2150 GMT: A Quiet Night. For the first time in days, a noticeable drop in news and chatter. So we may close shop early and welcome you to a new day in several hours.
1910 GMT: We Take It All Back — No Rest for Ahmadinejad. Remember how we said (1225 GMT) that Ali Larijani’s statement on Iran’s uranium programme yesterday — which could have just as easily been given by the President — indicated a possible easing of tensions between Ahmadinejad and his conservative/principlist opponents?
Well, forget that. Member of Parliament Ali Motahhari, who has taken the point in the challenge to the President, has resumed the attack, and he has done so in the Larijani-affiliated Khabar Online:
We cannot claim the crisis is totally over until both sides make up for their mistakes. The differences of opinion between the government and [the opposition] might have been eased to some extent, but they still exist. Our statesmen should not imagine that people’s massive presence in the Thursday rally reflects the approval of their performance…. The presence of political elite in the rally does not mean there is no longer any criticism or objection towards the regime.
Motahhari declared that the Government must stop banning the press and should release all political prisoners. And he made clear that Larijani’s apparent conciliation on the nuclear issue was more of a demand that Ahmadinejad stick to a hard line against the United States:
People expect their governments not to seek compromise with big powers. The government should be honest with people and tell people if it is engaged in behind-the-scenes negotiations with big powers. Nor should the government tie Iran’s nuclear issue to normalization of ties with the United States.
2200 GMT: To close the day, a video — courtesy of The Flying Carpet Institute — of a workers’ demonstration in Arak on Wednesday:
2155 GMT: The Amir Kabir student website, a valuable source of information throughout the post-election crisis, has been attacked by the Iranian Cyber Army.
2135 GMT: Brother, Where Art Thou (cont.)? Davoud Ahmadinejad, the brother of the President, has declared that he is ready to prove that the beliefs of Presidential Chief of Staff Esfandiar Rahim-Mashai, clash with Islam. Once again, the attack appears in Khabar Online, the publication close to Ali Larijani.
2125 GMT: Journalists and press managers have requested the freedom of Ali Ashraf Fathi, clergyman and writer of the Tourjaan weblog (named after the location where Fathi’s father was killed during the Iran-Iraq War), who was arrested last week during the “40th Day” memorial for Grand Ayatollah Montazeri.
2110 GMT: Crackdown and Blackout. So the regime’s strategy of breaking up any mass movement on 22 Bahman continues. Iranian activists and websites such as Reporters and Humanrights Activists in Iran continue to document arrests, and there is even a claim that three members of the Committee of Human Rights Reporters — Mehrdad Rahimi, Saeed Haeri, and Shiva Nazar-Ahari — have been charged with “mohareb” (war against God).
Reports continue to circulate that Internet service has slowed significantly and even been halted in parts of Iran. Official explanations have included disruptions because of the loss of a major cable and “developments and expansions in the Tehran-Mashad corridor”.
2240 GMT: We close tonight by posting a video of the comments of Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, defending the regime’s approach in the Presidential election and against subsequent protests, on CNN.
2155 GMT: News from Evin Prison. Another demonstration tonight by families of detainees and their supporters — Peyke Iran reports hundreds present. The website claims 23 detainees have been released to the cheers of the crowd.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is looking at a bright future under the aegis of the visionary leadership of Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei and the support of a considerable number of devotees inside and outside the country…
“Ceremonies marking the 31st anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution will kick off this year at a time when Iran has made great progress in various fields of science and technology. The global powers, along with their supporters inside the country, desperately sought to undermine the principles of the Islamic Revolution.
So, Mr Firouzabadi, we pass over to you the EA All is Well Trophy Video:
2015 GMT: The speaker of the reformist minority group in Parliament, Mohammad Reza Tabesh, resigned to protest restricitons such as the filtering of the party’s website Parleman News and the banning of its reporter from the Parliament and preventing guests of MPs from entering the Parliament. (Those guests include family members of political prisoners. One delegation was turned away today.)
The Deputy Speaker and members of the party intervened and requested Tabesh to remain in his post.
What we wrote at 0745 GMT: “Some media were looking forward to today’s “5+1″ (US, UK, Russia, China, France, Germany) meeting on Iran’s nuclear programme. Even if that gathering had significance for the internal situation in Iran, it is unlikely to produce any results: China has declined to send a high-level official, blocking any move towards further sanctions on Tehran.”
What Associated Press reported an hour ago: “Top diplomats from six key powers focused on possible new sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program at a meeting Saturday, but reached no agreement, Russia’s deputy foreign minister said.”
2205 GMT: Writing in Exile. Nazila Fathi, The New York Times correspondent who fled her native country in June, has written an emotive account of post-election events and her departure. The article, however, also offers a powerful insight into how “new media” has re-shaped both opposition and coverage of it: Read the rest of this entry »
2110 GMT: Peyke Iran has published the news we heard earlier (see 1810 GMT) that all the detained Mothers of Mourning have been released.
1855 GMT: HomyLafayette has an excellent summary of information around the Mohammadi case.
1845 GMT: More on the Trial of the Baha’i (see 0725 GMT). An EA reader notes confusion over the court hearing for seven Baha’i members arrested in 2008 for “organizing riots”. Many accounts say the trial was today but one Iranian source reports that testimony began yesterday, a day early.
1815 GMT: Not A Nuclear Scientist. A highly reliable EA source checks in on the Professor’s case: “I hand checked all three UN black lists [of Iranian nuclear scientists]. Ali Mohammadi isn’t there.”
1800 GMT: Oh. My. Goodness. The Supreme Leader’s representative to the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps, Ali Saeedi, has reportedly declared that the the deaths of 75,000 people will be worthwhile if the Islamic Republic is preserved. 1745 GMT: The Presidential website has made a contribution to the Mohammadi story, declaring that the Iranian nation will have its “revenge” on the “enemies” who killed the professor. More info, however, on Mohammadi as a particle physicist: his faculty profile and a list of publications which complements those we noted earlier (1445 GMT).
Austin Heap, one of the most prominent activists on the Internet and Iran (see, for example, “The Haystack Project” to provide unfiltered Web access to Iranians), writes a guest blog for Enduring America on yesterday’s diversion of Twitter users to the page of the “Iranian Cyber Army”:
There were probably a few odd text messages whizzing around in San Francisco at 11 PM on Thursday night at a place called Dyn. It’s a company that most people had not heard of, even though it powers websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, and Vimeo. They even have a catchy motto: “Uptime is the Bottom Line”. Now, however, a group calling itself the “Iranian Cyber Army” had hacked Dyn’s servers and changed only a tiny line of text. The outcome was the “occupation” of Twitter, causing a two-hour outage of service for Tweeters around the world.
Dyn offers a service called managed DNS hosting. Essentially a yellow pages for the Internet, DNS translates lettered website names into an IP address, like phone numbers for computers. When you type in enduringamerica.com on your browser, a request is sent out to a DNS server. The DNS server responds to your browser and says, “enduringamerica.com’s IP address is XX.XX.XX.XXX”, then your browser “calls” that IP. Read the rest of this entry »
UPDATE 1320 GMT: HomyLafayette offers an important correction on the text used by the “Iranian Cyber Army” (see 0945 GMT): “The red text on the green flag in fact reads, ‘O Hossein, peace be upon him,’ referring to Imam Hossein, a key figure in Islam and the 3rd Imam of Shiites.” It is Hossein’s death that is commemorated in the month of Moharram that starts today.
UPDATE 1010 GMT: Twitter has posted, “Twitter’s DNS [Domain Name System] records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed. We are looking into the underlying cause and will update with more information soon.”
“Above the flag, in Arabic, read: ‘Hezbollah is victorious.’ On the flag, in red Arabic writing: ‘Yassin’ (an Arabic name written in bold) then in smaller Arabic print ‘the feast of peace’. Below the flag was more written in Farsi.”
I woke this morning to find that Twitter was running extremely slowly and sometimes grinding to a halt. Indeed, since 1200 GMT yesterday there have been serious slow-downs in delivery of messages.
Service is now picking up, but the hot story is that Twitter was hacked yesterday by the “Iranian Cyber Army” with this message:
THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY
iRANiAN.CYBER.ARMY@GMAIL.COM
U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But THey Don’t, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation Iranian Peoples To….
NOW WHICH COUNTRY IN EMBARGO LIST? IRAN? USA?
WE PUSH THEM IN EMBARGO LIST
Take Care.
Yet, in this apparent victory for Iranian cyber-warfare, there lies I think a greater admission of defeat. If Twitter has not been that important in the challenge to the regime’s legitimacy since the Presidential election of June, why try to knock it out — raising the ire of millions of users who so far have had little interest in the events in Iran — at the start of Moharram? That seems more a confession of worry than an assertion of strength. Read the rest of this entry »
2150 GMT: A Quiet Night. For the first time in days, a noticeable drop in news and chatter. So we may close shop early and welcome you to a new day in several hours.
Austin Heap, one of the most prominent activists on the Internet and Iran (see, for example, 
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