Right now, right this minute there are people in Iran preparing themselves to give up their lives for the right to choose their own government. Think about that for a second. On the other side of the world tonight, in a country that most americans view with scorn and derision, there are people ready to sacrifice everything for something we take for granted every day. If you were faced with the same decision would you have the courage to do the same?

If you are twittering in support please take note of the following:

• Change your location and time zone on Twitter to Tehran, Iran (that’s GMT+3:30
• Change your profile icon to green in some way.
• Set up a proxy. and send a DM to @ProtesterHelp. On Windows, do this and on Linux do this. On Mac, do this DO NOT POST THESE PUBLICLY. DM TO @austinheap or ProtesterHelp
• Don’t retweet posts without confirmation. Chances are you are not getting some giant breaking story so watch carefully and cross-check sources for verification before retweeting.
• When posting to twitter use hash tags #iranelection or #gr88
• DO NOT retweet posts verbatim from Iran. This puts the users at risk. The Iranian Minstry of the Interior is watching Twitter closely now. Don’t use names and reword the post.
• DO NOT DDOS (PageReload) Iranian government websites. It slows all Iranian traffic, doing more harm than good in this information war.

If you are looking for a good way to follow the events in Iran you’ll find most mainstream media outlets are a bit behind the flow. For more immediate coverage you can follow the #iranelection hashtag the signal to noise ration here is pretty low but it does provide a real-time connection of sorts.

For ongoing coverage Andrew Sullivan’s blog at The Atlantic and Nico Pitney’s blog at the Huffington Post have been doing an incredible job.