[IMPORTANT EDIT]: as stated numerous times in comments, this is fine. It is often done to protect victim's account from being further compromised by the adversary, for example for protecting their DMs, or collecting further material from their online activities. So, no need to try unsuspend his account. Thank you.
Jadi (Amirhossein Mirmirani) had 133K Twitter followers. He is a lovely computer geek and open source veteran from Tehran, Iran. He has been active educating youth for many years. He was arrested yesterday.
His account is suspended after his arrest, which is most probably due to fake reports from the cyber army. If you work at Twitter or Facebook, please help unsuspending his account which is vital for him to reach his audience and give him visibility, even when he is arrested. They want to remove his internet presence.
My understanding is that when someone is arrested in Iran, other activists try to shut down that person's social media accounts in order to prevent Iranian authorities going through his/her profiles and gather more incriminating evidence against them. Isn't that what is happening here?
So actually trying to “help” by getting Twitter to reverse the suspension, may actually be the worst thing you can do to him and his fellow activists.
Yet another example of how good intentions aren’t enough. You need to fully understand the situation before you act, especially when dealing with a situation that is different from what you are familiar with.
It may be a good idea to flag this entire submission until some other action can be taken. It's not great to have all of this discussion about social profile circumvention in the open IMO.
If you are an authoritarian state you don't give too much worry about that, if you grab the wrong person "oh well another day another murder."
It's about terror and control, not about justice. If you think that's bad wait till you see what the Khmer Rogue did in Cambodia. The precious framework of individual rights, a relatively functioning justice system, and constitutional guarantees may not be perfect here in the US of A, there are issues, and those rights are still being eroded, and we have work to do, but people who draw comparisons between places like the US and China or Iran clearly have no idea what they are talking about, and it's a decent chance they may in fact be part of state sponsored psychological warfare apparatuses.
There is no due process in authoritarian states. Being suspected by someone on the police that you might hold subversive views is enough to get you arrested, tortured, and murdered.
Right, but as soon as they suspect someone they probably run tools like these. They can be ran faster than it takes to find someone and throw then in a van for sure.
This is probably a very US-centric (or insert-your-country-here-centric) viewpoint that does not hold true everywhere else in the world. Even if it does, it would be idealistic to assume these things continue to hold true during moments of crisis for a state..
we (activists) actually ask social media platforms to suspend the account and publicize it. to avoid the activist being tortured to extract passwords. twitter is doing the right thing
I'm not sure why your being downvoted (or whatever it's called on here). It's a legitimate question. It looks like one person in here claims to have some amount of knowledge on the matter, but it would be good to get some kind of confirmation in either direction before endorsing one tactic, or another.
That sounds stupid. Iran is an official government agency, they can just ask twitter or some ally like UAE or China to hand over all the information in a form a lot easier for searching through than logging into their account.
What evidence do you have that Twitter will comply with a request like that from Iran? Even when redirected via a government that doesn't have anything to do with the account?
They have to follow the laws of the countries they operate in. Keep in mind that business operations and server locations (and incorporation locations) are not the same thing.
If you serve customers in another country, their laws apply. You can either follow the law or not serve in that country. This is pretty much how it has worked forever.
This is obviously not great if you have a set of less-restrictive and more-restrictive laws that contradict each other. And it's not great if values, politics and rights in general aren't compatible. As much as we can disagree with what mass-murdering authoritarian regimes are up to, unless we go to war (after we have already applied all the sanctions we can think of) there isn't much you can do about it.
The paradigm you're describing is only a convenient fiction for countries that have made treaties with each other to create such environment. It's prevalence has more to do with the fact there's really only three and a half major sovereign bases of power in the world (soon to be two and a half), than the actual physical reality. The actual physical reality is that communication over borders doesn't violate the Schelling point of borders (ie it's not an act of war), hence Radio Free Europe etc.
Unless you can point to a treaty between the US and Iran that lets Iran sue US companies, or some other way that Iran can actually enforce a judgement on Twitter, then no, Twitter has no need to respect Iran's laws. About the only way I see is for Iran to firewall Twitter wholesale, but isn't the wholesale end-user Internet shutdown basically doing that?
You don't need a lawsuit if you're Iran, you just use your APTs to perform cyberattacks on US-hospitals and send your Iranan secret agents to work at Twitter and do your bidding from the inside out. Both have happened and are happening.
This isn't really a "but it's the law!"-case, it's a country A wants something, and they might use whatever they have to get it. The US has sanctions, but Iran doesn't except maybe oil production, but there are other places where you can get oil. So if Iran has nothing they can deny anyone else, they resort to attacks.
So when Iran says "do this because it is our law", you might not do it because you are interested in their laws nor do you have to follow them (legally), but you might not want the expense of being targeted by them.
Isn't that the exact opposite of what you said above? "If you serve customers in another country, their laws apply. You can either follow the law or not serve in that country." That would seem to imply some overarching legal enforcement regime, rather than law of the jungle.
As to the law of the jungle, if embedded Iranian agents have enough power to do anything to Twitter, then the right framing is that Twitter has a massive security problem. Also it would be foolish of Iran to burn such resources on damaging Twitter rather than continuing to silently exfiltrate data that interests them.
If Iran performs arbitrary attacks on hospitals in "retaliation" for Twitter's actions, then that still doesn't affect Twitter. And similarly, that's best framed as said hospitals having abysmal security, rather than focusing blame on Iran. The Internet is hostile noise.
> That would seem to imply some overarching legal enforcement regime, rather than law of the jungle.
No, it implies that if you respect the laws of the countries the people you serve reside in, you can choose to follow the law by not serving them, and therefore not having to "do what they say", or serve them, but then by their laws "do what they say".
Regarding effects on Twitter: it costs them money. Their share prices drop and jo-jo a ton when stuff like this gets out. Legally, not much effects twitter, it's not a person after all, and legal departments weasel their way around plenty to make sure a company keeps existing and keeps making money. If it's cheaper to censor some random person on your private platform then compared against shoring up your cyber defences, that's an easy choice for the people in charge with somewhat cartoonish dollar signs in their eyes.
The reality is that nothing is truly isolated from side-effects and circumstances in the world. Even if there are no diplomatic ties, and no physical violence, it's all happening on the same globe with the same internet. So ignoring laws is not always the cheapest way to deal with countries, and not dealing with countries is generally not an option when you're connected online.
> it implies that if you respect the laws of the countries the people you serve reside in, you can choose to follow the law by not serving them, and therefore not having to "do what they say", or serve them, but then by their laws "do what they say".
This is only a real dichotomy if there is a legal enforcement regime forcing one to choose.
You're substituting a few handwavey indirections to profit-based incentives. While partially true, this mainly functions to absolve Twitter from not taking a more principled stand - the same argument could be made if they started doing more deplorable things with user data.
So sure, the stock market is fickle and irrational, like every herd. But the fundamental analysis for Iran being able to attack Twitter is that Twitter has poor security, period. I'd rather focus on the real problem than merely shoot today's messenger.
So practically speaking, what will happen if Twitter ignores Iranian law and allows IPs from that country to use their platform anyway? I don't think the US govt will enforce Iranian law for them...
More like the IRG doing cybers on you. Iran doesn't have much leverage besides that.
As for who might care: twitter might. They may have to spend more money on defence, on screening people when hiring them, and on legal to make sure they aren't getting sued in the US for discrimination, data leaks or whatever else people might come up with if they keep (accidentally) hiring foreign intelligence officers without checking who they are.
> They have to follow the laws of the countries they operate in. Keep in mind that business operations and server locations (and incorporation locations) are not the same thing.
> If you serve customers in another country, their laws apply. You can either follow the law or not serve in that country. This is pretty much how it has worked forever.
You are right.
Now, Twitter is free to not follow this law and expect consequences: a law suit from Iran, or retaliation towards Twitter operations on Iranian ground.
So are you claiming that Twitter has an office in Iran? It's been some years since I worked for Twitter, but as far as I know they do not operate in Iran except to the extent which their services are available to anybody with an IP.
I don't think any company officially operates in Iran due to sanctions. In any case, Twitter isn't going to comply with a sanctioned country's requests, especially ones for censorship.
The Iran situation is in a lot of flux, so while that may be possible when being methodical about one person, it is less so if you are trying to rapidly detain hundreds or thousands per day.
They probably have a script that creates an archive of all social media posts. Not hard to do. As soon as you have a name to point it to you can run this sort of tool.
I've redacted the link from the parent comment because we got emails suggesting that it might put someone at risk. We can eventually add it back later if that would be helpful—but I think the comment makes the point either way.
I think the authorities are stupider than what you think.
When they arrest someone in a demonstration, they will confiscate their phone and open the apps on the device. If the account is inactive, they can not see anything.
May I ask you to delete your comment if that is not a problem? You basically gave the regime an evidence we said the activists are trying to hide away.
If I was kidnapped, beaten and probably in a mass grave don't you dare take down what I said that put me in that position. (Frankly we may be in that spot sooner than you think in the US) That's exactly what the regime wants, to shut him up. He gave his freedom at a minimum, probably his life to say what he said, the least we can do is listen to him.
The suspension is temporary. Presumably when the person is released, Twitter will reinstate the account. The other reason for suspension is to not compromise DMs and followers. But I also understand your point of view in not wanting to delete it.
So in this hypothetical scenario they don't know about the Internet Archive but they do happen to browse Hacker News? This probably isn't their first rodeo. I'm sure they're aware of the archives that exist.
Telling that the personal website is the most resistant. Interesting idea that social media accounts could be taken down by good actors as a form of damage control.
This is not about you, please stop; no reason to believe that either your own well being or life is on the line, nor for that matter, that of your friends and family.
Concept of plausible deniability is vital in situations like this for all parties involved. Unless you are able to prove via evidence it is not, please refrain from (repeatedly) commenting on a topic, that at least to me, you appear to be unfamiliar with and has the very real potential to result in physical harm to others.
If I have errored in my reasoning, please feel free to explicitly state why. Thanks.
If you are talking about plausible deniability for the person (I was talking about Twitter) - there is strictly zero value of it for him. He is in prison and everything should be done to free him up.
Other people that worked with him? It is not like the public Twitter messages cannot be filed as they come (other do it for you too). You mean that he may have received DMs? Ah, and the zealots in Iran will just say "ah yes, right, this must be the devil US".
So before getting all warmed up - state what you have to state. This is not like there is a big secret about people using Twitter/Telegram/Signal to protect their lives and only you, me and 3 other people are aware.
You are probably much more experienced in plausible deniability than me. I have just set this up for companies, on actual systems with actual encryption.
It is not that you have an error in your reasoning - it is that I do not see that reasoning at all.
Twitter’s encryption offers no plausible deniability. Even Twitter having the data offline might potentially be a threat in the worse case scenario, given countries have used insiders to again access to information:
What is your meaning of "plausible deniability"? In cryptography, this is the fact that data cannot be confirmed to be encrypted. In other words: you see a file or read some raw data and you cannot prove that this is encrypted data vs random bits.
What kind of plausible deniability do you expect from Twitter? The app may leave numerous traces in the phone and this has nothing to do with Twitter but it is just the way things work. Once you know that Twitter was installed, where do you see room for plausible deniability?
Point two: you do not know whether the accounts were deleted. They may have been suspended/masked/whatever.
Point three: well, if you are taking into account internal espionnage, do you expect that the data from within Twitter will only be retrieved after the imprisonment?
I had interviewed an Iranian in the US a few months ago for a position, but he was not interested in the role we had open. There was a new opening so I looked him up, but now there was nothing. His personal site was gone, and his linkedIn vanished. Google still finds him on scholar and links to the downed page but the only way to see it is the wayback machine.
Jadi would be happy to know that he was on HN:) after getting free.
One of his hobbies was selecting news on HN and translating them for non English speakers in Iran.
You are on our mind bro.
Hope to see you soon in your next podcast.
#woman_life_freedom
Unless I'm being obtuse, wouldn't it be right for Twitter to state that it's disabled an account to protect the user and others rather than because it violates their rules?
Unless I'm being obtuse, wouldn't it be right for Twitter to state that it’s disabled an account in order to protect the user and others rather than because it violates their rules?
Is this to protect his account from being accessed by authorities and checking his DMs? Isn't it better then to disable access to his DMs rather than blocking public tweets/timeline? I don't see a point in suspending his entire account when all his tweets would probably be available in some public archive/wayback machine.
(Have limited experience on the topic, just attempting to respond based on what little I do know.)
Twitter stating the obvious has no control over information that’s no longer on its servers. Possible Wayback may not not even be aware of the risks it’s creating.
That said, DMs are very much in Twitter’s control and it is not uncommon for highly motivated parties with substantial resources to either insert employees into companies like Twitter or target employees via bribes, blackmail, etc. Google’s first publicly disclosed attack, which among other things targeted activist accounts, very likely was a result of insider helping. Beyond that, if Twitter did not do anything, it is a very real possibility that the activist might be tortured for their passwords; if the accounts don’t exist, are not recoverable, at least for that specific reason, it would be irrelevant.
There are so many situations to account for, but deleting the account/data is this safest minimal viable path.
> Funny how Twitter tolerates blatantly terrorist regimes like Iran
They tolerate them just like how they tolerate the murderous f*cks who lied about nonexistent Iraqi WMDs and proceeded to murder 1 million Iraqis. They are still on twitter. They have blue checkmarks. They make 6 figures or more. The whole lot of them, an entire administration...
Actually they try very hard to dodge the laws of the countries they're operating in. In India they've been playing all kinds of games to avoid following the law.
There was a particularly farcical argument used by them, which was on the lines of "our policies are better than your law."
They only complied when their employees faced arrest and other legal actions.
I don't get the impression that their senior management are grounded in reality. My popcorn is getting cold waiting for Twitter's muskification.
Apparently you can also violate the Twitter guidelines without being banned only if you are Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran who has done this for years, here is an example of him calling for violence to 'destroy' another country: [0]
Twitter really has one rule for some individuals and another rule for many. There is no justification for any of this from the big tech appeasers.
> Twitter really has one rule for some individuals and another rule for many. There is no justification for any of this from the big tech appeasers.
Huh? Twitter has explicitly justified differential treatment for different kinds of users -- particularly in the name of public interest. Their rules and policies site has a page titled, "About public-interest exceptions on Twitter":
> At present, we limit exceptions to one critical type of public-interest content—Tweets from elected and government officials—given the significant public interest in knowing and being able to discuss their actions and statements.
> As a result, in rare instances, we may choose to leave up a Tweet from an elected or government official that would otherwise be taken down.
Yeah, vague "we may choose for undisclosed reasons" rules are the best way to say "we'll do whatever we feel like, mostly depending on whether we agree with the tweet".
Do you think someone should be banned for saying something like:
The Nazi regime is a deadly, cancerous growth and a detriment to this region. It will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed. Then, the shame will fall on those who put their facilities at the service of normalization of relations with this regime.
Coincidentally, the Nazis also spread lies about Jews murdering children. I'm sure if Twitter had been around, you would've seen similar Tweets coming from them, for very much the same reasons.
Are you sure it is needed? Twitter is basically pure evil. Everybody knows that. If Elon will be successful with the acquisition, it will become evil^2.
> Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture saying that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, every parody of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.
This above is obviously sarcasm. When PayPal did the exact same thing and was reported here it was all 'okay' and 'fine' for the big tech appeasers and the responses were 'but private platform', 'they knew they broke the TOS', which is not the point.
The entire point is that companies like Twitter and PayPal should not be able to do it for 'no reason', or giving a vague TOS violation without pointing to what exactly was violated. Now it has happened to someone who isn't an 'undesirable', it is now a 'problem' when in fact this have been happening for years.
It can happen to anyone, including this tech blogger. It shouldn't be 'guilty until proven innocent'.
What the fuck is this insane notion being pushed in this thread? How does having your account suspended protect you? It's probably the primary way that he can get his story out or at the very least let people know that he's alright. Authorities almost certainly have all of the relevant data that has been expunged from the public's view already. And even if they don't, it's on archive.org
Some next level doublethink going on in this thread.
Jadi (Amirhossein Mirmirani) had 133K Twitter followers. He is a lovely computer geek and open source veteran from Tehran, Iran. He has been active educating youth for many years. He was arrested yesterday.
His account is suspended after his arrest, which is most probably due to fake reports from the cyber army. If you work at Twitter or Facebook, please help unsuspending his account which is vital for him to reach his audience and give him visibility, even when he is arrested. They want to remove his internet presence.
Profile screenshot: https://twitter.com/KavehMadani/status/1577695715131899904/p...
His Website in Persian: https://jadi.net
Instagram (suspended): https://www.instagram.com/jadijadinet/