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MediaGurdian innovation awards: Austin Heap vs. Iran's consors - -

By Aleks Krotoski

MediaGuardian Innovation Awards: Austin Heap v Iran's censors

Innovator of the year Austin Heap helped create Haystack, a system for beating web censorship

"Austin

Austin Heap, co-creator of the Haystack system. Photograph: Andy Hall

Just after the Iranian elections, when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government closed its borders to foreign reporters and shut off web access for its own citizens, one Ohio-born, San Francisco-based hacker decided that he had the knowledge to open things up.

Austin Heap, a 26-year-old with a background in election protection in the US, followed the Iranian results on Twitter, and recognised that Iran's censorship had stepped up. He sent a tweet to fellow computer geeks and made contact with Daniel Colascione, based in Buffalo, New York.

The pair worked for 72 hours without sleep to deconstruct the filtering methods of the Iranian telecommunications agency. Then they created Haystack, a censorship workaround that directed requests from computers in Iran through servers elsewhere in the world, hidden in a stream of innocent-looking traffic. They also devised technology to protect the identities of Haystack's users. All this made it possible for people on the ground in Iran to reach blocked sites safely and securely, to organise inside the country and communicate with the world.

This success made Heap the overwhelming choice when the judges of this year's MediaGuardian Innovation awards were asked to nominate their innovator of the year. More than one person around the 30-strong judges' table suggested that Twitter itself should take the title – but although its implications for people power became clear in 2009, the service launched in 2006.

Ultimately, the judges decided that Twitter was just the conduit for innovation. It, as well as other social networking applications such as Facebook and YouTube, was hugely important in 2009 because of what it gave to the people who were on the ground in the midst of world-changing events: they were the meeting point for an army of citizen journalists who provided detailed accounts of riots, injustices and deaths.

Haystack, the softwa



    
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