Those running the show in Iran are throttling back that country's Internet access in advance of huge protests expected today, the 31st anniversary of the founding of the Islamic Republic. Slowing Internet traffic to the point that the 'net becomes useless is becoming a regular tactic in Iran as it tries to tamp down opposition. It's also exactly the sort of behavior that makes Hillary Clinton's talk about "one Internet" -- and the right of people around the globe to have access to it -- more than just feel-good rhetoric.

Someone affiliated with the Iran government is also saying today that Gmail is being blocked in Iran in part to encourage Iranians to switch from Google's servers to a home-grown email service.

The real surprise is that it took them this long. PressTV, operated by the government-affiliated Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting company, has just run a documentary that alleges that the video that rocketed around YouTube and around the world which captured the June, 2009 death of Neda Agha Soltan was actually evidence of a double-dealing plot. According to the IRIB read of events released this week, Soltan was in on a scheme to fake her death, but that her co-conspirators turned on her and actually carried out the deed:

The documentary alleges that Arash Hejazi, the writer and physician who treated Neda as she lay bleeding on a Tehran street, as well as her music teacher who was with her at the protest, were members of a team that carried out the plot.

"While Neda is [pretending] she is injured and is lying on the back seat of the car on their lap, they bring out a handgun from their pockets," the documentary's narrator says.

"A handgun that they obtained from their Western and Iranian friends to water the tree of reforms and kill people and create divisions within society. Neda, for a moment, realizes their wicked plan and struggles to escape, but they quickly shoot her from behind.

"The narrator adds that this is how "deceived and deceitful" Neda was killed.

The graphic video of Soltan's death in the streets of Tehran has helped to catalyze anger against the Iranian regime, both in an out of Iran, so it's no wonder that they'd have in interest in coming up with some sort of alternative explanation to try to convince viewers that what they're seeing isn't actually what they're seeing.

The 2009 post-election protests in Iran have changed the Internet. Or, at least, how people are learning to use the Internet to resist oppressive governments and other regimes. The Catch-22 of online resistance is that those places in the world where we've seen the citizenry most actively pushing back against governments online -- Iran and China, to name just two -- also happen to be the places where authorities tend to have the most control over the Internet, able to dictate that telecommunications companies filter Internet traffic or, as we've seen happen around the world, simple flip the "off" switches on the country's routers and hubs until times of turmoil pass.

That's why we're seeing a great deal of creativity going into figuring out ways to circumvent the censors, and perhaps not surprisingly, the latest round of work dedicated to online circumvention seems to be focusing on video work. A new group called Access has sprung up that is dedicated, at the start at least, to protecting and promoting web video. Online video has been proven to have enormous currency in the Iranian context. We might not be able to easily wrap our minds around the latest dictate from this or that cleric, or parse the latest official statement coming out of the Iranian government, but video of the death of Neda Agha-Soltan in the streets of Tehran is powerful stuff. It stays with you. What you take in through video can be difficult to shake.

Just one example: the gruesome video above of the seeming death of a protestor in Tehran on December 27th.

YouTube's CitizenTube blog has been aggregating videos from Iran's most recent protests, and it has a guest post up from Access' Executive Director Brett Soloman about how the organization is working to make video accessible from all over the world. Part of Access' strategy seems to be to flood the zone. The group spends time converting videos to all sorts of formats (including mobile, enormously popular in Iran) and propagating them throughout social networking sites like Facebook and the Iranian-themed Balatarin, all in an effort to make video of what's happening in Iran nearly unavoidable.

Foreign Policy's Evegeny Morozov has a cover story in this month's Prospect (UK) on how he evolved into a hearty skepticism about technology's potential to slay dictators, empower the disempowered, and generally lead to a more just political landscape. Morozov -- who has been in the past affiliated with Georgetown University, in his role as a Yahoo! Fellow, as well as George Soros' Open Society Institute -- turned from a proponent of digital democracy to a doubter when his efforts in the field, he says, "seemed to be hurting the very causes we were trying to promote." Morozov's critique here centers on the idea that intolerant regimes seem to be getting pretty skilled as using the Internet to their own advantage.

In this Prospect essay, Morozov brands New York University professor and theorist Clay Shirky "the man most responsible for the intellectual confusion over the political role of the internet." And so, Prospect has given Shirky a chance to respond. He takes the opportunity to highlight how social media creates a new kind of "information cascade" when it comes to political resistance. In other words and to put it simply, the idea is that potential political protestors can wait and see the government responds to opposition. Political protests can have a longer tail today because those on the fence benefit from watching -- often in real time -- how early adopters fare in their resistance. Shirky:

Prior to the spread of social media, a typical classic case of late and failed reaction by the regime to an information cascade is the one documented by Lohmann, around the collapse of communism in eastern Europe. The classic case of late and successful reaction by a regime is Tiananmen Square and, even there, the subsequent alteration of the Chinese state continues to be driven in part by the recognition that without continued economic improvement, the same forces that drove insurrection might return. Though the regime always holds most of the power, insurrections that take advantage of the dynamics of information cascades thus offer protesters both offensive and defensive capabilities that they wouldn’t otherwise have.

It's an interesting debate, and both essays are worth reading.

That said, it's worth noting that both Morozov and Shirky here are focusing their commentary almost entirely on in-the-streets, down-with-dictators style political actions. Of course, politics involves a lot more than just political protests. Marching loudly in the streets of Tehran or crashing Moldova's capital building certainly catches attention. But narrowing in on that sliver of where tech meets politics seems to ignore an enormous universe of other stuff that matters, like using technology to help build civil society, empower social organizations, engage in the political process, advance intellectual arguments, create better options for young people, so on and so forth. (Photo credit: Dan Patterson)

How do we make sense of Twitter and its impact? As short broadcast bursts? A multi-directional reporting network? The trail left by the social interaction of folks who may, or may not know each other? It's an interesting -- and tough -- question. And a new project from Microsoft's Gilad Lotan suggests that making sense of Twitter is as much art as science. Lotan has launched ReTweet Revolution, a visual exploration of some of the many tweets generated in response to the Iranian election.

Lotan says his project's aim is to "help viewers grasp which of the messages were chosen to be passed on by millions of twitter users, and how they were manipulated along the way."

With reports now coming out of Iran that some of the 150 or so protesters locked up in the post-election conflict there have been tortured -- having their fingernails forcibly removed or being forced to lick toilet bowls -- NBC's Jim Sciutto picks up on one detail that is both chilling to those of us who engaged in Iran from afar and revealing of how seriously Iranian authorities take new media. Among the charges under which the protesters will stand trial is "sending images to the media of the enemy," i.e. blogging, emailing, YouTube-ing, and otherwise revealing to the world a peek inside Iran in those troubling days. (Photo by Steve Rhodes)

There's an absolutely fascinating back and forth in the comments of Ethan Zuckerman's blog. It's enough to make you remember why you love the medium. The context is that Zuckerman wrote a long post critiquing the New York Times The Lede blog blogger Robert Mackey for lending weight to a rumor that has long swirled in the international blogosphere. Mackey has been liveblogging events on the ground in Iran since the mid-June election. And in an update with the lead-in of "While there is no evidence to suport the rumor..." Mackey referenced the controversial idea that a well-known blogger with Iranian roots is actually working on behalf of the Iranian government in infiltrating the Iranian blogosphere, to harass and diminish opposition bloggers. Zuckerman acknowledged that questions about the blogger-in-question's political ties have been asked again and again in the international blogosphere. But he objected to Mackey's amplification of the rumor, given his perch at the paper of record...

Work continues on Haystack, "a new program [and network] to provide unfiltered internet access to the people of Iran."

YouTube's new decision to make usage metrics publicly available give us a whole new trove of information to mine about how various political actors and messages are doing. This information--who’s watching your videos, geographic distribution, traffic flows and total views, ratings by users--has always been available to video publishers through YouTube's Insight tool. Now, if publishers choose to make that info public, we can see it too. Some examples of what you can find out: President Obama's special video message to the Iranian people on the Nowruz holiday, which has more than 600K views, was "most popular" in Iran:

An interesting note jumps out from Hillary Clinton's big speech before the Council on Foreign Relations today. Clinton highlighted the fact that the State Department's important work on the the digital front has included "keep[ing] technologies up and going." That seems to me to be an obvious reference to the much-noted fact that a State Department Policy Planning staffer reached out to Twitter during the post-election uprising in Iran and asked them to keep their system running, instead of going ahead with scheduled downtime. Rather that shying away from outreach that could read as meddling in Iran's internal affairs, Clinton is embracing it. Her full remarks on the topic are after the jump.