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AdaptiveMobile, backed by the investment arm of Intel Corp. (INTC), proposed a system in partnership with Ericsson for Iran’s largest mobile provider in 2010 that would filter, block and store cell phone text messages, according to two people familiar with the discussions. An Ericsson spokesman confirmed the proposal. The Irish company still services commercial gear for a similar system it sold in 2008 to Irancell. Police have access to the system, say two former Irancell managers.

Texting has become the predominant means of digital communications because more than 70 percent of Iranian households have a mobile phone -- four-times greater than the percentage with internet access.

Hundreds of people have been convicted by Iranian courts for offenses related to election protests, according to New York-based nonprofit group Human Rights Watch.

“My mobile phone was my enemy, my laptop was my enemy, my landline was my enemy,” says Shojaee, who turned to using pay phones.

Iran is one of many authoritarian countries across the Mideast and North Africa employing Western surveillance tools for political repression. In Bahrain, for instance, communications monitoring centers sold by Siemens AG (SIE), and maintained by Espoo, Finland-based Nokia Siemens Networks and then its divested unit, Trovicor GmbH, have been used to track and arrest activists, according to a Bloomberg News investigation.

Much of NSN’s gear in Iran has since been swapped out in favor of China’s Huawei Technologies Co.

The 3.9 million-euro ($5.5 million) system AdaptiveMobile proposed could handle more than 10,000 messages per second and archive them for a period of 180 days, according to a company proposal. The archive would contain 54 terabytes of storage, according to the document. That’s big enough for all the data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope over 20 years.

A rapidly growing global business, the “lawful interception” and information intelligence market now generates more than $3 billion in annual sales

“Ultimately, telecom is a force for good in society,”

Police arrested him on the outskirts of a rally that December, beating him with fists and a baton and jailing him for 52 days. Security agents interrogated him 14 times, presenting transcripts of text messages plus an elaborate diagram showing all the people he’d called -- and then everyone they’d called.

The system can record a person’s location every 15 seconds -- eight times more frequently than a similar system the company sold in Yemen, according to company documents. A tool called “geofences” triggers an alarm when two targets come in close proximity to each other. The system also stores the data and can generate reports of a person’s movements. A former Creativity Software manager said the Iran system was far more sophisticated than any other systems the company had sold in the Middle East.

“A lot of people were not happy they were working on a project in Iran,” he says. “They were worried about how the product was going to be used.” Gokaram says he worked only on commercial products and didn’t share those concerns. He declined to discuss specifics about any technology deployed in Iran. Creativity Software, which is privately-held and partly funded by London-based venture capital firm MMC Ventures, announced last November that it had made four sales in six months in the Middle East for law enforcement purposes without identifying the mobile operator clients. Saul Olivares, market development director at Creativity Software, declined to discuss sales of law enforcement technology, but in an e-mail he pointed to its practical benefits, such as locating individuals during disasters, for ambulance crews and in other emergencies.

The European Union took aim at Iran’s growing surveillance capabilities in October 2010, enacting new sanctions that include prohibitions for goods that can be used for “internal repression.” The regulations, however, focused mostly on low- tech items, such as vehicles equipped with water cannons and razor barbed wire. In September, the European Parliament broadened its surveillance concerns beyond Iran, voting for a block on exports of systems if the purchasing country uses the gear “in connection with a violation of human rights.”

After his arrest early last year, Pourheydar, the opposition journalist, says police accused him of speaking to foreign media such as BBC and Voice of America. Their evidence: unbroadcast mobile phone calls captured, recorded and transcribed, he says. They also had transcripts of his e-mails and text messages. He never learned which companies provided the technology that made it possible.

“All these companies, which sell telecommunications services and listening devices to Iran, directly have roles in keeping this regime in power,”

While citizen journalism accounts for a large slice of viewership on YouTube, its users are also eager distributers of professional news video. The study shows YouTube as a global news arena where professional and amateur video bleed together, and is made consumable in on-demand style.

A relatively nascent new organization, Russia Today, a network founded in 2005 and backed by the Russian government that often reports rumor, had easily the most videos among the most-viewed. The second most-viewed news organization among the top videos was Fox News, although the study pointed out that more than half of those videos were posted in criticism of the network.

that the issue is for the first time a hot topic of debate shows that long held taboos are slowly being broken