USB drives Iran protests

Posted by prateek on May 17, 2012

usb

If you have an unwanted USB thumb drive, don’t throw it away — you may be able to do your bit for the cause of freedom in Iran. San Francisco’s Austin Heap, one of the leading Western hackers who helped Iranian dissidents and protesters get their videos and reports to the outside world following last month’s disputed presidential election, has written a software program to get around Tehran’s Internet filters. Now, he says, he needs to get it to people in Iran — and one of the best ways to do so is via those ubiquitous “thumb drives”

Heap’s software, called Haystack, will supposedly let Iranians anonymously get access to the full Internet. Iranians can’t download it directly, but they can pass around thumb drives on which the software is loaded.
“We have a version of Haystack that is very easy for users to run — they just stick in a drive (say, a USB stick) and it essentially boots directly into Firefox with Haystack running in the background,” Heap is quoted as telling FoxNews.com via e-mail. He didn’t, however, provide any information on how he was planning to actually get the thumb drives into the country, for security reasons.