Bombard Iran ... with broadband

Washington and other western capitals seem to lack an efficient policy to support Iran's protest movement. They wish that the so-called green movement could replace the current military-messianic alliance at the country's helm with a more reasonable interlocutor that would be amenable to solve Iran's nuclear dossier, and co-operate in other arenas, chiefly Iraq and Afghanistan.

However, thanks to a number of systemic changes, direct logistical, financial or military assistance cannot be contemplated. Yet, there is one option that might prove a highly efficient way of supporting the green movement while avoiding any direct entanglement into Iran's affairs: bombarding the country with high-speed internet access.

The internet is a key element in the events currently unfolding in Iran. What has been dubbed the "Twitter revolution" makes extensive use of social networking platforms to disseminate the movement's messages and organise protests. In a country where fair journalistic reporting has become impossible because of government restrictions, Iran's citizen-journalists have used internet resources to provide the world with images of government violence. Similarly, the government seems to be aware of the power of images and information.

One of the pillars of its repressive policy has been media propaganda depicting protesters as vandals and stooges of foreign powers. In pursuing this policy, the government actively curtails alternative sources of information in the country (especially the BBC and VOA broadcasts in Persian), thoroughly filters sensitive websites used by protesters to communicate (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc) and reduces internet speed to just about nil to render video streaming or uploading impossible. It has even moved to ban Gmail.

The technology to overcome this already exists. Households and businesses in areas with poor infrastructure connect to the internet through satellites. A Japanese satellite,