(Photo courtesy of the Mission for the Establishment of Human RIghts in Iran (MEHR) )

NEW YORK, June 25 (UPI) -- Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam remembers the violent protests that accompanied Iran's 1979 Revolution. A young boy at the time, he recalled the lack of information flow, “no one knew anything, months passed before the world learned of the violence."

Thirty years later, a disputed presidential election has triggered a second wave of country-wide protests with the same hostile elements. No longer a young boy, this spokesman for Iran Human Rights is leveraging the Internet to document the Iranian regime's "violent response and neglect of rights."

He said he views technology as playing a two-fold role in the current protests. It exposed Iranians to new freedoms and then became a powerful tool in the struggle to achieve them. Ideologically, “Iran can never go back,” he noted in a telephone interview, “when technology moves forward, so do ideas.”

Comparing coverage of today’s protests with those of three decades ago, he said, “in the present digital age we can know exactly what is happening, as it happens. It has become harder to conceal, delay or manipulate the facts.”

The widely publicized death of 26-year-old Neda Algha-Soltan is a case in point. She was allegedly shot by a government sniper while resting outside her car during a traffic jam. Using a camera phone, her companion in the car recorded her death. Within hours the footage was available online and viewed throughout Iran and the world. Today she is remembered as the "face of the anti-government struggle."

Neda gained recognition “because of the borderless world of the Web, because she was a girl and because she wasn’t even fighting,” said a male Iranian student at the University of Southern California. “Her tragic death united people in Iran and strengthened the resistance movement."

This student prefers to remain anonymous because he carries an Iranian state ID. “We have to hide our identity to protect ourselves,” he said. He keeps abreast of developments through friends in Tehran who, under guises of aliases or anonymity, upload videos and blog on Facebook and Twitter.

Head of News and Politics at YouTube Steve Grove commented on the significance of having “visual knowledge” to understand events on the ground. Citizentube, YouTube’s political video blog, has become an important platform for Iranians to upload and document their eyewitness accounts of the violence. Grove said, “It is a window to the world and a voice for those who are silenced.”

The sad irony is that Neda's connection to the world is perhaps stronger after her death than it was when she was alive. Her posthumous promotion from travel agent to martyr represents the sheer power of the cyberage.

Even the Iranian authorities have become cognizant of the fact. The decision by Iran's highest legislative authority to refuse an election annulment has met with strong protests. In response, the government has clamped down on technology. Web sites are increasingly filtered for reformist news, SMS texts are blocked and Iranians are having to resort to proxy accounts to report on up-to-the-minute news.

Yet for Amiry-Moghaddam it’s too late to return to the way things were. He said he believes the struggle in Iran will continue until freedoms are won and the violations cease. Looking back over the last 30 years, the excitement in his voice is raised, “this is a major turning point for Iran, the second I will have witnessed in my county’s history.”