Story.From.Iran: Easy, Anonymous, Safe

From twitter user twitter.com/NicholBrummer

There is probably no easier way to send out a story than doing it via
email. Anybody in Iran should be able to get their story even if they
have no blog. Once you have safe access to internet (not easy) email is
a simple method with very low bandwidth, good for a slow connection.

But I guess nobody will send anything if they cannot believe that they
will be safely anonymous. I checked that no email headers are visible
in the blog postings. Only the subject and message contents are posted
here.

If you set up a new gmail account and send email from there, then even
ShowIran can only see that account name. So even if you do not trust me
(which you can), your email-headers are completely anonymous. Use
https://gmail.com and everything is encrypted. The internal transfer
from your gmail to my gmail remains inside gmail. But any trusted email
servers with ssl should also get your email to gmail safely.

If you want to authenticate your post, just state your twitter name at
the top of the message. Subsequently, select your post in this blog to copy the URL. Then confirm your identity by pasting it in a tweet confirming you are the author.

Blogspot has a feature that it shows 'backlinks'. It would be nice if that
works for tinyURL's from twitter. I am not aware of a method to post
the long URL on twitter.

I will not keep any copies of your email on the email account
Story.from.Iran@gmail because I do not want any hackers to get at your
full email, with the headers. A disadvantage might be that it will be
more difficult to prove at some later point in time that you were the
author of the post. The best way to authorise your post from twitter. Make sure you have a good password for twitter, if you do not want people to hack into that!

My conclusion: this should work. Next problem is to get the word out to
the people with the real authentic stories. Once there are stories, it
is important that other people confirm or deny these stories in
comments, and in tweets to the post.

I hope this will work. This blog could become a gold-mine for
journalists and historians that will try to understand what is now
happening. It is easy to copy this idea for other subjects, once it works.

Letters from Iran?

I'm just another dutch guy, curious about revolutions, preferably of the non-violent type. For that to work, usually the system has to eventually give up, like in the Soviet Union and South Africa. Now the world is following developments in Iran on Twitter and various blogs.

I was wondering if there is a need for a simple blog where Iranians can just email their personal story, and remain anonymous. Not only hardened tech-savvy bloggers have important stories to tell, and setting up a blog can be a big hurdle if connections are bad.

So just email your stories. Please try to verify your facts, but do not reveal names, adresses, details that could cause anybody being hurt! So write the truth, but change the names.

Please only send good stories, no tweets, or spam, or I'll have to end up moderating this. Don't want that. Comments and tweets can serve as confirmation of these stories.