Center for a New American Security

the "Why Afghanistan Matters" video contest

Too easy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxU49W_-YM0

The deleted backup scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXAdQiN3zwQ

Oh yeah, NSFW.

P.S. Thanks for fixing whatever IP thing was going on.

Very transparent and aenemic PSYOP.

shhhh...the truth is Sepah has won the battle to take control of their servers....trust no one...

Yikes, now I'm expecting a goon squad of pleated-pants-and-red-tie-wearing thugs to break down my office door at any moment.

I've been following the proxy front a little and noticed this inevitable note from Austin Heap's blog on the State of the Iran Proxies:

# 18. Death threats have already been made against cooperating
# hackers. If you receive such a threat, report it to your local
# police immediately. Do not assume that your cooperation is unknown
# to the Iranian regime or their agents, and do not assume you will
# have warning if they act on their threats. If you are not already
# armed and prepared to defend yourself, fix both of these bugs.

Here's a global map of the proxy servers that people are providing, from a link on twitter. There is also this WSJ article Iran's Web Spying Aided By Western Technology.

Apparently, the Iranian government now has the mo in the proxy war.

If I were in the shoes of an Iranian protester wishing to protect my online anonymity and message security, I would use rather than twitter the old USENET (or Google Groups, now owned by Google), plus a mail2news gateway like the one at mixmin.net (e.g. post to soc.culture.iranian via the email address mail2news_nospam-20090622-soc.culture.iranian@m2n.mixmin.net), plus the cypherpunk anonymous remailer chain chained together using strong GPG encryption to post messages. I would do all this through a dialup connection outside the country, browsing with an anonymous network like TOR to an online email client. This would provide all the communications capability of twitter with anonymity, security, and robustness to internet and (low) bandwidth access. It does not provide the mobility of posting from a cell phone (unless you have a hacked iPhone), or the deniability from the government reading the "-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----" tag, but for this there are steganographic tools if one wanted to communicate with family or group members—however, public mail2news gateways and remailer chains are not setup to process steganography. Searching twitter for "#iranelection gpg" also reveals this (unused) solution for strongly encrypted tweets.

The reality is that by clamping down on the proxies and tracking unencrypted messages, the government is successfully forcing people to use sophisticated, error-prone tools that very few will in fact use. It's a lot easier to post an SMS to twitter from your cell phone.

Re comment by el mestengo negro -

PSYOP is when WE make the video. For the contest, YOU make the video, and as long as it doesn't violate normal rules of decency, copyright or endanger the troops, it qualifies. Up until now, most of the troops in AFG have been restricted from expressing themselves on YouTube altogether - yet the insurgents have no such rules. Think you can do better than the insurgents? Send us your entry!

For details, check out the website,, Youtube channel, or follow on Twitter.

There are other web sites for the videos "why Afghanistan Doesn't Matter" :-) And Russian media agree with your assertion. But this contest has been sponsored based on the belief that if the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians, from 42 countries, who have been to Afghanistan, simply show the rest of us why they were serving and what they saw in Afghanistan, you are also likely to agree that Afghanistan matters.

Bwhahahahahaha!!!

Afghanistan Matters? Only if you want to run pipeline from Iran through Pakistan to India. Other wise it hard to justify why spending billions if not trillions of dollars on COIN operations to benefit a corrupt government, an uneducated populace, and a country of little or no natural resources. Unless opium and heroin can be a considered natural resource and industrial product. Or beards. Bwhahahahaha!!!

A counter terrorism mission is more defensible than COIN and determining whether Afghanistan matters.

To Iraq I say. To Iraq. It has resources, a relatively educated and literate population, and a better future than Afghanistan.