Bob Ostertag: In the Digital Iran, Censorship and Surveillance Merge: Via Huffington Post .

Now would be a good time to remember that censorship and surveillance are different things. I tremble at the thought that the brave citizen journalists of Iran are now getting a brutal lesson in the distinction.

For nearly two weeks, they have managed to keep one step ahead of the Iranian censors, by using proxies, mirrors, specialized software, and most importantly and surprisingly, Twitter. As a result, people around the world like me, sitting in comfortable chairs sipping coffee and risking nothing, have been able to follow the incredible events there through a kaleidoscope of citizen media that have overwhelmed both Iranian censors and conventional news outlets.

But censoring these communications and surveilling them are very different matters. To censor them, one must intercept them and block them as they happen. To surveill them, one need only reconstruct them after the fact, a far easier task technologically speaking. In techno-geek-speak, censorship is "realtime." Surveillance doesn't have to be.

In this case, as long as you can keep a record of electronic communications (a trivial matter), you can then take as long as you like to strain the through digital soup, filtering for whatever words, or addresses, or even patterns of recurrent transmissions you are interested in, and then trace them to their source.

In all the hubbub over the Iranian state's inability to censor the opposition, one question that has not been prominently asked is simply this: why would they want to? Once activist communication moves from the real world to Twitter, Facebook, SMS, and email, activists get the huge advantage that their messages can be received all over the world, but the state gets the huge advantage that all this stuff is neatly stored in one place for surveillance.

"Old school" activist communications through, say, conversations in tea houses, schools, and cafes, were typically 1-to-1 or small group affairs, a sharp limitation compared to a street activist typing a tweet into a cell phone that will be read by hundreds of thousands around the world. And of course, real world activist communications are notoriously susceptible to real world surveillance: informers, recording devices, cameras, and so on.

Nevertheless, state surveillance cannot be in all real-world places at all times. Furthermore, just because a conversation in a cafe is picked up by a hidden microphone does not mean that the cops can reconstruct exactly who the participants in the conversation were, or where they might be found a week or two later.

Not so with electronic communications. The state actually can sift through all electronic communications, and when they find something interesting, they can trace the conversation backward and forward in time, and branch out from one interaction to entire networks of people.

Reading last night's bone-chiling tweets from the Iranian known on Twitter as PersianKiwi, who has been posting virtually non-stop for the last week and a half, raises the question of whether the difference between censorship and surveillance is now playing out to a bloody end in Iran:

Read Original Article (Via Huffington Post.)