This past October Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, paid a rare visit to the holy city of Qom in efforts to regain political and religious support lost during last year’s highly publicized election backlash. In Qom, he asserted that the “sedition” of last year “inoculated the government against political and social microbes.” Within days of his remarks, one defiantly named Facebook group – “One Million Green Microbes” – had amassed nearly 10,000 members.

Iran’s Green Movement is the largest opposition movement mounted by Iranians since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Although there have been giant leaps forward in communications technology since then, Green activists understand that opposing a government as entrenched as the Islamic Republic of Iran will require much more than Facebook fan pages, Twitter clouds, and emotional YouTube clips. The future of political activism in Iran and other repressive environments around the world is in the hands of those who employ both digital activism and civil resistance.

The opposition is learning to mix and master both. Digital newspapers containing updates about political prisoners and detained activists are sent to subscribers as PDF attachments to untraceable Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encrypted emails. The A4-sized, home printer friendly newspapers, once printed, are intentionally left behind in public places. The header reads: “Kaleme – A Newspaper to Leave Behind”.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard, however, has left little room for the use of Internet communication in the organization and expression of the opposition in Iran. In a post-election takeover of Iran’s telecommunications industry, the elite branch of the Iranian military wielded its economic power to amass 51% stakes in telecoms in attempts to stem the use of Twitter and other Internet services from coordinating the Green movement. Mark Fowler, a former Iranian specialist for the CIA, described the situation in Iran as a “soft war” in which the Revolutionary Guard has been “using their whole economic base to expand control over the telecommunications field to confront the threat they see.”

Today, Iran’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), the state’s telecommunications monopoly, monitors online communication and content through a centralized location. The technology and monitoring equipment was sold to Iran in 2008 by the Nokia Siemens Network (NSN) — a joint venture between the Finnish cell phone maker and the German engineering conglomerate. The NSN monitoring center was part of a broader contract with Iran that mainly provided the country mobile phone network technologies. The Iranian government reportedly experimented with the monitoring technology prior to the election, but did not use it extensively until after the votes were “counted”.

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