"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." John Gilmore, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in 1993.
In the same way that people in Mumbai used Twitter last fall to publicize news of terrorist attacks in that Indian city, Iranians are using Twitter to let the world know what is going on in that country after a government crackdown was imposed to quell unrest and dissent after dubious election results.
Using the hash tag #Iranelection, a number of people purportedly from Iran are not only reporting news from that country, but using Twitter to pass on a series of Internet port addresses that are open in the country, though the government has tried to shut down the Internet to keep news of the unrest from leaking out.
"working Iran proxies 218.128.112.18:8080 218.206.94.132:808 218.253.65.99:808 219.50.16.70:8080", for example, is being Tweeted and re-Tweeted by a number of people.
More than 150 Tweets a minute are being posted about the Iranian election, including descriptions of 500,000-person protests, and even photographs.
Moreover, other people outside Iran are using Twitter to criticize CNN for what they perceive as its failure to cover what's going on in the country, using the hash tag #CNNfail.