Iranian Proxy Wars

Really amazing look at some of the internet pathways the Iranians are using to get information out to the outside world amidst the government clampdown on information:

Here's a geographic visualization of the proxies, drawn in Google Earth. In the first one, we've drawn Iran in green, with some of their domestic network sketched in white, and their major international connections drawn in red. Each of the colored arcs represents a single open web proxy; they are "fountaining" out of a cable landing or Internet traffic exchange point that makes approximate sense for their Iranian Internet routing. For example, all of the web proxies in Europe are drawn from the Marseilles termination of the Sea-Me-We-4 cable. The web proxies in Turkey are drawn in light blue, radiating from Ankara, where the Iran-Turkey gas pipeline passes through on its way from Bazargan. Those unusual Iranian proxies emerge from Tehran, and so forth.

If we rotate the globe, you can see how the countries of Asia are doing their part to keep the bits flowing in Iran. India, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Japan are all visible sources of web proxy activity.

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I'd like to be able to say that these maps are a measure of the strength of the democratic impulse and volunteer spirit in all the countries of the world. But that might be a stretch. You see, looked at another way, an open proxy is a security hole, something you might find in a machine that's been compromised, or at the very least, badly administered. Security purists think of them as the "unlocked gun cabinet" of the Internet — a resource for anyone who wants to abuse a website, commit fraud, cover their tracks.

They had a more global map that shows the large role US proxies are playing in getting around the censors:

Just thought I'd share.