Defying a warning by Iran's Revolutionary Guards against opposition demonstrations, around 1,000 protesters gathered at a Tehran square Monday, according to witnesses. There are severe media restrictions inside Iran.

Reuters -Iran's hardline Revolutionary Guards on Monday threatened to crack down on street protests after opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi called on supporters to stage more demonstrations over the disputed June 12 election.

"In the current sensitive situation ... the Guards will firmly confront in a revolutionary way rioters and those who violate the law," said a statement on the Guards' website.

TEHRAN -- Locked in a bitter contest with Iranians who say the presidential elections were rigged, the authorities have acknowledged that the number of votes cast in 50 cities exceeded the actual number of voters, state television reported Monday following assertions by the country's supreme leader that the ballot was fair.

But the authorities insisted that discrepancies, which could affect three million votes, did not violate Iranian law and the country's influential Guardian Council said it was not clear whether they would decisively change the election result.

The news emerged on the English-language Press TV as a bitter rift among Iran's ruling clerics deepened over the disputed election. The outcome of the vote, awarding a lopsided victory to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has convulsed Tehran in the worst violence in 30 years, with the government trying to link the defiant loser to terrorists and detaining relatives of his powerful backer, a founder of the Islamic republic.

The loser, Mir Hussein Moussavi, the moderate reform candidate who contends that the June 12 election was stolen from him, fired back at his accusers on Sunday night in a posting on his Web site, calling on his own supporters to demonstrate peacefully despite stern warnings from Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that no protests of the vote would be allowed. "Protesting to lies and fraud is your right," Mr. Moussavi said in a challenge to Ayatollah Khamenei's authority.

Western powers are seeking to undermine Iran by spreading "anarchy and vandalism", the foreign ministry says.

A spokesman said foreign media were "mouthpieces" of enemy governments seeking Iran's disintegration.

He spoke as Tehran remained tense but quiet amid heavy security aimed at preventing new protests against the result of Iran's presidential election.

Iran's Guardian Council says it found irregularities in 50 constituencies, but denied that affected the result.

[-c contacted me yesterday. She is a "perennial lurker" here and "an Iranian ex-pat living in the US". I asked her what she might want to add and the she wrote back the following . The text is unaltered  but for a personal closing paragraph directed to me which I decided to omit - b.]

by -c

I'm not really sure that anyone can add anything of value at this point. We have to wait to and see. Having said that, I will share my thoughts on what is happening now and what bothers me about what I see and hear. Apologies if my thoughts are disjointed; I've tried to lay them out as best I could. Believe it or not, I've also tried to keep it brief -- there are many aspects to what is happening, and I only touch upon one or two that resonated with me.

I don't want to address the issue of election fraud because, frankly, I don't have a favorite in this race (I had serious problems with both candidates) and I can buy plausible scenarios for both having won. I also don't presume to speak for anyone else with my remarks. The relationship that the people of Iran have with the government is, like most things in this world, more nuanced than people on both sides would like to admit, and if one person says that they know that the majority of people feel a certain way, that person is lying. In any case, it seems as though we might be seeing the end of the protests, so some of what I write is moot. (But I will write it anyway! ;-) )

The problem, in my view, is that there are three groups, all of whom are convinced that they are absolutely right and hold a majority: those who support Mousavi and think the election has been stolen from them, those who support Ahmadinejad and think that foreign elements are trying to steal the election from them, and those who hate the Islamic Republic and want it gone.

... the Iranian government appears to be engaging in a practice often called deep packet inspection, which enables authorities to not only block communication but to monitor it to gather information about individuals, as well as alter it for disinformation purposes, according to these experts.

The monitoring capability was provided, at least in part, by a joint venture of Siemens AG, the German conglomerate, and Nokia Corp., the Finnish cellphone company, in the second half of 2008, Ben Roome, a spokesman for the joint venture, confirmed.

The "monitoring center," installed within the government's telecom monopoly, was part of a larger contract with Iran that included mobile-phone networking technology, Mr. Roome said.

"If you sell networks, you also, intrinsically, sell the capability to intercept any communication that runs over them," said Mr. Roome.

<...>

Countries with repressive governments aren't the only ones interested in such technology. Britain has a list of blocked sites, and the German government is considering similar measures. In the U.S., the National Security Agency has such capability, which was employed as part of the Bush administration's "Terrorist Surveillance Program." A White House official wouldn't comment on if or how this is being used under the Obama administration.

The Australian government is experimenting with Web-site filtering to protect its youth from online pornography, an undertaking that has triggered criticism that it amounts to government-backed censorship.