Iran election

The owner of a medical records software business in the tiny town of Miami Oklahoma, Anthony Papillion is on the forefront of a new wave of Internet activism, fuelled by social media sites like Twitter, which are giving Iranian citizens and supporters of the government protests there new ways of involving themselves in the political struggle.

Iran's government in recent days has tried to cut off Internet access for most of its election protestors by shutting down routers at the nation's perimeters, ripping satellite dishes off roofs, cutting cables and turning off telephone switching networks. Iran, in effect, has declared cyberwar on itself. And it doesn't appear to be winning the fight because of the resilience of a communications grid originally designed to be both resilient and pervasive.

As political tensions increase in Iran, an apparently ad-hoc cyber protest against the results of recent Iranian elections has knocked key Web sites off-line. Meanwhile, online communities are ramping up their opposition efforts.

Network maintenance that would have put Twitter offline for as long as 90 minutes late Monday has been postponed due to the importance the microblogging service is currently playing in Iran.