Iran Feature: Why Withdrawal of Google Reader is a Blow for Iranians

Google’s announcement that it’s killing off Google Reader, the company’s beloved, if not wildly popular, tool for consuming RSS feeds, was met with outrage from journalists and other, largely American nerds who rely on it to efficiently churn through blogs and other websites. But the real tragedy is likely to be felt in countries like Iran, where Google Reader is used to evade government censorship.

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The Latest from Iran (24 September): Rafsanjani, Nukes, Ahmadinejad in New York

Nikahang Kowsar links last night's shutdown of Google and Gmail in Iran to President Ahmadinejad's trip to the US

See also Iran Opinion: Thoughts on the US De-Listing of the "Terrorist" Mujahideen-e Khalq
Iran Interview and Analysis: Ahmadinejad's Show Begins with Washington Post --- An Easy Ride on Nukes, And Nothing on Human Rights
Iran Analysis: Daughter in Prison, Son Back in Tehran --- What Now for Ex-President Rafsanjani?

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2030 GMT: Sanctions Watch. The US Treasury has officially designated the National Iranian Oil Company as "an agent or affiliate" of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, supporting Washington's pursuit of new sanctions on foreign banks dealing with the NIOC.

The Treasury told Congress that there was not enough information at this time to conclude that the National Iranian Tanker Company is linked to the IRGC.

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Egypt, Syria (and Beyond) Live Coverage: Day 2 of a Presidential Election

2045 GMT: Syria. According to the Local Coordinating Committees of Syria, 38 people have been killed so far today:

10 martyrs were reported in Idlib, 7 in Hama, 6 in Damascus Suburbs (Beit Jinn, Zabadani, Abadah and Douma), 12 in Homs (Rastan, Qosair and Deir Baalba), 1 in Daraa (Kalzour), 1 in Deir Ezzor, and 1 in Aleppo.

2025 GMT: Syria. Many suspect that the results of the parliamentary election were rigged. The process itself excluded many parties and candidates that would have been legitimate challenges to the status quo. Earlier today I wrote about the convenient symmetry of the results of the parliamentary election and today's leadership vote. Everything about the election smells fishy.

Today, parliament met for the first time and elected their leadership board. To no great surprise, a former the Baath party official won the position of speaker. The rest of the results (English) are published by Syrian state media's SANA here (Arabic).

So, the former Baath party makes up the majority of the parliament, and the leadership. If you're the Syrian opposition, this sounds rigged. But if you're the Twitter Account Hama Echo, then you KNOW it's rigged:

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Syria 1st-Hand: Life with Assad's Alawites (Rosen)

A Pro-Assad Demonstration in AleppoI told the sheikh that the opposition said Alawites controlled the regime. "This is rejected," he said. "It's for justifying the attack against the regime." He listed ministers, governors, and director-generals and insisted very few were Alawites and most were Sunni.

"Our president is Alawite and we suffer from this," he said. "There are four million Alawites," he claimed with some exaggeration. "We don't have even one per cent of the positions in the government." He and his guests said they believed Syria was being pressured so it would make a deal with Israel.

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Iran: Assessing Latest Cyber-Threat, Rogue Certificate Part 2 (Arseh Sevom)

Earlier in the week, our colleagues at the civil society organistion Arseh Sevom assessed the security threat, possibly introduced by the Iranian regime, that left Google users in Iran susceptible to a rogue certificate attack.

Now, Arseh Sevom reanalyzes the threat in part 2 of the series. And they have an alarming piece of information, that users of Tor, Yahoo, and Mozilla may also have been compromised...

See Also, Iran Special: Assessing the Latest Cyber-Threat --- The "Rogue Certificate" (Arseh Sevom

Latest from Iran (3 September): Elections and the Revolution

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UPDATE: Google and Mozilla have revoked more than 200 security certificates as a result of a hack into the accounts of certificate authority, DigiNotar.

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Iran Special: Assessing the Latest Cyber-Threat --- The "Rogue Certificate" (Arseh Sevom)

Suppose you want to send mail to your brother. But an enemy somehow manages to get credentials of a postman and bribes or coerces his way into becoming the postman that takes your mail to your brother and brings his reply back. Now when you put mail in the mailbox, he will discard your mail and instead, write a mail himself and take that to your brother as if you had written it. Then, when your brother writes a reply to your mail, the postman picks that one up, discards it and writes a totally different reply and brings it back to you.

The result is that neither you nor your brother are able to communicate what you wish to communicate to each other if the enemy wishes to alter your message. Worse, even if he doesn’t, any secret that you sent, including your addresses and passwords are now the property of the enemy. Now imagine the government of Iran or another government being that postman, reading every message you send over Google…

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