calls Iran’s “electronic curtain” designed to limit Iranians’ contact with the rest of the world via the Internet.
Gregory Sullivan is the man in charge of the effort to use techno-savvy to tear down that curtain. Sullivan is a career US Foreign Service officer and the director of press and public diplomacy in the State Department’s Bureau of South and Central Asia Affairs.
Recently, Mashable, a major website and blog dedicated to reporting on the social media, sat down with Sullivan and talked to him about the State Department’s efforts, which use a wide range of digital platforms to engage with Iranian citizens. A Facebook page, Twitter handle and a YouTube account have been active for two years. Recently, the State Department hosted its first-ever Google+ hangout entirely in Farsi.
Sullivan said, “There was a strong reaction and we build a dedicated following [in Iran]’” He says his department’s approach is about reaching out to Iranian citizens who aren’t “part of the regime,” people who they think “have had their voice taken away” by the Iranian government.
In October of last year, the State Department opened a “Virtual Embassy,” an online destination where Iranians could learn more about the US in lieu of an actual embassy, since the US hasn’t had one in Iran since 1980.
“We needed an information headquarters—a hub, if you will—and the notion of ‘Virtual Embassy Tehran’ was born,” Sullivan told Mashable. “It’s information central for Iranians who need to know about the US, our policies, study opportunities and work visas. That’s the same service an actual brick-and-mortar embassy would provide. So we figured, why don’t we create a virtual embassy online?”
Sullivan said the virtual embassy has worked. He said 350,000 people visited in the first three months, even though the Iranian government blocked the site the day it opened.
“What we hoped to see, and what we did see, was a spike in requests for the Persian-language site from countries where there is not a large Persian-speaking population,” he said. That told him Internet users in Iran were using foreign proxies to bypass Iran’s “National Gateway,” which restricts access to the Internet, and get to the “virtual embassy” site.
“If we can get accurate info to [Iranian citizens] and help give them a voice, maybe it changes this whole dynamic. Maybe it puts pressure on this regime. In many ways, our efforts to reach out to people connects with our methods to put pressure on the regime.”
Sullivan said his outreach efforts are grounded in President Obama’s two-track policy toward Iran: Punish the regime for the “poor choices” that it makes, but “hold out hope” for a solution through diplomatic means. By building an online connection with Iranians, Sullivan is hoping to generate the cross-cultural understanding on which diplomacy relies.
“We found online engagement to be a viable way to engage with Iranian citizens despite government limitations on Internet access,” Sullivan told Mashable.
The Iranian government tries to clamp down on Internet access. All web traffic in the country has to pass through that “National Gateway,” which then limits access to websites deemed off-limits by the government .
So how do Internet-savvy Iranians get around Iran’s National Gateway? They use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and proxy servers located outside the country. For example, an Iranian may dial up an innocent sounding site based on a server in Paraguay—but from that site and server, he or she can link to the “virtual embassy” or Facebook or any other website, bypassing the regime’s filters.
Circumventing the gov-ernment’s filters this way doesn’t come without risks. The regime has a “cyber army” of Internet “enforcers,” and the government routinely spies on citizens’ online behavior. Many Iranians continue to ignore the risk of government harassment and intimidation.
“We have heard that 40 percent of Iran’s web traffic bypasses government filters,” Sull-ivan said. “We estimate there are as many as 14 million Facebook users inside of Iran despite the fact that Facebook is one of five million or so sites blocked for use by Iranian Internet Service Providers.”
To that end, the US is actually responsible for developing many of the filter-circumvention tools used by Iranians and citizens of other less-than-open societies. The US has spent over $70 million on “Internet freedom tools” to bypass state filters in many countries. Sullivan estimates that at least one million people are using filter-bypassing tools designed in America.
Iran acknowledges that it can’t just shut down the Internet, since so much of the country’s economic infrastructure is digital that cutting all access would result in a huge financial loss. The country suffers from a technology “brain drain;” many of Iran’s sharpest minds leave to pursue better opportunities elsewhere. According to Sullivan, that makes it harder for Iran to outsmart citizens using VPNs and proxies to get around the National Gateway.
The Islamic Republic does, however, have a history of significantly slowing the web down just before planned protests. And Iran is working on building a “National Intranet,” an Iran-only network that will allow digital communication within the country while severely restricting outside access.
Communications Minister Reza Taqipur said this week that the oft-delayed system would come on line by May 21. He said it will include a domestic email service, a search engine that can replace Google and a data center.