Chatroom Revolutionaries

Iran's dissidents and exiles discover the Web.

Marc Johnson from the August/September 2004 issue

"Got a Mullah?" asks a stainless steel coffee mug for sale on the Web. Emblazoned alongside the question is a cartoon of a giant hand clenching two irritated-looking clerics who resemble Iran's late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

One click away, a heather gray, 100-percent cotton T-shirt proclaiming "Free All Political Prisoners in Iran NOW!" features a famous image of Ahmad Batebi, an Iranian film student sentenced to 15 years for anti-mullah activities. The widely reproduced image shows Batebi's "crime": holding aloft a bloodstained shirt that belonged to a friend beaten by regime forces.

Both items -- along with lunch boxes, greeting cards, and bumper stickers -- are available to any Iranian expatriate at activistchat.com, a site that also features news, petitions, forums, editorials, and other information of interest to the Iranian diaspora. Such sites are the tools of the would-be next Iranian revolution. Many are produced by revolutionaries who grew up not in Iran but in Europe and North America. They communicate with their comrades however they can, surfing for any scrap of news available from within the tightly controlled Islamic Republic of Iran. Aside from their unconcealed disdain for the ruling clerics in Tehran, they are characterized by an intense nationalism and not a little intergroup disagreement over where Iran should be headed.

"I cannot go into specifics," Potkin Azarmehr, director of the Campaign to Free Iran's Students (cfisnews.com), says cryptically of his group's work with those inside Iran. Careless communications, the dissidents explain, can trigger crackdowns, closing precious avenues of contact. "Certainly the global communications revolution has made things a lot easier," he says. "You only have to look at the areas in which the Islamic Republic has endeavored to crack down," he adds, to get clues about how the world of dissident Iranians is operating.

In fact, the way the opposition communicates with students inside Iran is no great secret. E-mails, chat rooms, and phone calls to family and friends are the only near-realtime ways to find out what is going on inside the Islamic Republic. All involved are acutely aware of the fact that Iran's intelligence and security services try to intercept such communications, with inconsistent results. Roozbeh Farahanipour, executive director of the Glorious Frontiers Party (marzeporgohar.org), notes matter-of-factly that such communications are dangerous, "because if the regime finds out, you are probably going to be executed." But for the students and their supporters, that's a very big if.

The students believe that in the long run they can defeat the regime's security efforts. But the regime isn't their only problem. Despite their high-tech communications, expatriate opponents of the regime face a number of low-tech challenges. Among them are competing agendas, a debilitating scramble for leadership, and a chronic lack of funds.

Such challenges notwithstanding, the dissidents make daily efforts to undermine the regime. As with all authoritarian governments, the Islamic Republic's security agencies can process only so much information about the counterrevolutionaries, and they are constrained by security requirements, financial resources, even the banal strictures of available time. The student groups know this and hope that through sheer message volume and guile they can stay one step ahead of their adversaries.

Aryo Pirouznia, spokesman for the Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran (daneshjoo.org -- daneshjoo means "student"), observes that when the game is cat and mouse, the mice have to stay on the cutting edge. "Our site has been blocked" by the regime, he states. "But what they don't understand is that...we are not in an age in which a country's borders can be closed." Indeed, dissident groups have found a technological solution to their communications problems: Anonymizer.

This program, which allows surfers to view sites while concealing their identities by going through an anonymous proxy server, has been a boon to the Iranian students. When the Iranian security apparatus finally catches up with them, Pirouznia explains, "We change, then they change. We change user names, we change places. We use several chat rooms now. You have the public chat rooms, which are totally monitored [by the regime]; then you have the private chat rooms, which we use."

Proxy servers and chat rooms are not the only Internet-based approaches Pirouznia's group uses. Such groups are also sending encrypted and compressed documents via U.S.-based free e-mail accounts, a tactic also used by organized criminals, terrorists, spies, journalists, and even businessmen.

"Let's imagine you have Hotmail, Yahoo, whatever, and you are in Iran," Pirouznia says.

"You have several accounts. Why? Because the [Internet backbone] 'belongs' to [the Iranian security services], you can't claim, 'I never went to Yahoo or Hotmail.' They say, 'Here is the log. You went to it.'" But by having numerous accounts, and by using at least one of them only for apparently benign activities such as sending jokes and family gossip, the user covers his dissident communications. The other accounts, says Pirouznia, "are destroyed after a time, and you get another under another name. And all of the materials that come and go, they are all encrypted. It has become a way of life."

American administrations since the late 1980s have ignored the student groups, instead pursuing a policy of unofficial dialogue with the Islamic Republic. The would-be revolutionaries' unrequited desire for attention, however, may be coming to an end. In August 2003, for example, the International Broadcasting Bureau, the agency that administers such services as Radio Free Europe, confirmed for the information technology newsletter Security Focus that Uncle Sam would give every Iranian with Internet access a free subscription to Anonymizer -- as long as the subscriber was resident in Iran. Neither the bureau nor Anonymizer will disclose how much this deal is worth, but it could total up to 2 million users.

And last May, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) sponsored Senate Bill 1082, the Iran Democracy Act, intended to reform Radio Farda (a sort of Farsi Voice of America), provide grants to other external Iranian media, and back a referendum on Islamic rule. Most observers believe the bill was meant to be a shot across the Islamic Republic's bow. Brownback's bill has not been signed into law, however, and further legislation is unlikely in an election year. Congressional interest notwithstanding, the dissident groups, both external and internal, are still largely on their own.

The sites officially represented by Azarmehr, Pirouznia, and Farahanipour are three of perhaps a dozen that form the core of the Iranian opposition in exile's fractious electronic vanguard. There are monarchists, socialists, constitutionalists, Zoroastrians, republicans, hard-core communists, moderate Islamists, Mossadeghists, Azeris, and other less well-defined confederations of students, aging ex-students, and businessmen distributed throughout the West. They are far from unified. Iran watchers believe that "the opposition" is a misnomer, that there simply is no unified opposition. Privately, many members of the opposition will admit as much. Why they can't unify is a tougher question. Pirouznia attributes it to Iranian character. "We have a problem with being self-centered," he argues.