Iran: An Open Letter on Haystack and Human Rights (Shahryar)

This week the testing of Haystack, a highly-publicised system seeking to provide access to the Internet --- free from surveillance and filtering --- to Iranians, was suspended amidst security concerns and criticism of both the technology and the promotion of the initiative.

Josh Shahryar reflects and responds in this open letter:

I along with everyone else on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other media have been following the current storm of criticism being heaped upon Austin Heap [one of the developers of the project] and Haystack. 

You can read that criticism on the blog of Danny O’Brien, who personally tested the software and found the flaws, and in the resignation letter of former Haystack developer Daniel Colascione. Media who once described Austin as a hero and hailed Haystack and the future of Internet access are now sure to find more readers as they turn to disappointment and even anger.

I am observing serious debate and at times in-fighting between activists on social media. This is both depressing and alarming for me.

My first fear is that a debate about Haystack will harm the future development of software intended to circumvent state-sponsored censorship. But more importantly, my fears are about us: the global network of human rights activists who already have to fight for attention and credibility from the mainstream media.

From its inception to this day, Haystack has only been a minor actor on the stage of the human rights calamity that is ongoing in Iran. So far, whatever the intentions of the project, it has not affected the situation on the ground for Iranians. It is simply software in development that is geared towards helping dissidents in the future.

All of us --- those who backed Haystack and those who didn’t --- need to know that we support each other and Iranians before we support anyone else. I worry about those of us who have lost sleep, weight and work hours commenting on social networking sites, writing petitions, and blogging about this issue. Austin Heap is one person and, whatever his contributions and mistakes, it should not negate the good work done by thousands of others. 

We are united by our collective desire to help Iranians get their deserved human rights. Arguing whether some of us supported Haystack or not is not just useless but damaging, for it distracts from what we should be focusing on.

What the world needs to know urgently from us is far beyond Haystack, Austin Heap, and the Censorship Research Center. What the world needs to know urgently is that the human rights situation in Iran is deplorable. It needs the information that there are men and women in dungeons suffering from hunger, thirst and open wounds. It needs the news about women who are being oppressed for writing about human rights for all. It needs about the 17 political prisoners who stood up defiantly and refused to eat because their rights as detainees were not respected.

Austin does not need defending --- he has his blog and media contacts. Countless others, who are being brutalized by a regime hell-bent on destroying any opposition, need our voices. And they need our voices to be united. We cannot offer those voices if we are too busy defending or attacking Haystack.

Let us focus on what we have been doing for the past year. It has helped before and it will help again. United, we can change things –-- however small those changes may be in the first instance. So, please, let us not argue about an issue that might harm our cause.

With humble apologies to Austin Heap,

Josh