Haystack

» see haystacknetwork.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Austin Heap was a San Francisco programmer in his twenties when the Iranian election protests broke out in June 2009, and like a lot of people watching the footage he wanted to do something with the skill he had. What he started building became Haystack, and the pitch was that it would wrap a dissident's traffic in ordinary-looking traffic so completely that the censors could not tell there was anything to look for. He and Daniel Colascione set up the Censorship Research Center to carry it. The slogan on the website was Good Luck Finding That Needle.

The censorship part of this was not abstract for me. YouTube was blocked in Turkey from 2008 to 2010, and for two years the practical response across the country was to change your DNS settings, a workaround so common that people wrote the numbers on the whiteboards in internet cafes. That is roughly the ceiling of what circumvention meant here: a domestic block on one large site, and a fix you could talk somebody through over the phone. Haystack was aimed at a state that would arrest you for what it caught, which is a different order of problem entirely.

Between June 2009 and August 2010 Haystack collected the kind of coverage most security projects never see. The Guardian gave Heap its Innovator of the Year award and the BBC put the tool in its Virtual Revolution series. In March 2010 the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control issued a license permitting the software to be exported to Iran despite the sanctions regime, which no one had managed before. On 6 August 2010 Newsweek wrote that Heap had found the perfect disguise for dissidents in their cyberwar against the world's dictators.

None of those organizations had reviewed the code. It had not been given to anyone outside the project who could read it.

~ the case file ~

~ the promise ~

Haystack claimed something stronger than a proxy. A proxy hides where your traffic goes; Haystack said it would hide that you were doing anything unusual at all, by burying the real connection inside traffic patterns that matched ordinary Iranian browsing. The Center also said it had obtained a manual describing Iran's filtering software, written in Persian and passed on by an Iranian official, which was the sort of detail that made journalists stop asking technical questions.

The design was never published or audited, and it was handed to Iranian users in small numbers while all this was going on. The people running it were inside a country where being identified carried a prison sentence, which is the part that made an unaudited build a serious matter rather than an embarrassing one.

~ the review that ended it ~

In early September 2010 a copy of the software finally got into hands outside the project. Jacob Appelbaum of the Tor Project went through it while Danny O'Brien at the Committee to Protect Journalists pushed the same questions publicly. Evgeny Morozov had already published a long account in Foreign Policy on 9 September laying out how little anyone had verified. The technical verdict arrived within days: the tool did not do what had been claimed, and worse, it could make a user easier to single out rather than harder.

On 13 September the Washington Post reported that testing in Iran had been halted, and haystacknetwork.com posted a line saying the same thing, pending a security review. The BBC confirmed the suspension the following day. Daniel Colascione, who was the only programmer on it, resigned on 14 September, and with him went the project. The Center said the source would be released. The website went quiet and the domain eventually belonged to somebody else.

~ what got buried with it ~

The people who broke the story spent the next year arguing that the real failure was journalistic. A tool with no published design and no external review was described in national outlets as working, and a government office granted it a first-of-its-kind export license on the same absence of evidence. Nobody involved had to lie for that to happen. Each institution treated the previous one's coverage as its own verification, and the chain ran from a magazine profile to a Treasury license without anyone stopping to read a line of source.

The lasting effect was on everyone else in the field. After September 2010 the anti-censorship community got a good deal stricter about publishing source and getting an external audit before anything shipped, and funders started asking for both. That standard is Haystack's actual legacy, and it was paid for by a number of Iranians who ran the software during the protests and were never counted.

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