North Korea is the most isolated nation in the world. Iran is one of the top ten most isolated, and has been since Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s revolution back in 1979. But using Iran’s own technology, the Iranian people are changing that.
You see, over 70% of Iranian households have a satellite dish. The government uses them for state run channels. Meet a mechanical engineer named Reza (he’s using an alias name for reasons I think should be obvious). He loves his You Tube, but You Tube is banned in Iran. So Reza uses USB drive, MGEG file and software called Toosheh. With this, he decodes and gets fresh You Tube videos Americans like us virtually take for granted. Toosheh was launched last month in LA by eight American and Iranian pro-freedom and democracy activist. Toosheh is Farsi for bundle. It allows Iran satellite dish owners to use Iran’s underdeveloped, yet censored Internet. Iran’s Supreme Council for Cyberspace enforces some of the strictest online censorship rules in the world, banning everything from You Tube videos to American news to anything the Iranian government may count as ‘anti-Islamic’. But Toosheh takes advantage of Iran’s woeful tech infrastructure.
Toosheh is catching on. Since October 2015, it’s been downloaded over 56,000 times. For the first time, thousands upon thousands of Iranians have access to Twitter, Facebook, and You Tube. For the first time since the late 1970s, many Iranians can listen to American music and watch American TV shows. They can listen to Iran political satire, like Kambiz Hosseini. He has a podcast that can be compared to our satirist, like Jon Stewart, John Oliver and Samantha Bee. They even have access to e-books that are sexually graphic and books that explain their constitutional rights, or in Iran’s case, lack therof. I think Resa and the developers of Toosheh should get some kind of freedom or honor award for breaking such barriers. Could Toosheh eventually cause a revolution of Iranian freedom and liberation?