectly supported by the state.

"Since June 2009, an increasing number of bloggers have been threatened, arrested, tortured, and kept in solitary confinement, and at least one blogger died in custody. Over 50 bloggers and online activists have been arrested, and a dozen remained in detention at the end of 2010. The Iranian authorities have taken a range of measures to monitor online communications, and a number of protesters who were put on trial after the election were indicted for their activities on Facebook and Balatarin, a Persian site that allows users to share links and news. A group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army, later found to be associated with the Iranian authorities, also managed to hack a number of opposition and news sites with a mix of technical methods and forgery."

In contrast, the five freest countries are Estonia, the United States, Germany, Australia and the U.K.

But here's arguably the worst indicator of the health of free speech online.

"Even in more democratic countries--such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Turkey, and the United Kingdom--internet freedom is increasingly undermined by legal harassment, opaque censorship procedures, or expanding surveillance."

We expect repressive countries to repress. We expect democratic countries to exert forces against that tendency. Of course they do, but when you see this sort of trend, you're seeing a speech ecosystem under serious threat. Transparency is growing more opaque even as it becomes the motif du jour. Is it time for those in democratic countries to spend at least as much time at the sickbeds of their own freedoms as the graves of others'? (That was a rhetorical question. It's time.)

Other sources: OpenNet Initiative

In the aftermath of the election, during which a (some say statistically improbable landslide) victory for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was announced, the social media buzz grew into a roar as a meme began to circulate: Where Is My Vote. A website, several Facebook pages, and now thousands of tweets have ensured few social web users have not yet heard of the controversy and the Iranian government's response of censorship.

"In coordination with Twitter," Stone wrote, "our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran... Our partners are taking a huge risk, not just for Twitter, but also the other services they support worldwide--we commend them for being flexible in what is essentially an inflexible situation. We chose NTT America Enterprise Hosting Services early last year specifically because of their impeccable history of reliability and global perspective."

Citizens Had Taken to Twitter to Report and Find News

Although, as noted above, sources cannot be verified at this time, the vast majority of tweets we have seen tell stories of violent military reactions to protesters:

Many more tweets are linking to news coverage and photo or video evidence of what is happening on the ground during these protests.

Iranian Censorship of the Social Web

The Wall Street Journal reported this afternoon that many inside the country have resorted to overseas proxies to continue to use the websites. However, as proxies appeared on the web, they were gradually blocked. Many are now calling for users to stop publicly announcing proxies and use private channels such as email instead.

Blocked Hashtags, Changed Locations, & Other Misinformation

Still more non-Iranian users are changing their Twitter profile locations and time zones to reflect that they are in Iran. These users are often also posting green-tinted versions of their avatars. Some say this is a show of solidarity; other users insist this action will somehow "screw with the government's head."

As one Twitter user said and as several others would likely agree, "Most of the people on Twitter are [expletive deleted] retarded."

Changing one's avatar and location would likely do little to affect the Iranian government; these actions are simply a sign to a user's followers that he or she has at least a cursory interest in Iran current events.

As the conflict continues, Twitter users are reminded that the best, most useful information to share is that which is most verifiable and hence most likely to be accurate. Retweeting biased or exaggerated accounts damages any cause by feeding a hype cycle and drawing attention away from the heart of the matter. At the very least, users should attempt to search for and verify information before passing it on.