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The rare and unusually direct Twitter diplomacy between Iranian leaders and western policy observers “will go down in history,” one Hill staffer, speaking not for attribution, said Thursday, expressing the wider sense of amazement heard from many veteran Iran watchers at the display of tolerance and public diplomacy initiative coming from Tehran.

The welcome change in atmospherics has added to hopes for a diplomatic opening created by Rouhani’s election. But it must be accompanied by substantive progress in nuclear negotiations to lead to a broader easing of ties, western analysts and officials said.

the agents discovered her address while rifling through her personal papers.

"That's when they turned their (computer) screens around to me and said, 'Log in," she said. When she refused, an interrogator said, "'Well you must be a terrorist. You are hiding something.'"

A female interrogator ordered Doughman to open her Gmail account, threatening she would be deported if she didn't.

"She typed in gmail.com and she turned the keyboard toward me and said, 'Log in. Log in now,'" Doughman recounted. "I asked, 'Is this legal?' She said, 'Log in.'"

She said the agent searched for keywords like "West Bank" and "Palestine" and made fun of a chat in which Doughman talked of reading graffiti on Israel's West Bank separation barrier.

"After she read a bunch of stuff, humiliating and mocking me, I said, 'I think you've read enough,'" Doughman said, adding that agents jotted down names and emails of her friends as they inspected her chat history

"The interrogator asked me, 'Do you feel more Arab or more American? ... Surely you must feel more Arab," Doughman said. "I told her I was born in the U.S. and studied there, but she didn't like my answer."

After hours of questioning, both women were told they would not be allowed in. They said they were subjected to strip searches, placed in a detention center and sent back to the U.S. the following day. Doughman said they weren't allowed to call the U.S. Embassy.

a committed cadre of social media users who have become, in effect, volunteer intelligence analysts. On Twitter, Facebook and other services, they discuss satellite images, vessel tracking data and the latest gossip from their sources inside the country.

In a press briefing on June 10, Wing Commander Mike Bracken, a NATO spokesman, described the so-called “fusion centre” that pulls together intelligence.

“We get information from open sources on the Internet; we get Twitter,” Wing Commander Bracken said. “You name any source of media and our fusion centre will deliver all of that into usable intelligence.”

Lieutenant-General Charles Bouchard, the Canadian who commands the operation, ultimately decides whether to trust what he’s hearing.

“He will decide, ‘That is good information and I can act on it,’ ” the spokesman said. “Where it comes from, it’s not relevant to the commander.”