Iran Elections: reporter reportedly shot in Tehran; bloggers arrested

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I was skimming the Twitter listings under the hashtag #iranelection and this came up:

charmedguy18 @liviarierref Do you know which reporter, representing what news agency was shot dead minutes ago? #iranelection #helpiran #tehran

It's difficult to get more reliable information on this tweet as the information flow is really too fast to deal with. And while that was happening, there were reports of others being shot as well. Meanwhile there are some writing "not to trust" Twitter, and undoubtedly agents of the Iranian Government. But it's clear that today is not a good day to be a reporter or a blogger in Iran:

RadoxTheGreen RT @dcb23: 23 bloggers/reporters known arrested in #Iran http://tr.im/peVi #Neda #IranElection #Tehran #gr88

CNN iReport a good source too

While everyone raves about Twitter, and rightly so, CNN's iReport website's also a great source of video and photo news and I don't write that because I'm an iReporter. The idea of the program has been and is to give people on the scene who have camera a camcorders a fast way to report the news as they see it and many are doing so in Iran. While the flow of content to the iReport has been slow of late due to the Iranian Government's crack down on all things Internet, there's still material, like this video posted just five hours ago as of this writing:



And this photo shows police actually smashing a car! You'd think they'd not even consider such actions, but this pict proves otherwise.




There are other videos, including many too ugly to post here; you understand the story by now, I think.

Facebook was down;; was it an Iranian government plot?

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YouTube, MySpace, Metacafe, Blip.tv, Sclipo and Viddler


I was just heading to Facebook to test a theory on profile settings for a friend when I noticed the page wasn't coming up. I got the famous "the connection to the server was reset while the page was loading" message, so I refreshed the screen and the same thing happened: nothing. Still I had to make sure it wasn't me, so I sent out a tweet on Twitter (see the video). @egratto responded experiencing the same problem. We're both located in California, but I'm in Georgia, so location wasn't the reason.

Facebook was down.

Facebook has about 175 million users so for that five to ten minutes of time communication stopped a lot of people were impacted, which leads to this question: Was it an Iranian government plot? I mean think about it. They want to get Twitter but maybe, just maybe someone over there tried to take down Facebook too?

Considering the historic importance of Twitter and Facebook in communicating what can be called the Iranian Revolution, having either system malfunction would really make the hard-liners happy. But it raises another question: have Twitter and Facebook now become too important to have just one of their kind? I'm guessing there's a redundant system somewhere for both, but is that the case?

We're entering a new era of World communications where what was once considered a hickup could now impact national security and personal freedom.


UPDATE: I checked further and determined that the message regarding the connection happens to some who try to use Facebook from the Mozilla Firefox browser, which I was using at the time, but not frequently. In other words its not an everyday happening. But that problem is generally related to internet connection problems; I had none and was on six different sites at the same time. But I can't yet confirm the use of that browser for anyone else at the time and it's never happened to me before.

Over at my YouTube page a viewer commented:

Facebook and Yahoo was down yesterday for me for an hour and I was told by my IP that they were having technical problems.

Just my luck I had spent a good amount of time writing a message when it failed. ARGH !

Also, I learned that CNET reported a similar problem last year, when Facebook was having what they called "outage issues" experienced by their editors in San Francisco, Boston and New York, so it's not something that's a one-time glitch but that it happened today on this important week in Iranian history is worth conversation and investigation.

Iran Elections: Iran Minister threatens protestors with death

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As the song says, "it's getting hot in here", or more like hotter. According to Reuters, Iran Minister Mohammadreza Habibi has issued a statement threatening death to protesters. That's a lot of people, several million, including now (according to the Huff Posts Nico Pitney) Iranian soccer stars who wears green in solidarity with the protestors, which makes him a protester.

On the matter of the Huffington Post, it's blocked in Iran as the government continues its efforts to stamp out the impact of the Internet. I'll bet there's a proxy for it somewhere...

Meanwhile, Iran blames Washington for the protests siting "Intolerable" meddling. They missed the mark; they should blame San Francisco, the capital of New Media.

More updates on my video: