One of those potential scary applications of this technology is censorship. During the protests following the contested Iranian election last June, the governm

One of those potential scary applications of this technology is censorship. During the protests following the contested Iranian election last June, the government worked to prevent people from being able to use the internet to communicate information (especially photographs and video) of the repression to the outside world. The state censorship policy in Iran is mainly implemented with transparent web proxies that identify prohibited URLs and redirect to a warning page. Internet users in Iran have become quite adept at bypassing the filters by either using specific circumvention tools or by tunneling their traffic out over VPNs or protocols such as SSL or SSH. During the protests, the Iranian authorities began to restrict access to specific protocols by throttling them down to a trickle of bytes so that business users could still access some SSL services or foreign VPNs with enough patience, but the channels were no longer usable for mass tunneling to restricted websites. The traffic throttling is implemented with the same techniques that ISPs use to restrict P2P file trading traffic. It's the exact same DPI vendor hardware.