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<\/center><\/p>\nIn recent days there has been a great bruhaha over Haystack<\/a>, the anti-censorship software aimed to help\u00a0Iranians inside of Iran.<\/p>\n On September 2, 2010, Evgeny Morozov, a journalist colleague of mine, and online columnist for Foreign\u00a0Policy magazine, wrote a thought-provoking piece about Haystack<\/a>. In it, he called into question how\u00a0Haystack works and argued that in fact, Haystack may be dangerous to Iranians, given that no one knows precisely how Haystack works except its two creators Austin Heap and Dan Colascione.\u00a0<\/p>\n I’m afraid\u00a0that what this has now turned into is people feeling personally attacked rather than discussing the merits of\u00a0Haystack.<\/p>\n In gChats in recent days, I told Heap that Morozov raises a lot of good points concerning Haystack and\u00a0indeed, Heap has responded to the charges on his blog<\/a>. In fact, the two have since been in direct contact by email.<\/p>\n But Morozov isn’t the first to bring up these points. In fact, his questions are ones that have been raised months earlier privately by other smart tech folks\u00a0that I know and respect, like Danny O’Brien<\/a> (Center to Project Journalists, former EFF, Jacob Appelbaum<\/a> (Tor) and Ethan Zuckerman<\/a> (Berkman\u00a0Center, Harvard ; Global Voices). <\/p>\n Essentially their question to Heap has been: why should people trust\u00a0Haystack, when you won’t open up how it works?\u00a0<\/p>\n Heap has responded by essentially saying: no one should trust Haystack any more than you trust Psiphon,\u00a0Freegate, Tor, or any other web anonymizer.\u00a0<\/p>\n In short, this is a question that has plagued Haystack since its inception.\u00a0<\/p>\n And frankly, this is a larger problem with reporters like me reporting on highly technical issues that we\u00a0fundamentally don’t understand. I am not a cryptographer, nor a network engineer. That being said, I was present at one of the earliest demonstrations of Haystack held in San Francisco in the summer of 2009. Other programmers in the room, many of whom work for major Silicon Valley corporations, expressed no concern that this was an unbelievable or ridiculous project. <\/p>\n Now, when I’ve spoken with\u00a0Heap, and reported on Haystack, I’m essentially taking Heap’s word that Haystack does what he says it\u00a0does. I have no means of proving that it doesn’t, nor that it does. Even when Heap has demonstrated the\u00a0software for me, I have no real means of confirming his claims.<\/p>\n The best I can do, as a journalist, is to try to temper my interest and enthusiasm for a project like Haystack\u00a0with other voices. I’ve reported on the project a few times for PRI’s The World, for my forthcoming book, “The Internet of Elsewhere,” and\u00a0most recently for Popular Science<\/a><\/i> magazine.\u00a0<\/p>\n In two pieces for The World, I countered Heap’s claims with skepticism raised by Ali Reza Eshraghi, an\u00a0Iranian journalist living in Washington DC, who said in my July 9 2009 report<\/a>:<\/p>\n “I am not 100 percent sure that by using all these technologies, all of these softwares, that means that ok, I\u00a0can be safe and secure in Internet. But yes, it will definitely be helpful for me, but also they are also trying to\u00a0find out, you know, again new softwares, new technology, how to monitor again the browsers?”<\/p>\n More recently on April 13, 2010, I included comments from Prof. Nader Entessar of the University of South\u00a0Alabama who said this about Haystack<\/a>:\u00a0<\/p>\n “We shouldn’t look at it in terms of a major tool, even a very effective tool to pressure Iran to change its\u00a0policies, let\u2019s say in the nuclear arena or other areas.”<\/p>\n Now, in addition, I need to come clean about a personal connection that I’ve had to Haystack since its\u00a0inception.\u00a0<\/p>\n In getting involved in this discussion and presumably having read a lot of what has been written about\u00a0Haystack in the press so far, Morozov came across a piece that I penned for Popular Science<\/a><\/em> magazine\u00a0earlier this year.\u00a0<\/p>\n In a private email, Morozov wrote to me: “I feel that I need to ask you the following: what’s your relationship –\u00a0if any – to Babak Siavoshy? If there is relationship, why wasn’t it pointed anywhere in the piece as a potential\u00a0conflict of interest?”<\/p>\n Morozov is completely correct. I should have come forward a lot sooner regarding my personal connection\u00a0to Haystack and sincerely apologize for not doing so earlier and in a more transparent way.\u00a0<\/p>\n