Anarchogeek

IraqJournal.org & The Iraqi Firewall

A couple of days ago one of the indymedia tech lists recieved a panicked email from Rick at Big Noise Films. Jacquie his partner at BNF and Jeremy Scahill from Democracy Now are in Iraq working on Iraq Journal a site covering upcoming war in Iraq from Baghdad. The problem they were having is that ftp was being blocked. It seems that although Iraq does allow net connections they restrict access to ftp to just some government offices behind a seperate special firewall. Jacquie's a videographer and she needed to upload her material. Unlike CNN which can just drive their satellite trucks in to broadcast minute by minute coverage we on the left have had to make due with much less resources. It's actually pretty amazing that Democracy Now along with the support of indepenent radio stations and other groups have been able to get people down there to do written, audio, and video reports every day.

The solution they came up with for getting around the firewall is to use an http PUT just like how videos normally get uploaded to indymedia sites. I think really the next step would be to look at using webDAV or something else which would allow restarting transfers. The thing with firewalls like that is they don't really stop ftp traffic, they just stop traffic to port 21. You can always just do ftp (or a more secure and reliable file transfer protocol) over port 80 and have it pretend to be web traffic. It would be stoppable if the government really wanted, but remember they still use FTP in the government computers and that's insecure as hell.