Internet Provider Says It Blocks Sites

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Yeowatzup

New fears of Internet censorship spread in the Russian blogosphere Monday after a wireless Internet provider co-owned by Russian Technologies acknowledged blocking access to some web sites.

Moscow-based users of the Yota provider have been unable to access web sites such as Garry Kasparov’s Kasparov.ru, Solidarity’s Rusolidarnost.ru and the banned National Bolshevik Party’s Nazbol.ru over the past few weeks, bloggers and the sites’ editors said.

Access also was patchy until Sunday to the site of opposition magazine The New Times, its web editor Ilya Barabanov said Monday.

Yota denied that it was blocking those sites. But Denis Sverdlov, chief executive of WiMax operator Skartel, which runs the Yota brand, did acknowledge that Yota blocks access to sites that are classified as extremist by the Justice Ministry. Because of that, Yota users cannot open the Chechen rebel web site Kavkazcenter.com.

“In November, we got an order from prosecutors recommending that we close access to extremist sites,” he said in e-mailed comments. “Since we are a law-abiding firm, we put the order into practice.”

As for users’ lack of access to the opposition web sites, Sverdlov blamed technical difficulties that arose after Yota introduced new IP addresses to cope with the rapid growth of its customer base. “On Oct. 23, we were assigned a bloc of 65,536 IP addresses. After we put them to commercial use, we found that IT managers of some other sites could not exclude them from those IP addresses they filter,” Sverdlov said.

As proof that there was no censorship, he said President Dmitry Medvedev’s official site at Kremlin.ru was at times inaccessible as well.

Kavkaz Center was declared extremist in a 2008 court decision and appears 10 times on the Justice Ministry’s list of more than 450 items classified as extremist. The ministry’s list does not mention any of the opposition sites that have complained of being inaccessible to Yota users.

Critics say the extremism law, which was widened in 2006, is being used to silence the opposition.

It is unclear why, with the exception of Yota, most national providers do not block access to Kavkaz Center.

A representative at Yota’s technical support hot line told the Novy Region news agency on Friday that the company was blocking 29 extremist sites. The unidentified representative said Kasparov.ru was not on the list but the list had been updated a week earlier.

Bloggers, meanwhile, are rattled by an audio file posted online Sunday in which a female voice — purportedly of a Yota support representative — says Kasparov’s and Solidarity’s sites are blocked because they are on that list.

“This strongly smells of political censorship,” said Denis Bilunov, a senior member of Kasparov’s Other Russia movement.

He said the most likely explanation was Russian Technologies’ involvement in the company.

The state-owned arms and industry behemoth bought a blocking stake in Telconet in November 2008.

A spokeswoman said Russian Technologies could not immediately comment on the allegations Monday.

Skartel spokesman Anton Belkov said he would not comment beyond Sverdlov’s statement.

Skartel has been building a network providing high-speed wireless Internet service since last summer and has said it wants to become a nationwide operator covering 180 cities within three years. State corporation Russian Technologies holds a 25.1 percent blocking stake in Skartel’s parent company, Telconet.

The Internet has been called the country’s last bastion of free speech after the state brought most national television channels and influential print media under its control over the past decade. Fears of a crackdown were raised last month after a video address by police officer Alexei Dymovsky lambasting corruption unleashed a string of copycat whistle-blowers airing their complaints online. Also last month, top search engine Yandex stopped ranking popular blog posts after several entries exposed problems that embarrassed government officials.

Obama praises dissident Cuban blogger Sanchez

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | AndreDeak

By Jeff Franks| Reuters | Thursday, November 19, 2009

HAVANA (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama praised dissident Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez and said in a posting on her website on Thursday that he looks forward to the day “all Cubans can freely express themselves.”

The U.S. leader, in responses to questions on Sanchez’s “Generation Y” site, also repeated his desire to improve U.S.-Cuba relations, saying he wants “direct diplomacy” with Cuba and could visit the Communist-ruled island.

“The United States has no intention of using military force in Cuba,” Obama wrote in a reply. “Only the Cuban people can bring about positive change in Cuba and it is our hope that they will soon be able to exercise their full potential.”

Obama’s comments broke no new ground on U.S. policy toward Cuba. Relations between Washington and Havana soured after Fidel Castro came to power in a 1959 revolution and were further strained when he pushed Cuba toward the Soviet bloc.

The United States maintains a 47-year-old trade embargo on the Caribbean nation.

But the unusual written exchange — Sanchez wrote that she sent questions to Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro — added to the blogger’s international stature as a leading dissident voice in Cuba.

“Your blog provides the world a unique window into the realities of daily life in Cuba. It is telling that the Internet has provided you and other courageous Cuban bloggers with an outlet to express yourself so freely,” Obama wrote.

“The government and people of the United States join all of you in looking forward to the day all Cubans can freely express themselves in public without fear and without reprisals,” he said.

A spokesman for the White House National Security Council confirmed that Obama had written Sanchez.

Raul Castro, however, has not responded, according to Sanchez, 34, who has won several international awards and was named by Time Magazine last year as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.

She is among a growing group of young Cubans who have taken to the Internet to express their desire for change in Cuba.

DAILY HARDSHIPS

Her blog often describes the hardships of life in Cuba and criticizes the repression of dissent by the government, which has made clear its distaste for her. Havana views dissidents as mercenaries working for the United States and other countries.

Sanchez said two weeks ago that she was detained and roughed up by state security agents in what she believes was a Cuban government message to quiet her criticism.

The Cuban government has said nothing about the incident, but the U.S. State Department said it expressed its “deep concern” to Havana. Obama did not mention it in his reply.

Obama pointed out to Sanchez what he said were steps to improve relations with Cuba, including an easing of the trade embargo and the initiation of talks on migration and postal service.

But he has said further normalization of relations depends on Cuba making progress on human rights and releasing political prisoners.

Raul Castro, who replaced ailing older brother Fidel Castro as president last year, has said Cuba is willing to talk to the United States about anything, but that it will make no unilateral concessions to its long-time enemy.

“I have said that it is time to pursue direct diplomacy without preconditions, with friends and foe alike. I am not interested, however, in talking for the sake of talking,” Obama told Sanchez.

Asked if he would be willing to travel to Cuba, Obama said, “I would never rule out a course of action that could advance the interests of the United States and advance the cause of freedom for the Cuban people,” he said.

Sanchez has a larger international audience but is little known in Cuba where Internet access is limited.

She asked Obama whether the U.S. trade embargo was to blame for Cuba’s lack of Internet, to which he pointed out that he had lifted restrictions on U.S. telecommunications companies that want to offer service there.

“These are small steps but an important part of a process to move U.S.-Cuban relations in a new and more positive direction,” he said of his policy.

“Achieving a more normal relationship, however, will require action by the Cuban government.”

(The website is http://www.desdecuba.com/generaciony/)

(Additional reporting by Matt Spetalnick in Washington; Editing by Jane Sutton and Paul Simao)

Toronto’s Citizen Lab uses forensics to fight online censors

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Hank Ashby

by Robert Mahoney, Deputy Director, CPJ

from CPJ’s Blog

A basement in the gray, Gothic heart of the University of Toronto is home to the CSI of cyberspace. “We are doing free expression forensics,” says Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, based at the Munk Centre for International Studies. Deibert and his team of academics and students investigate in real time governments and companies that restrict what we see and hear on the Internet. They are also trying to help online journalists and bloggers slip the shackles of censorship and surveillance. Deibert is a co-founder of the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a project of the Citizen Lab in collaboration with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. ONI tracks the blocking and filtering of the Internet around the globe.

“We are testing in 71 countries,” says Deibert, who shares his data with Berkman. “We are testing all the time. We are the technical hub of ONI.”

“We started out in 2002 with China,” said Jillian York, project coordinator for Berkman. “The work evolved, and then with Cuba we cracked it.” By 2006, ONI had expanded its dragnet for blocked or filtered content to more than 40 countries. However, as Citizen Lab and Berkman gained expertise and resources so did the censors they battled.

“We are now onto third-generation controls,” York said of Internet censorship. “The first generation was simple filtering, IP blocking in China, for example.” The second generation was surveillance, which ranged from placing spies or closed-circuit cameras in Internet cafés to installing tracking software on computers themselves. “The third generation controls combine all the above. We see it in China, Syria, and Burma. It’s a very broad approach,” York laments.

ONI’s research and public awareness-raising provides just one weapon in the increasingly sophisticated armory that bloggers need to deploy against government encroachment. Some free-speech campaigners engage across a wide battlefront, taking on authorities in Tunisia or Pakistan, for example, to keep blogging and video platforms open. Others, like Deibert, devise tools for an individual user to tunnel beneath a firewall or slip past a digital spy undetected. He helped develop Psiphon, a free, open source application that channels data through a network of proxies to circumvent censorship. “Anyone can use it. It’s fast and there’s nothing to download onto your computer for the Internet police to find,” said Deibert.

It’s a game of digital cat-and-mouse with authorities hunting down circumvention nodes, and Psiphon switching to an alternate as soon as a node is compromised. Citizen Lab launched Psiphon in December 2006 but did not have the resources to develop it further. So in May this year, Deibert and another ONI founder, Rafal Rohozinski, spun it off as a commercial enterprise. It is still free to users but charges companies to deliver their blocked content. Clients so far include the BBC and the U.S. government-funded Broadcasting Board of Governors. Social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have been a boon to Psiphon and other circumvention tools like Tor, spreading node connection information among bloggers and journalists. This was evident during the media crackdown in Iran that followed the disputed June presidential elections, when Twitter proved difficult to shut down.

Much of the light in Deibert’s Toronto basement may come from rows of LCD screens but unmasking digital spies is not all about electronic wizardry. “With ONI, we are testing all the time but we are not just a technical operation. The technology is not as important as the cultural information,” says Deibert, sounding like an old-school Le Carré character who stresses “human intelligence” over gadgetry. Reporting by volunteers on the ground in repressive countries provides vital information and context for monitors to analyze censorship developments and anticipate blocking strategies.

Berkman has expanded the reporting network through a crowd-sourcing tool called Herdict, which allows individuals to report a blocked Web site immediately.

“This is a constant struggle—the threat environment is always morphing,” according to Deibert. And the threats don’t just come from governments. Defenders of free expression and user privacy are increasingly concerned about the potential dangers of “cloud computing,” in which vast stores of personal data are held remotely by private companies both in democracies and repressive states. “Some of the biggest threats are from private companies. Cyberspace is largely owned and operated by private companies. Data is sent into a cloud over which we have no control,” Deibert says. The potential for such abuse is heightened in repressive states. An example of the dangers for the Citizen Lab team was TOM-Skype, the Chinese version of Skype. Citizen Lab uncovered a huge privacy breach where supposedly secure data were being stored secretly on servers in China.

Another case that Diebert says should concern us was in July this year when BlackBerry users in the United Arab Emirates were directed by text messages from their service provider Etisalat, which is majority owned by the UAE government to a link to upgrade their phones. The software they downloaded, however, turned out to be spyware. BlackBerry maker, Research in Motion Ltd of Canada, denied involvement and showed customers how to remove the software.

Deibert cautions online journalists in these days of increased third-party hosting to pay attention to corporate as well as government surveillance, and to read the fine print of terms-of-use agreements with ISPs and others before checking the sign-up box for an e-mail account or blog hosting platform.

“We need to lift the lid on the Internet. Where are the servers, where does your e-mail go, where is the Internet exchange point located, who has access to the building?” he asked.

Every day journalists and bloggers are reminded of the need to fight for their freedoms. Censorship and surveillance are slippery slopes. Take Pakistan. In February 2006, in its first case of Internet censorship, Islamabad decided to shield its populace from cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, published in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten. The Pakistan Communications Authority blocked 12 Web sites that reproduced the offending caricatures. By April of that year the authority was censoring five other Web sites saying they had published “misleading information”. In July, 30 more Web sites were blocked, nearly all of them associated with the movement advocating independence for the province of Baluchistan.

This censorship creep is an established phenomenon in Asia and the Middle East. But now it is spreading to Africa, where Internet use is still relatively low. Sub-Saharan African governments that have hobbled their own broadcast and print media have watched the celebrity-censors of other continents like China, Cuba and Iran and have drawn the inevitable conclusion: Online journalism is the future, so control it now.

“Ethiopia is going to be a test case,” says the Berkman Center’s York. “Internet penetration is low, yet platforms like Blogspot are blocked.”

When you talk to people at organizations such as ONI, one thing quickly becomes clear: They don’t know who is going to win the war for control of cyberspace. Circumvention tools like Tor and Psiphon are tactical weapons. A strategic response requires unrelenting campaigning and public education to raise the economic, political and social costs of censorship and surveillance for governments and private companies.

Meanwhile, Citizen Lab keeps doing what it does best; “We combine the technology with human intelligence, then turn them around to watch the watchers,” Deibert said.

CIA Gains Technology to Monitor Social Media Buzz

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Graham

Online Media Daily | Laurie Sullivan | October 19, 2009

United States intelligence agencies will have a tool to read blog posts, Twitter tweets and chatter across the Internet. In-Q-Tel, the independent strategic investment arm of the U.S. government, has infused cash into Visible Technologies with plans to make the platform available to all 15 agencies it supports, including the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The decision represents a movement now underway by the United States government to become more familiar with emerging social media and Internet technology. In-Q-Tel also has made an investment in ThingMagic, a company deep in radio frequency identification (RFID) technology.

Donald Tighe, vice president of external affairs at In-Q-Tel, says the company made the investment to introduce Visible’s technology to government agencies, but declined to provide specifics. He says In-Q-Tel’s average investment varies between $500,000 and $3 million per company. Since being founded in 1999, In-Q-Tel has invested about 80% in work programs and 20% in partnering with other venture capitalists, Tighe says.

Explaining how U.S. intelligence agencies might use Visible’s platform, Tighe points to technology that companies install to automate analysis of customer service phone conversations. Sophisticated technology can determine when it’s appropriate to bring in a supervisor to resolve disputes based on the tone of the person talking and the words being used in the conversation to convey the message.

Visible Technologies’ platform helps brands to monitor the millions of posts and conversations on blogs, forums, YouTube, Twitter and other online forums. “There is a world full of countries with people who are in online chat rooms,” Tighe says. “They may talk about something important to national security issues, or maybe someone becomes concerned about what they hear in one of these rooms. These scenarios are an example of the type of monitoring technology Visible Technologies offers.”

The government represents a new market segment opportunity for tech companies, according to Blake Cahill, senior vice president of marketing at Visible Technologies. In this case, the CIA has become interested in a feature in one of the platforms the company offers.

Visible crawls about 500,000 Web sites daily to gather information from more than 1 million posts and conversations. In-Q-Tel’s investment is not random, but rather is related to a particular project that Cahill declined to discuss. It could alter Visible’s product roadmap, fast-forward it and open avenues to data that had been closed in the past, he admits.

Arab Winds of Change

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | FaceMePLS

Guardian | Brian Whitaker | October 22, 2009

“Women, bloggers and gays lead change in the Arab world.” That is the headline of an article by Octavia Nasr for CNN’s blog AC360°. “Several new lines are being drawn in the Middle East’s desert sand simultaneously,” she writes. “If they continue to be drawn at this rate longer and thicker, it’s hard to foresee any governments, censors or jails being able to stop them.”

Though Nasr sounds a bit overexcited about the existence of a feminist mag in Arabic in which “no one dares to advertise” and a few other developments which are interesting straws in the wind but scarcely signs of an imminent revolution, I think she has a point. If asked where change is likely to come from in the Arab countries, I would not put much faith in “reformist” politicians and opposition parties – they’re mostly no-hopers – but I would definitely put feminists, gay men, lesbians and bloggers very high on my list.

It’s important not to exaggerate what they are actually achieving at the moment, but let’s consider their potential as challengers of the status quo and drivers of change. The “Arab problem” is mostly perceived in terms of the regimes: the lack of democracy, authoritarian rulers who trample over people’s rights, and so on. That was the perception of the Bush administration in particular and it led to the simplistic idea that regime change was the solution.

It’s now very clear (as I explain in my new book, What’s Really Wrong With the Middle East) that this was a mistake. You can overthrow dictators, you can force countries to have elections and you can even insist on voting procedures that are reasonably fair, but that doesn’t bring freedom unless it forms part of a much bigger social transformation.

What has emerged in Iraq, for example, is not so much a model for the rest of the Middle East (as originally intended by Bush and the neocons) but a model of it. As the smoke drifts away, Iraq is emerging as a fairly typical Arab state with most of their usual negative characteristics – a government with authoritarian aspirations, institutionalised corruption and nepotism, pervasive social discrimination and a rentier economy that produces little besides oil – plus, for good measure, resurgent tribalism and sectarianism.

Arab regimes, by and large, are products of the societies they govern and it is often the society, as much as the government itself, that stands in the way of progress. In Kuwait, for instance, it was not the hereditary emir who resisted granting votes to women, but reactionary elements in the elected parliament – and there are plenty of similar examples.

Khaled Diab, an Egyptian who contributes regularly to Cif, summed it up pithily when he told me: “Egypt has a million Mubaraks.” In other words, the Mubarak way of doing things is not confined to the country’s president; it is found throughout Egyptian society, in business and in families too. The Arab family as traditionally conceived – patriarchal and authoritarian, suppressing individuality and imposing conformity, protecting its members so long as they comply with its wishes – is a microcosm of the Arab state.

Changing the power structures within families (and in many parts of the Arab world this is already happening) will also gradually change the way people view other power structures that replicate those of the traditional family, whether in schools and universities, the workplace, or in government. This is where women come in. In an Arab context, demanding the same rights as men is a first step towards change. Asserting their rights doesn’t mean that all women have to be activists for feminism. Even something as simple as going out to work – if enough people do it – can start to make a difference.

Contrary to popular opinion, most human rights abuses in the Arab countries are perpetrated by society rather than regimes. Yes, ordinary people are oppressed by their rulers, but they are also participants themselves in a system of oppression that includes systematic denial of rights on a grand scale.

In these highly stratified societies, people are discriminated for and against largely according to accidents of birth: by gender, by family, by tribe, by sect. Women, as the largest disadvantaged group, can play a major role in overcoming this and helping smaller disadvantaged groups to do the same. Once the equality principle is accepted for women it becomes easier to apply it to others.

Discrimination against gay people has only begun to be challenged in the Arab countries during the last few years. In a patriarchal system, where masculinity is highly prized, any deviation from the sexual “norms” and expected gender roles is not only subversive but is regarded as extremely threatening. The vigilante killings in Iraq are the nastiest example – not just of men who are thought to be gay, but others who simply don’t dress and behave “as men should”.

The third group driving change are the bloggers. A recent survey found 35,000 people blogging in Arabic, plus countless others who use Facebook, Twitter, etc, to communicate over the internet. There has been much debate about the extent to which this is reshaping public discourse and undermining censorship, but that is not really the main significance of blogging and the internet in the Middle East. The traditional “ideal” of an Arab society is one that is strictly ordered, where everyone knows their place and nobody speaks out of turn. Basically, you do what is required of you and no more. You keep your head down, don’t make waves and let those who supposedly know better get on with running things.

The point about bloggers is that they want none of that. They are engaged, they are alive, and they’ll speak out of turn as much as they like. Put all these elements together and you can see how, sooner or later, the edifice could start to crumble.

Using the Internet to Empower Women in Yemen

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

Rising Voices | EWAMT Workshop

I love stories about how the Internet and technology are being used as platforms for free expression around the world, so every once in a while, I’ll share them with you. I read a very interesting series of reports in Rising Voices about a really inspirational project.  Rising Voices is an outreach initiative of Global Voices, and their goal is to bring new voices from new communities and speaking new languages to the global conversation.  They do this by providing resources and funding to communities whose points of view are under-represented in global media.

In Yemen, Rising Voices is partnering with the Hand in Hand Initiative and Ghaida’a al-Absi to present  new media training courses for female politicians, activists, and human rights workers to diversify the Arabic-language blogosphere and to build an online network of Yemeni gender activists.

According to Rising Voices’ blogger Rezwan, the most recent workshop was held on October 15th, and participants blogged about a range of topics, from the spread of HIV/AIDS to poetry to the increase in the rate of drug addiction in Yemen.

To learn more about this fascinating project, go to: http://rising.globalvoicesonline.org/projects/empowerment-of-women-activists-in-media-techniques-yemen/

For Rezwan’s story about the most recent workshop, including links to the participants’ blogs, go to: http://rising.globalvoicesonline.org/blog/2009/10/20/ewamt-blogging-and-social-networking-energizes-women-in-yemen/.

Iranian Journalists Flee, Fearing Retribution for Covering Protests

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Faramarz

by Nazila Fathi

TORONTO — For two months Ehsan Maleki traveled around Iran with a backpack containing his cameras, a few pieces of clothing and his laptop computer, taking pictures of the reformist candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi during the presidential campaign. He did not know that his backpack and his cameras would soon become his only possessions, or that he would be forced to crawl out of the country hiding in a herd of sheep.

Mr. Maleki, 29, is one of dozens of reporters, photographers and bloggers who have either fled Iran or are trying to flee in the aftermath of the disputed June presidential election. Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based organization that promotes press freedom and monitors the safety of journalists, said the number of journalists leaving Iran was the largest since the years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The wave of departures reflects the journalists’ anxiety over the retribution many of them have faced for reporting on the government’s violent suppression of the post-election protests. As bloody clashes unfolded in the streets of Tehran, the government went to great lengths to restrict the flow of information to the outside world. Foreign journalists were banned, and local reporters and photographers were warned to stay at home.

A number of Iranian journalists defied those orders, disseminating information in phone interviews, on Internet sites and through pictures sent to photo agencies. Now, they say, they are paying the price.

Many journalists in Tehran, including a Newsweek reporter, Maziar Bahari, who is also an independent filmmaker, were among the hundreds of Iranians arrested and jailed. Some are defendants in the mass trials the government is conducting. The wife of one journalist, Ahmad Zeidabadi, said he had been tortured while in prison.

The editors of some opposition blogs, which reported the killings and the mass burial of protesters, have gone into hiding, and their whereabouts are not clear. The homes of some journalists, like Mr. Maleki, have been ransacked.

Mahmoud Shamsolvaezin, a veteran journalist and media expert in Tehran, estimated that 2,000 Iranian journalists had lost their jobs recently. He said about 400 of them had approached him for reference letters so they could get work abroad. “Journalists are leaving more than other groups because the government has closed newspapers and it has intimidated and terrorized them,” he said in an interview.

The government, which has closed at least six newspapers in the past three months, has accused the media of lying about the protests. Last week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the media a major weapon, “worse than nuclear weapons,” in the hands of Western countries, according to the Fars news agency. Almost all news agencies in Iran are affiliated with the government and rely on it for financing. The state news agencies IRNA and Fars are run by arms of the government.

Mr. Maleki was covering a demonstration on June 20 when he and dozens of protesters were chased by members of the Basij paramilitary force. They fled to an apartment building, where Mr. Maleki had enough time to hide his camera inside a chimney before members of the militia arrested them. He was jailed with hundreds of others for a day. Without his camera, authorities could not identify him as a photographer, but they recorded his national identity number.

Mr. Maleki never went home. A few days later a neighbor told him that his house had been ransacked and that his computer and personal documents, including his passport, had been taken. “They found out that I was sending pictures to Sipa,” he said, referring to an international photo agency.

He said he slept in a different place every night and continued to take photos of the protests, but finally decided it was too risky to stay. He paid $150 to a smuggler who drove him to Kheneryeh, near the border with Turkey and Iraq. Accompanied by a Kurdish guide, he crawled among a large herd of sheep for half an hour until they crossed the Iranian border and reached a steep cliff.

“It took us seven hours to climb down and reach a road in northern Iraq,” he said in a telephone interview from Iraq. He would not disclose which city he was in for security reasons.

The journalists leaving Iran come from a range of news organizations, not just those sympathetic to the opposition. A Web site supportive of Mr. Ahmadinejad, Parcham.ir, reported last week that two journalists for state-run television had defected to Italy and Britain. At least two photographers who worked for Fars have also left. Among the journalists who have left is this reporter, who covered the election and subsequent protests before leaving Iran in early July because she felt her safety was threatened.

The exact number of journalists who have left is not clear. Some worry that their families could be harassed if the government learns they are gone. Others are reluctant to reveal their locations in neighboring countries like Turkey and Iraq, fearing that government agents might find them and return them to Iran. Reza Moghimi, a photographer who worked for Fars, acknowledged that he became emotionally invested in the protests.

“The protesters were young, just like me,” Mr. Moghimi, 24, said in a telephone interview from Turkey. “It was impossible to be indifferent. I felt it was my duty to take pictures and reflect their voices abroad.”

With the camera given to him by Fars he began taking pictures every day. He said one of his pictures appeared on the cover of Time magazine anonymously, but he never told anyone he had taken it.

Mr. Moghimi said his fear increased after he saw a former colleague, Majid Saeedi, who was jailed for a month. Mr. Moghimi said he looked terrorized.

A few days later the director of Fars delivered a stern warning. “We have learned two of our photographers have been taking pictures secretly and sending them to foreign media,” he said. “We are just waiting for more information and will confront them soon.”

Mr. Moghimi got on the first plane to Turkey the next day and has applied for asylum.