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How talking to the Daily Show can land you in prison in Iran

In June , Newsweek reporter Maziar Bahari found himself suddenly pulled out of bed and marched to Terhan’s Evin prison, where he stayed for 118 days.

The authorities suspected him of spying for intelligence organisations including the CIA, M16, Mossad… and Newsweek.

Their evidence? A spoof interview given to The Daily Show’s Jason Jones.

"One day my interrogator told me that we have video evidence of you working as a spy and I thought to myself what can be the evidence?

"Then when he put the DVD of the Daily Show in the laptop I just thought 'Oh my God, they cannot be that stupid.' But they proved to be that stupid."

In the skit, Bahari is called Agent Pistachio, someone who supposedly coordinates all the Western journalists in Iran.

"I told my interrogator, 'I hope you're not suggesting that he's a real spy' and he said 'Well he looks very suspicious and why should he pretend to be a spy? Why should he choose you for an interview?'"

Threatened with execution and with a heavily pregnant wife at home, he was eventually released following a show trial, 25 pounds lighter than when he went in. He recounts his experience in chilling detail in Newsweek.

If you only read one thing today….

Green balloons to Iran, via Oxford Circus and the Beeb

BBC Persian TV's prime time news program is watched by an estimated 10 million people inside Iran.

So image how many saw these green balloons (symbols of the opposition’s ‘green revolution’) float determinedly up behind the presenter’s head as he announced Ahmadinejad’s selection as president.

The banners  - according to the 'Where is My Vote?' Facebook group - read "Ahmadinejad is not our president" and "Our President Mousavi"

(Hat tip: The Daily Dish)

The revolution will not be text messaged

On the eve of the Iranian elections, an eerie silence fell on the country's 41 million mobile phones. SMS messages were banned.

Three weeks later, service was restored. It's been running since the beginning of the month. But Iran’s phones are still oddly silent.

The excellent Tehran Bureau site explains:

Mousavi supporters took a page out of Gene Sharp’s “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” which lists “non-consumption of boycotted goods” as a method of civil protest.

Mousavi supporters are communicating their dissent with an embargo on communications, and Iran’s largest mobile operator, Mobile Communications Company of Iran (MCI), a subsidiary of the state telecom monopoly (TCI) is the boycott’s target.

Someone came up with the idea while listening to a BBC Persia report on the substantial losses MCI was incurring during the official black-out.

Within days, a chain email calling for boycott spread through social networking sites, along with the war-cry: “I refuse to generate revenues for a government than monitors my conversations and messages.”

Amazingly, there are already signs that it's working:

TCI shares on the Tehran Stock Exchange fell to an all-time low yesterday with a 6 percent drop over a two-week period, according to HAMNA, Iran’s mobile communication news agency.

Iran Cell, the country’s largest private operator, has also sustained losses.

A senior executive of this company, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Tehran Bureau that Iran Cell was losing “close to $250,000 a day” because of the drop in SMS volume.

Watch this space...

Iain Dale has made a decision

Count me in, Iain.

Could the Washington Post have got it wrong?

Really fascinating post by Hannah Devlin over on Science Central. Could the Washington Post have bungled its analysis of the Iranian election results?

Tehran-next-the-sea

Question: What's the difference between Iran’s Guardian Council and Plymouth City Council?

Answer: The former baulked at banning Twitter.

Plymouth, on the other hand, has no such qualms. Council staff have barred from using the site after the city's Labour group leader Tudor Evans called a member of the BNP a “Nazi” while on the site.

Erm... That's right Plymouth, show them how it's done.

Devilish digits in Iran's election

Since the Iranian elections earlier this month, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who thinks Ahmadinejad fights a clean fight.

With hard fact mired in swirling stories and deliberate obfuscation, pollsters and pundits have jumped on the unbelievable appearance of Ahmadinejad doing well in urban areas – where the vitriol against him has swelled to its most powerful proportions – and even his opponents' home turfs.

But, as Daniel pointed out on Saturday, the devil’s in the digits. When people cheat with numbers, those numbers often give them away.

With the same thought in mind, Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco, at the Washington Post, have taken a statistician’s eye-glass to the results and revealed some intriguing trends.

“last digits [such as 7and 9 in a vote count of 14,579] in a fair election don't tell us anything about the candidates, the make-up of the electorate or the context of the election,” they write.

“They are random noise in the sense that a fair vote count is as likely to end in 1 as it is to end in 2, 3, 4, or any other numeral. But that's exactly why they can serve as a litmus test for election fraud.”

So, in a natural selection of results in a fair vote, you’d expect each number (from one to ten) to round-off the vote-count one in ten times. Not in Iran’s provincial results. The number 7 is the final digit 17 per cent of the time, the number 5 only 4 per cent of the time.

According to The Post, there’s a less than 4 in 100 chance of a fair election producing spikes and drops like that.

And the mistakes aren't only there because the little Ahmedinejad was busy plotting domination while the other children diligently paid attention to their maths classes.

Humans, not just power-crazed leaders, are bad at making up random selections of numbers. If asked to, we’ll accidently reproduce some numbers more often that others.

Tests have also shown that, if asked to jot down a random selection of double-digit numbers, our lazy minds stray towards adjacent digits like 23, 45, or 67.

So back to Iran. What percentage of number-pairs contain ‘non-adjacent’ numbers? Only sixty-two.

Meet the Parents is a Jewish plot

Meet the Nutters.

It seems to me, watching clips from Iranian television, that there are a lot of things they could do with fixing before they got round to fixing an election.

Here is their brilliant theory on how the Jews timed Meet the Parents to help them out of their problems with geo-politics.

They can't be serious? Oh yes they can...

The best of the web from inside Iran

Change for Iran: “government is now playing a masterpiece mind game, all people here are so confused about what is real and who to trust”

Tehran Live: “Finally i could upload the videos of clash and conflict between protestors to election results and riot police forces and somewhere Basij forces…”

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=ahriman46&view=videos: A collection of amateur videos charting the course of the elections

http://iran.twazzup.com/: An updating collection of Twitter messages from Iran

Whers’s My Vote?: A facebook page posting news from inside Iran

The National Iranian American Council: blogging and translating Twitter messages from Farsi into English

Why Ahmadinejad mustn't win