If the computer geeks are right, Iran is facing the biggest potential revolution since the Ayatollah Khomeini. At the moment, its entire link to the Internet passes along one, crushingly overburdened telephone line to Vienna. Perhaps 80,000 people use the link, the vast majority of them in universities. But outside of Israel, Iran has the most comprehensive site for information browsing in the Middle East. New satellite hook-ups and eager private computer companies are poised to widen Iran’s loophole to the outside world. According to the Internet Society, in the first half of this year Iran had the world’s second highest increase in numbers of “reachable computers” hooked up to the Internet. But will the mullahs–once they figure out the full extent of what’s going on-allow it? “If they let this go ahead, it will change things radically in the next six years,” says one experienced user. “If the regime still exists at all, it will only be on the surface.”
For a country under a tight U.S. embargo and heavy Islamic censorship, the fresh air off the Internet is welcome indeed. “My friend connected with someone in Palo Alto who helped him search some computer companies,” says Eshragi, the student. “It was so great to know that someone out there cares about Iran.” One university student doing her thesis on English literature was able to get the full texts of all of Shakespeare’s plays–something not available in her university library. At this point, Iran’s phone line to the outside world is so clogged that downloading pictures, much less dirty pictures, is virtually impossible. But through another database on English literature, for example, Iranian women wrapped in their black chador veils can, if they like, browse through John Stuart Mill’s “The Subjection of Women.”
The government is trying to keep an eye on the computer revolution. It sponsors a network whose “chat rooms” allow online dialogue between only two subscribers at a time, with a silent auditor from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance listening in (the ministry denies it, but knowledgeable Iranians insist it’s true). Yet containing all the traffic won’t be easy. Users are hooked up via the Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics, which opened the line to Vienna three years ago (with government funds and support) and has recently begun spinning off users. They are scientists, not ideologues. A couple of hardworking 25-year-old computer-science graduates, with $50,000 in hardware and software and little help from outsiders, linked Iran to the world. “We went into that room down the hall with our diskettes and our manuals,” remembers Siavash Shahshahani, the institute’s deputy director. “Knowledge is more important than capital m this revolution”–and harder to contain.
Iran’s computer specialists worry as much about hard-liners in the U.S. Congress as they do about their own Islamic clergy. For some years, Iranian academies could not browse the library at, say, the University of Michigan, because the U.S. academic NSFNet was barred to them. Security wonks in the United States fret that Iranian terrorists could hack their way into top-secret data banks. Maybe. But it seems more likely that Iranian kids will hack their way through the barriers that have cut them off from the West.
