daniel splittgerber

Makes for an interesting moment in history doesn’t it? I can make a compelling case that within 12 months Iraq is descending it deepening unrest, Iran is at a point where military confrontation may be inevitable, the war in Afghanistan is much hotter than in the past few years, Pakistan is deteriorating (Steinberg said he didn’t feel a failed state was likely…but indicated the government had lost control of key regions…kind of like Colombia only much much more dangerous.), unemployment is at 10.5 percent, a second stimulus is needed, the health care bill was weak or fails in the Senate, the climate bill was weak or fails in the Senate and there is effectively no accord in Copenhagen.

I can also make an equally compelling case that a weak democracy in Iran gradually becomes more functional, democratic stirrings from Lebanon to Iran have hard-liners worried and forced to backtrack, reformers are gaining in the region, the offensive in Afghanistan starts to work, Pakistan remains stable, unemployment starts to fall, and the U.S. makes real progress on health care, climate and energy security.

We are on the razor’s edge at the moment. And central to every one of these issues is the President of the United States and his team.

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

So suddenly all those poseurs who might otherwise have bilked the hapless with offers of life coaching services or Feng Shui consulting have jumped on the social networking bandwagon. You can hardly swing a stick on the sidewalk nowadays without smacking one of these guys in the head.

Deep packet inspection involves inserting equipment into a flow of online data, from emails and Internet phone calls to images and messages on social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Every digitized packet of online data is deconstructed, examined for keywords and reconstructed within milliseconds. In Iran’s case, this is done for the entire country at a single choke point, according to networking engineers familiar with the country’s system. It couldn’t be determined whether the equipment from Nokia Siemens Networks is used specifically for deep packet inspection.

All eyes have been on the Internet amid the crisis in Iran, and government attempts to crack down on information. The infiltration of Iranian online traffic could explain why the government has allowed the Internet to continue to function — and also why it has been running at such slow speeds in the days since the results of the presidential vote spurred unrest.

Instead, in confronting the political turmoil that has consumed the country this past week, the Iranian government appears to be engaging in a practice often called deep packet inspection, which enables authorities to not only block communication but to monitor it to gather information about individuals, as well as alter it for disinformation purposes, according to these experts.

The monitoring capability was provided, at least in part, by a joint venture of Siemens AG, the German conglomerate, and Nokia Corp., the Finnish cellphone company, in the second half of 2008, Ben Roome, a spokesman for the joint venture, confirmed.

For a while it looked like a clear-cut victory of new media over old. (…)

[But] the much-ballyhooed Twitter swiftly degraded into pointlessness. By deluging threads like Iranelection with cries of support for the protesters, Americans and Britons rendered the site almost useless as a source of information—something that Iran’s government had tried and failed to do. Even at its best the site gave a partial, one-sided view of events. (…)

Much more impressive were the desk-bound bloggers. Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and Robert Mackey of the New York Times waded into a morass of information and pulled out the most useful bits. (…) The winner of the Iranian protests was neither old media nor new media, but a hybrid of the two.

No one can see into the back rooms of the clerical establishment or into the bunkers of the Revolutionary Guard. No one knows the real results of the vote. No one can predict how long the street protests will last or how ready the regime is to use force and the price it would pay in its own people’s blood. Yet something momentous has happened in a pivotal country in the most combustible part of the world. Having fatally misread its own people, Iran’s government must now decide whether to back down or to crack down.