Nicholas Kristof: Freegate in Iran | NYT
Mr. Zhou said that usage of the [Global Internet Freedom Consortium] software has tripled in the last week. It set a record on Wednesday of more than 200 million hits from Iran, representing more than 400,000 people. ...
[Freegate] takes a surfer to an overseas server that changes I.P. addresses every second or so, too quickly for a government to block it, and then from there to a banned site.
Freegate amounts to a dissident’s cyberkit. E-mails sent with it can be encrypted. And after a session is complete, a press of a button eliminates any sign that it was used on that computer.
{Update on June 22: James Cowie on "The Proxy Fight for Iranian Democracy"]
If there's a lesson here for the rest of the world, perhaps it's this: Install a few proxy instances on machines you control. Learn how to lock them down properly. Swap them with your friends overseas who live in places where the Internet is fragile. Set up your tunnels and test them. And don't wait until the tanks are in the streets to figure this out, because by that point, you may have already lost the proxy war.
