The Lair

It has been approximately 12 years and a bit since we were all in the same continent (never mind the country or city). Lots of things have changed, obviously – like the nieces – but it’s nice to see that some things haven’t.

A small anecdotal, possibly unscientific experiment to record the checkpoint experience, as it were.

Experimental environment: reasonably modern (unfortunately coloured) car, four occupants. One occupant (namely, moi) can speak the native lingo. Everyone can speak English, albeit some with a strong accent. For reference, a couple of the occupants look unmistakably expat/foreign.

Duration: 1.5 days (essentially, a couple of nights and a day) worth of driving around from one Colombo nightspot to another.

Number of times stopped: 31 (yes, I counted. That’s the whole point of this post, right?).
Breakdown: 8 army only, 2 navy only, 4 airforce only, 1 police only, the remainder: mixed (one policeman and army, usually). This is just based on visibility, there could have been other guys hiding in the shadows for all I could see.

Number of times I showed someone my (tattered and faded) identity card: 24 (I was waved on without so much as a check of papers 7 times, just a brief stop and a peer into the window was all it took).

Number of times anyone had to get out of the car: 0. I usually never get out of the car unless asked specifically to do so. I have no idea about checkpoint etiquette or requirements, but I’ve seen people nipping out of the car as soon as they’re stopped.

Number of times I had to show the whole nine yards (ID, license, insurance etc): 1. Surprisingly, this wasn’t the police only checkpoint, but one of the mixed checkpoints leading to Temple Trees. The experience and tone of the cop doing the checking of documents was nasty enough that it invited comment from the other occupants of the car. Maybe the dude was having a bad day. Maybe it was because he is a cop and not the military (who were unfailingly polite, each and every single time).

Other numbers: 192.6km on the odometer for the entire trip, approximately 18 hours (I should have recorded time spent in the car for a more accurate statistic, I suppose).

Completely unscientific averages: a stop approximately every 40 minutes on average, or every 6 kilometres.

More interestingly, the people travelling with me were never ever asked for their papers or anything. There were 2-3 instances where I was asked where they were from (to which i replied with their current country of residence, not their respective countries of origin). Other than that, not much more than a quick glance in their direction.

Not entirely sure if this post is going to be interpreted as a damning indictment of the security theatre that is checkpoints or not. The number of stoppages certainly seem high, given the duration (but balanced by the fact that we were usually skirting a high security area or actually in it). The lone incident with the nasty cop would have, unfortunately, been the only thing I even remembered, had I not been recording information to write this post.

It seems like a made-for-a-VC-presentation fairytale – an oppressed people rise up, converge online and overthrow the comedic villain that everyone loves to hate. It could even be the next “You Got Mail” (You Can Haz Tweets?). On the face of it, I should be all over this – power to the people, information should be free, and hey, it’s Iran. My (completely irrelevant and probably unedified) view from several thousand miles away is that there could be worse things that a change of regime. And that this view is probably diametrically opposed to my country’s foreign policy causes me much amusement.

But somewhere, Iran’s Twitter Revolution went a little bit awry.

By no means the first, but (as usual) one of the most succinct descriptions came from the Economist.

Meanwhile the much-ballyhooed Twitter swiftly degraded into pointlessness. By deluging threads like Iranelection with cries of support for the protesters, Americans and Britons rendered the site almost useless as a source of information—something that Iran’s government had tried and failed to do

A quick anecdote – count the number of Iranians on the #iranelection hashtag page. Come back when you reach 10. Take provisions, you may be gone a while.

But there was more to come. The next big thing was the Sea of Green where everyone was supposed to give their Twitter avatar a sickly (or hulk-like) cast of green. And here, Twitter to the rescue.

Slowly buy (sic) surely, green-shaded Twitter icons of bored American housewives will destroy the grand ayatollah’s will to go on

And there is even an unsurprising followup.

My little tweet about how sad it is that in 2009, activism = turning your Twitter icon green, got me in a little bit of hot water last night

Because I know exactly how many things have been solved by hand wringing, blog posts ad nauseum, tweets and even candlelight vigils and demonstrations at busy roundabouts. Answer: a bit less than the people doing them might think.

ETA: Saw this post a couple of days ago. I love the picture of the failwhale.
ETA-2: The latest thing appears to be changing the timezone/location of your Twitter profile to match Tehran. Because allegedly, security forces are using these pieces of information to crack down on Iranian sources. Clearly, this is far easier than Iranians (who may genuinely be at risk) changing their information to something like GMT/London in order to blend in. Anyway, I would be shocked if Twitter and Facebook were still accessible via normal means from within Iran.