The Daily Background

A frightening new study on the American health pandemic known as obesity:

_Mississippi had the highest rate of adult obesity, 32.5 percent, for the fifth year in a row.

_Three additional states now have adult obesity rates above 30 percent, including Alabama, 31.2 percent; West Virginia, 31.1 percent; and Tennessee, 30.2 percent.

_In 1991, no state had more than a 20 percent obesity rate. Today, the only state that doesn’t is Colorado, at 18.9 percent.

_The South is the fattest region. The Northeast and West are slightly slimmer than the rest of the country.

_Mississippi also had the highest rate of overweight and obese children, at 44.4 percent in total. It’s followed by Arkansas, 37.5 percent; and Georgia, 37.3 percent.

_Following Alabama, Michigan ranks No. 2 with fat boomers; 36 percent of its 55- to 64-year-olds are obese. Colorado has the lowest rate, 21.8 percent.

Phew, who would have believed 100 years ago that there would be a place on earth where one in three adults was obese?

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So, last Sunday (the 28th), Tiffany and I went to watch the (gay) Pride Parade here in Chicago. It was our first year going and one thing that I found pleasantly surprising was how many stereotypes were pretty much blown to pieces by the marchers. Here are some pictures I took challenging conventional wisdom on gays and lesbians. The quality varies because some of them were taken with my cell phone instead of my actual camera, which ran out of battery.

There are plenty of veterans who are gay.

This is the gay and lesbian Chicago Police float. Plenty of police officers were in attendance, both marching and serving as security for the parade (some of those not marching decorated the motorized tricycles they drove with rainbow flags).

Gay and lesbian Chicago librarians.

A small but loud contingent of gay Chicago firefighters drove down the street with their sirens blaring at one point.

This one was pretty fun to watch: a little motorized train of gay and lesbian Chicago Transit Authority employees hummed down the street. No word on whether they were the cause of the parade’s late start (heh, Chicagoans will get that one).

This happens to be the Puerto Rican float, but there were plenty of ethnic minorities represented, including the very impressive all-African American South Shore Drill Team.

There were more churches than I could count at the parade, but float happens to belong to a Jewish GLBT organization.

The Google trolly had a rainbow logo. The corporate presence at the parade was very interesting to see, and it ranged from displays of support from OfficeMax (whose banner read “Come Out, Come Out Wherever You Work!”) to not-so-subtle pandering from Southwest (whose banner read “Southwest dot com slash gay travel”).

Supportive parents of gays and lesbians (one sign in the background reads “God blessed me with a gay son”).

… And, okay, some stereotypes were confirmed. But what’s so wrong with that?

Oh, and lastly, this is a photo of IL Senator Roland Burris being driven around in a convertible. As he drove by, he was the only person clapping and cheering (though there were a few loud boos, not the least of which was my own). Geez, what is it with me taking blurry cell phone pictures of Roland Burris these days?

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Ever since I broke the Belkin astroturfing scandal earlier this year, people periodically send me emails about other companies who are also trying to pay people to write fake positive reviews of their products on sites like Amazon.com (they range from automated computer backup services to coffee machines). I’m always happy to publish these accounts because I think consumer protection and advocacy, especially in the digital age, is very important.

The latest example of this has to be a record in terms of how much the offending company is willing to pay for a fake review: a whopping $25! (A commenter at another website discussing this story jokes, “At least Elsevier was a little more respectful of their potential reviewers - Belkin only paid people 65 cents per review.”) The email I reprint below, forwarded to me by an academic source, was sent by a medical textbook publisher to a list of contributors whose work was featured in the book. The publisher, Elsevier, is according to Wikipedia, “world’s largest publisher of medical and scientific literature.” Here’s what they, quite shamelessly, write:

—– Original Message —–
Dear Clinical Psychology,

Congratulations and thank you for your contribution to Clinical Psychology. Now that the book is published, we need your help to get some 5 star reviews posted to both Amazon and Barnes & Noble to help support and promote it. As you know, these online reviews are extremely persuasive when customers are considering a purchase. For your time, we would like to compensate you with a copy of the book under review as well as a $25 Amazon gift card. If you have colleagues or students who would be willing to post positive reviews, please feel free to forward this e-mail to them to participate.

We share the common goal of wanting Clinical Psychology to sell and succeed. The tactics defined above have proven to dramatically increase exposure and boost sales. I hope we can work together to make a strong and profitable impact through our online bookselling channels.

We look forward to hearing from you, and once again thank you for your hard work and dedication to this process

Sincerely,
[redacted]

On behalf of
Elsevier Marketing
Editorial/Administrative Assistant

Elsevier
525 B Street, Suite 1900
San Diego, CA 92101 USA
Tel. 619-699-6308/
Fax. 619-699-6715
[redacted]@elsevier.com

________________________________
*** Confidentiality Statement ***
This e-mail is intended only for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed and may contain information that is privileged and confidential. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately by replying to this message and then delete it from your system. Any review, dissemination, distribution, or reproduction of this message by unintended recipients is strictly prohibited and may be subject to legal restriction.

Thank you for your cooperation.

It turns out, Elsevier is no stranger to this sort of thing. Also, according to The Scientist magazine, they were allegedly caught publishing a fake medical journal with the sole purpose of basically giving the pharmaceutical corporation Merck quotes to use in their drug commercials:

Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of [Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine], a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles—most of which presented data favorable to Merck products—that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship.

Elsevier yesterday issued something of a non-apology after a textbook trade publication also published the above email:

Cindy Minor, marketing manager for science and technology at Elsevier, said that the e-mail did not reflect Elsevier policy. She called the request for five star reviews “a poorly written e-mail” by “an overzealous employee.” Minor said that the concerns over the marketing pitch have been discussed “at the highest levels” in the company and that nobody favors paying for good reviews. The situation “is not being taken lightly,” she said.

“We want unbiased, honest reviews,” she said.

Tom Reller, director of corporate relations for Elsevier, issued a statement distinguishing between what was and was not acceptable under company policy. “Encouraging interested parties to post book reviews isn’t outside the norm in scholarly publishing, nor is it wrong to offer to nominally compensate people for their time, some of these books are quite large,” he said. “But in all instances the request should be unbiased, with no incentives for a positive review, and that’s where this particular e-mail went too far.”

Err, with a statement like that, coupled with the above claim from Elsevier’s employee that “The tactics defined above have proven to dramatically increase exposure and boost sales,” one has to wonder exactly how prevalent these fake reviews are in scholarly publishing. Further, while Mr Reller doesn’t seem to like paying for reviews, he also doesn’t acknowledge understanding that authors reviewing their own work as if they were merely consumers is wrong.

Naturally, the company is blaming this email on the underling who sent it– but in my experience, administrative assistants aren’t the ones who put their butt out on the line, bu a bunch of $25 Amazon gift cards, and go to all this length to contact dozens of people and ask them to write phony reviews so their bosses will profit more. No, the individual who sent the above email was almost certainly ordered to do so by higher-ups who don’t waste their time getting their hands dirty like this.

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The Iranian government has used state television to accuse those who protesting the results of the (almost certainly) fraudulent June 12th election as violent hooligans bent on destroying private property. “Promoting anarchism and chaos and vandalism, supported by Western powers and Western press, is not acceptable at all,” an Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman said today, echoing recent comments from other officials.

Now, a series of images and video digitally smuggled out of Iran debunks this notion, and proves that the Iranian riot police are actually the ones destroying property– only to blame it on the legitimate protesters in an attempt to marginalize them in the eyes of the world (and in the eyes of other Iranians). Let’s spread these images as far as possible so nobody will be fooled by the regime’s lies.

Riot police break the windows of a white sedan:

[Source]

Two photos, one taken right after the other, of another white sedan being destroyed by hardline cops:

[Source]

[Source]

In the lower left hand corner of this picture, an Iranian police officer smashes another car’s window:

In the following video, more riot police intentionally try to break a storefront’s glass:

Video shows riot police first destroying a car, then spray-painting on a wall:

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The above video from Tehran is remarkable for two reasons. The first reason is pretty obvious: it shows Iranian protesters vastly outnumbering hardliner government stormtroopers and forcing them to retreat on Saturday June 20th, a day that Ayatolla Khamenei proclaimed that no protests would be tolerated.

The second reason that this video is somewhat remarkable is the story behind what it took for you to be able to see this video. It was originally filmed, likely on a cell phone, in Tehran, and digitally smuggled out of the country, like so many other hundreds of videos showing government oppression are now seeping out. That does not make it unique. BBC Persian found the video online, aired it, and also uploaded it to their YouTube account here.

The BBC has, stupidly, chosen to prevent us from embedding their YouTube videos, essentially restricting their own content from the larger traffic that it would enjoy should it be allowed to go viral and get embedded in blogs and the like. So I downloaded the video and uploaded it to my YouTube account (my embed is what you see above). It’s stupid that I should even have to take this step to allow this video to be seen by others, but what happened next is what is even stupider.

Upon uploading it, I got a notice on the video saying that YouTube’s automatic content detection system has flagged my video for infringing the BBC’s copyright:

Hence, my video was automatically quarantined with nobody allowed to see it. Through YouTube’s automated system, the BBC was literally claiming that I had infringed their copyright– when they didn’t even own the copyright to the video themselves that they were claiming copyright over!

The truth is, I have exactly as much right to upload the video as the Beeb did: we were both uploading it under the fair use doctrine.

This is an instance where the old rules of copyright have collided with the new realities that technology brings, and suddenly the old rules don’t apply. The Islamic Regime has effectively put all foreign journalists under house arrest and some say they have arrested domestic journalists by the dozens. Iranian opposition leaders and citizen journalists (the people running around with their cell phone cameras making these videos and taking these pictures) have repeatedly asked internet users all over the world to syndicate their content wherever possible. The BBC has no right to deny to me a fair use privilege that they themselves have taken advantage of.

Anyway, the video is now under review, and because I submitted a challenge to the automated copyright takedown notice, it has been temporarily reinstated so you should be able to watch it. I’ll post updates if the situation changes and the BBC wants to press forward with taking it down permanently.

For now, I’ll end this post on a quote from the man who probably won Iran’s recent fraudulent election, Mir Hossein Mousavi:

“Today you are the media, it is your duty to report and keep the hope alive.”

Update: Looks like I’m not the only one to have this happen to one of their Youtube videos.

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Nice going. I wish I could say that the rest of Tehran looked as good as this… This next one is really something to watch for a couple of different reasons: it starts off with a few interesting things: a man wearing a suit flashes a peace sign to the camera, and a woman can be seen gathering up rocks and putting them in her purse to throw later on. Both of these are interesting for demographic reasons. What happens next though is disturbing: a man gets shot by the Basij seemingly producing a retreat by the protesters in what looks like a scene from a horror movie:

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Except for the last item in this post (which is an official statement from Obama), everything here is information gathered from Iranian Twitter users I’ve been following, and should be taken as unconfirmed rumors.

– The Fatemiyeh Hospital in Tehran has recorded 200 injured and between 30 and 40 people dead today in state-instigated violence that has surpassed all the violence in the past week combined.

– There are also unconfirmed reports that helicopters are A) delivering guns to Basij troops (the Basij are government-authorized un-uniformed militias) and B) in some cases spraying chemicals on protesters which causes the skin to burn.

– There are also reports that public railway transportation (Metra) has been shut down in an effort to stop people from coming into Tehran to join the protesters. People are still planning to join them by using other ways to get there though.

– Injured protesters are being cautioned in some cases to avoid hospitals which Basij troops are stationed at (they have supposedly been known to arrest people and deny them medical treatment), and instead are told to go to foreign embassies which the Basij cannot attack because it would be a violation of diplomatic code. The Canadian embassy is rumored to be turning injured people away, while the Australian embassy is said to be accepting wounded people and treating them using their own resources.

– Some Basij offices may be being attacked and burned by protesters.

– Mousavi has called for a general strike if he is arrested or killed, and says he is “ready to die for the truth” (this one is confirmed, not just a rumor). Additionally, he is using the slogan “down with the coup d’état,” in reference to theories that he won the election and that Admadinijad is effectively committing a coup against him, although this also invokes the 1953 coup against Iran orchestrated by the CIA.

Here is the White House statement on violence in Iran today:

For Immediate Release, June 20, 2009

Statement from the President on Iran

The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.

As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.

Martin Luther King once said - “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.

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One or two readers may know that my dad, Misagh Parsa, is a professor of sociology at Dartmouth, an expert on revolutions, and from Iran himself. He just had an interesting background article about the current situation published at Gozaar, an online journal about human rights and democracy in Iran:

The Islamic regime is also vulnerable socially and culturally. After consolidating power, the Islamic regime relegated women to second-class citizenship and denied them basic social, economic, and personal rights. The regime condemned homosexuals to death and stoned adulterers. The Islamic Republic imposed a set of cultural measures ranging from dress codes to music and dancing that were incompatible with the demands of the majority of the people who had struggled to overthrow the monarchy.

The Islamic fundamentalists and the theocratic clergy have discredited and undermined their own religion by making Islam the underpinning of failed economic and political experiments. Many citizens believe that the clerics have politicized and manipulated Islam to accumulate wealth and power. The ruling clerics have squandered their religious credentials and at times resort to nationalist rhetoric and external threats to stay in power. Not surprisingly, Iranians are among the most secular people in the Middle East today. In a national poll, 83 percent declared that religious teachings were irrelevant to daily life. Seventy-five percent of Iranians do not even say obligatory daily prayers and, in effect, refuse to be coerced into heaven.

My dad, whose most-well known writings concerned the 1979 Iranian revolution, concludes that:

As currently constituted, the opposition movement appears to lack a leadership capable of transforming the protests into a serious revolutionary struggle. For example, as some protestors have been shouting “Death to dictator,” Mousavi has been urging them to shout “Allah Akbar,” that is God is great. To bring about this transformation, the movement would require a strong, secure leadership that can break away from the existing system and present a democratic alternative acceptable to the majority of the protestors who are risking their lives. The leadership must forge a broad coalition of students, women, and the rest of the population to be able to challenge the regime. The coalition must include the major social classes and collectivities in order to disrupt social and economic structures. A strong leadership must be able to mobilize both bazaaris, who have had their own grievances against the state, and workers who have been fighting for better working conditions and independent labor organizations. Such a coalition should be able to disrupt the social structure and press for democratic changes.

(The bazaaris are loosely defined as a group of merchants and businessmen.) Well, let’s hope to see it happen.

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At the end of the first act of the musical Les Miserables is a song called One Day More, in which the full ensemble sings about their hopes and fears for the coming day which will see many of them dead. The Tony-winning production was of course based on the book of the same name by Victor Hugo about the failed anti-monarchist June Rebellion of Paris in 1832. The rebellion was led by relatively wealthy students who believed that the masses would join them (they didn’t, and were quashed by government forces).

In Tehran Friday night, a different version of One Day More can be heard. The following is a video taken in Tehran in which people chanting from balconies can be heard:

In the background, people can be heard shouting Allahu akbar (God is great), as they have done for several nights now. The chant was used similarly during the Iranian Revolution of 1979, although this time instead of also chanting death to the Shah, they have been supplemented this time apparently with “Death to the dictator,” meaning Ahmadinejad.

On Friday, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei all-but threatened that any future protests would be crushed in a brutal manner that would make recent violence pale in comparison. The planned march at 4PM, Iranian time (7:30ish AM EST Saturday) is set to go ahead anyway, and a lot of Iranians on Twitter that I’ve been following are nervous but hopeful. The rest of us can do little more than hope that it turns out better than it did for most of the characters in Les Mis. Already there are signs that it will: for one thing, the movement in Iran right now isn’t solely students like earlier unrest has been (such as in July of 1999); rather reports indicate that it’s cutting across many demographic barriers and gaining steam rather than losing it, especially due to Khamenei’s speech which was widely interpreted as needlessly inflammatory.

Now the ball appears to be in the court of the Iranian army and law enforcement. Tomorrow things will come to a head, and either the police will choose to side with the protesters and Khamenei will have made the biggest mistake of his career, or the police will side with Khamenei against their country and there will be a huge amount of needless bloodshed (which may in turn spark more potent mourning rallies and lead to even more unrest). There were some unconfirmed reports earlier that army officials who opposed Khamenei’s upcoming crackdown were being arrested pre-preemptively, which isn’t a good sign. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

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Because of the urgent situation in Iran and the global interest it has produced, Google has added a Farsi to English translator (it also works English to Farsi) to its web offerings. The Google team writes:

We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran. Like YouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa — increasing everyone’s access to information.

As with all machine translation, it’s not perfect yet. And we’re launching this service quickly, so it may perform slowly at times. We’ll keep a close watch and if it breaks, we’ll restore service as quickly as we can.

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Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated in Tehran for the fifth straight day on Wednesday.

The NYT remarks on how difficult shutting down the now-daily protests may be for the Iranian regime:

[The government’s] intimidation tactics have been on display over the past few days with little result, as Iranian state news reports of seven people killed in various cities did not deter another major antigovernment rally on Tuesday. This time, analysts say, the government will have trouble bringing about a swift, sharp end to the demonstrations over the contested presidential election results in the same way it had shut down previous eruptions.

First, there is the sheer size of these demonstrations, with protests that are not limited to students, but cut across generations and economic classes. Second, there is a more pronounced, if still nebulous, leadership centered around the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, who has adopted an openly hard-edged attitude toward the government. Third, the current crisis was inspired by common anger over a national election, not the more narrow issues students took to heart.

The parallel they draw, along with Juan Cole, is to China’s Tiananmen Square incident of 1989, in which the government brought in tanks to disrupt protesters.

The parallel that I’m surprised hasn’t come up though (at least among people I’ve been reading), is to a much more recent happening: Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004-2005. Here’s Wikipedia’s run-down of what happened in a nutshell:

The Orange Revolution was a series of protests and political events that took place in Ukraine from late November 2004 to January 2005, in the immediate aftermath of the run-off vote of the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election which was claimed to be marred by massive corruption, voter intimidation and direct electoral fraud. Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, was the focal point of the movement with thousands of protesters demonstrating daily. Nationwide, the democratic revolution was highlighted by a series of acts of civil disobedience, sit-ins, and general strikes organized by the opposition movement.

The protests were prompted by reports from several domestic and foreign election monitors as well as the widespread public perception that the results of the run-off vote of November 21, 2004 between leading candidates Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych were rigged by the authorities in favor of the latter. The nationwide protests succeeded when the results of the original run-off were annulled, and a revote was ordered by Ukraine’s Supreme Court for December 26, 2004. Under intense scrutiny by domestic and international observers, the second run-off was declared to be “fair and free”. The final results showed a clear victory for Yushchenko, who received about 52 percent of the vote, compared to Yanukovych’s 44 percent. Yushchenko was declared the official winner and with his inauguration on January 23, 2005 in Kiev, the Orange Revolution peacefully reached its successful conclusion.

The internet also played a crucial role in organizing the Orange Revolution (although much less sophisticated than today). One expects that with all that’s going on with Twitter right now, books may be written about the current use of technology in the not so far future.

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So, a couple of updates on the Iranian election situation:

- Hundreds of thousands of pro-Mousavi demonstrators gathered in Tehran today, as all “normal” internet service providers were said to have been shut down by the regime.

- The likely winner of the election, Mousavi, let out from house arrest, addressed the crowd and told them to continue to protest peacefully, although the stormtroopers sent in by the regime are growing more violent. Another big protest is expected tomorrow.

- The speed of the vote counting is being called into suspicion by polling experts (40 million hand-counted paper ballots were counted in a matter of hours?)

- Although Iranian officials are saying on state radio every fifteen minutes that the vote counting will be reviewed, some analysts are expecting that they are trying to placate protesters but will eventually ratify the existing results as I had earlier suggested.

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“We in the United States do not want to make any decisions for the Iranians, but we do believe that the Iranian people and their voices should be respected.”

The President strikes exactly the right note in discussing the extent of US involvement and how important it is to let the Iranian people decide their own fate and not letting the US become the issue. With one fell swoop, he just took away a huge excuse that Ahmadinejad’s regime would have loved to have used against legitimate protesters.

You never in a million years would have heard Bush utter this acknowledgment that even the semblance of US intervention can be fatal to true reformist efforts.

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On the surface, this is good news:

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran’s supreme leader ordered Monday an investigation into allegations of election fraud, marking a stunning turnaround by the country’s most powerful figure and offering hope to opposition forces who have waged street clashes to protest the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

State television quoted Ayatollah Ali Khamenei directing a high-level clerical panel, the Guardian Council, to look into charges by pro-reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, who has said he is the rightful winner of Friday’s presidential election.

The decision comes after Mousavi wrote a letter appealing to the Guardian Council and met Sunday with Khamenei, who holds almost limitless power over Iranian affairs. Such an election probe by the 12-member council is uncharted territory and it not immediately clear how it would proceed or how long it would take.

On the one hand, this could just be a way of pacifying protesters who have thus far refused to be pacified by violence, while those in power clean up their vote fraud. On the other hand, it certainly does give an opportunity for the real results to come out as any kind of review does (whether or not they are actually released by the ruling body or someone else), so there’s hope.

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Supporters of Mousavi run from riot police in Tehran

Reports indicate that internet access has been severely curtailed in Iran, as has access to phone services and some journalists have been beaten or otherwise censored. Still, the evidence of massive, unadulterated fraud in Iran’s presidential election this weekend is as plain as day. Not only does it seem that the Mullahs have stolen the election in Ahmadinejad’s favor, they have also posited the results as a totally illogical landslide that frankly nobody is likely to believe. Juan Cole sums up one of the many pieces of evidence pretty concisely:

1. It is claimed that Ahmadinejad won the city of Tabriz with 57%. His main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is an Azeri from Azerbaijan province, of which Tabriz is the capital. Mousavi, according to such polls as exist in Iran and widespread anecdotal evidence, did better in cities and is popular in Azerbaijan. Certainly, his rallies there were very well attended. So for an Azeri urban center to go so heavily for Ahmadinejad just makes no sense. In past elections, Azeris voted disproportionately for even minor presidential candidates who hailed from that province.

2. Ahmadinejad is claimed to have taken Tehran by over 50%. Again, he is not popular in the cities, even, as he claims, in the poor neighborhoods, in part because his policies have produced high inflation and high unemployment. That he should have won Tehran is so unlikely as to raise real questions about these numbers. [Ahmadinejad is widely thought only to have won Tehran in 2005 because the pro-reform groups were discouraged and stayed home rather than voting.)

The list goes on and on of course. Like for instance this graph made from official numbers showing the results on election night:

Um, right. That’s… plausible (Update: maybe it is?).

The practical question at least for those of us in the US is, what should be done by the Obama Administration? The answer is, not more than what other democratic governments around the world will do:

“But I think it’s wise for the U.S. government to keep its distance,” [the strongly anti-Ahmadinejad Hadi Ghaemi, New York-based spokesman for the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran] said in a phone interview. The White House can and should “show concern for human life and protesters’ safety and promote tolerance and dialogue.” But to get any further involved, even rhetorically, would “instigate the cry that the reformers are somehow driven and directed by the United States, whether under former President George W. Bush or under President Obama, and there’s no reason to give that unfounded allegation” any chance to spread.

That’s spot on. Any rash moves on the part of the Obama administration will simply give Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs political justification to crack down further by claiming that the reformist movement has been tainted by the west (whereas in reality it’s homegrown and legit). I wrote a piece for Truthout back in 2007 which included interviews with Iranian dissidents explaining how the change has to come from the Iranian people, not foreign efforts:

In interviews, prominent dissidents said they felt the Iranian regime was using the accusation that pro-democracy student groups might be working with America in efforts to discredit them. One Iranian activist lamented in an interview, “Our government says that if anyone wants human rights and democracy, ‘this group is an agent of the CIA.’”
[…]
Nevertheless, Atri said he is committed to diplomacy and nonviolent means of regime change, and expressed great admiration towards the American civil rights movement. Atri also said he was impressed with the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, through which regime change occurred after massive peaceful protests during late 2004 and early 2005. Atri explained, “This regime is very worried of anything like the Orange Revolution in Iran.

“They’re very sensitive. Everybody who is talking about an Orange Revolution or nonviolent action, they say ‘okay, this is a CIA program.’”

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