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Reporter Cyrus Farivar looks at the ongoing cat-and-mouse game being played out online between Iranian authorities and protestors.

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JEB SHARP:  The Iranian government warned today that it would show opposition leaders no mercy unless they changed course.  All the signals from Tehran this week point to a zero tolerance of more protests.  Last Sunday’s demonstrations were apparently the final straw.  Eight people were killed.  The protests began in June, that’s when a disputed presidential election gave Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term.  Since then, both the reformists and the regime have stepped up their game online, as we learn in this report from Cyrus Farivar.

CYRUS FARIVAR:  From his apartment in San Francisco, Austin Heap has been at the forefront of an effort to keep Iranians online.  Six months ago, he helped create proxy servers for Iranians.  That’s a way to route internet traffic through another computer to avoid Iran’s notorious internet filters.  But he says Iranian authorities seem to have developed a more effective strategy for blocking online traffic on large protest days, like last Sunday.

AUSTIN HEAP:  What they’ll do is, it’s almost like a button or a switch that they flip and it will go from you know, heavily filtered internet to you know, white listed internet where they’re hand selecting which sites they want to allow instead of selecting which sites to deny.

FARIVAR:  Heap says he knows this because dozens of Iranians have allowed him remote access to their computers.  He’s also observed something else that Iranian authorities are apparently doing.  It’s known as null routing.  If someone in Iran types in a web address like Facebook.com, their computer will connect to that web page’s server but the page won’t load.

HEAP:  You’ll still be able to like look up the domain, but when it actually makes that connection, it just you know, it’s like calling a phone line that’s been disconnected.

FARIVAR:  Heap is doing all this to help Iranians and to help some software he’s developing.  It’s called Haystack and it’s an anti-filtering program designed for internet users in Iran.  This week, the Iranian government declared that proxy servers and anti-filtering software, like Haystack, are illegal.

WILLIAM BEEMAN:  That’s been in the works for some time but they can’t do it.

FARIVAR:  That’s William Beeman, an Iran expert at the University of Minnesota.  He says the Iranian government has tried to ban various technologies before like satellite dishes.  That didn’t work and this one won’t either, says Beeman.  It’s too hard to enforce, though authorities will try.

BEEMAN:  They’re trying to prepare in advance the possibility that they could get somebody and put them in jail just simply for operating, using one of these technological ways to circumvent the government.

FARIVAR: Meanwhile, many Iranians both in and outside the country have been using new techniques to try to get around the government ban and people are still managing to send out videos of protests.  Mehdi Saharkhiz is an Iranian living in New York.  His father is a well known journalist who was arrested in Iran earlier this summer.  Saharkhiz says he’s trying to do what he can from the U.S.

MEHDI SAHARKHIZ:  One of the things we try to do is we try to get these videos and then we download these videos and send it back in as a mobile format so people can see it.

FARIVAR:  Saharkhiz says that allows more people in Iran to download the videos and distribute them among friends, without running the risk of sending the videos on to someone they don’t know.  It’s likely there will be more videos of protests to distribute.  The seventh day of mourning for those killed in last Sunday’s protest will fall on this Sunday and that may bring yet another round of this endless online cat and mouse game.  For The World, I’m Cyrus Farivar.

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