World War III or IV has begun!

Email to President Barack Obama via whitehouse.gov.

You are considering what to do about the atrocities committed in Syria, but if history is any guide, you will be fighting the wrong war.  You will be fighting an aerial bomb war but somebody has already started an electronic war.  Your bomb war will only make the electronic war worse.

The Syrian Electronic Army has already claimed to shut down the New York Times web site twice.  What have they done besides annoy a lot of people.  We don't know, but they may have stolen passwords and credit card information.  We don't know, but they may have planted little viruses that change a story or even plant their own stories.  We don't know, but they may spread a virus to the computers of readers of the New York Times.  I do know that after attempting to access the New York Times I had more and more difficulty accessing other sites.

How will your aerial bomb war make the electronic war worse?  Your bomb war will recruit more electronic warriors on behalf of Syria, and this will happen without any help from the Syrian government.  Many of these warriors may not even be in Syria.  Are you going to bomb Moscow because the Syrian Electronic Army's site is hosted in Russia?

And the more Syrian Electronic Army Units there are, the more damage they can do.  Bring down NASDAQ?  It recently had an outage.  Was it a coding error?  Or was it an attack?  What other weevils lurk in the hearts of these men?  Instead of stealth bombers, you need to find lots of Shadows!

See also http://magree.blogspot.com/2013/08/syria-letter-to-president-of-united.html.

The size of the crowds in Tehran is unbelievable

See http://www.flickr.com/photos/mousavi1388/sets/72157619701000269/ for photos posted by Moussavi1388. 1388 is the current year in the Iranian calendar.

Also a counterattack on Iranian government websites is underway. Two can play the game of web-blocking. Simply by requesting a web site, thousands of people can block that web site. Try Ahmadinejad's web site. Since there are more Iranian citizens upset with the election results than there are government employees who can block opposition web sites, the only government defense is to shut the web entirely. And that would upset lots of business people who have not been demonstrating. I think the strong-armers in the Iranian government have put themselves in a no-win situation.

I think we're going to see the Web as the biggest promoter of democracy that we've ever seen.