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In your typical game of cat and mouse, the cat only wins sometimes. Unfortunately, for the cat — eventually he meets a pretty smart mouse. And then he loses.

Debkafile, over here writes how the Iranian intelligence services began to turn technology on citizens using deep packet inspection.

DEBKAfile's Iranian sources report that the day after the presidential poll and resulting street outbreaks, Iran's Internet control and tracking supervisors took over the 10 leading service providers in the country.

Here's the thing — that technology is entirely useless against VPNs with even the lightest encryption. There just isn't enough computational power to scale across all users of the internet. The only way to stop such "nefarious" VPN traffic would be to shut the internet off, or stop VPN traffic via the deep level packet inspection. But if they managed to do that, they would stop a lot of commerce, and threaten what's left of Iran's economy. Thereafter, one could still use SSL proxies — and blocking all HTTPS packets would be even more damning to the economy.

Persians have a rich history of innovation and technology. They won't stop now. And they know what VPNs are. Twitter has the details, and there are American companies in the VPN trade already jumping on the bandwagon.

The opposition will just get smarter. And the internet just dealt a clear blow overall to totalitarians — they're surely very paranoid right now. They should be. You don't have to be a genius to figure out the mouse wins eventually.