The Guardian a harrowing report from universities in several Iranian cities, where plainclothes and riot police have joined the basij in attacking dormitories, apparently indescriminately,

"At 3am they announced on loudspeakers: 'If you evacuate the building we won't harm you. Otherwise, you'll all be injured or killed.' All the students then came out of the building in lines, with their hands on their heads. The police hit them with batons and some started to shout that they had conquered the dorms. Eventually they let us go back to our rooms but at least 10 had been shot, some appeared to have been killed and hundreds were injured."

The Guardian understands that five students may also have died in clashes at Tehran University early on Sunday. The students — named as Fatemeh Barati, Kasra Sharafi, Mobina Ehterami, Kambiz Shoaee and Mohsen Imani — are believed to have been buried today in Behesht-e-Zahra, a famous cemetery in Tehran, reportedly without their families being informed.

So far, the Guardian is calling 12 student deaths. The regime clearly doesn't understand how the technology works—if you beat hundreds or thousands of students to shut them up, they'll be text messaging to the world, en masse, within minutes. You make them louder than they would've been had you just let them march. You've just handed them megaphones the whole world can hear.

Alternately, it opens the door for a new kind of propaganda for those who do understand the technology. If the revolution is to be Twittered, a well-falsified YouTube video or Twitter campaign could have the power to start a riot, a counter-riot, or maybe even take the fight out of already-rioting people before anybody has a chance to confirm its authenticity.

Not that it's happening in this case—"one person = one broadcaster" is working some world-historical magic right now—but it's going to happen someday soon.

UPDATE

Another sign of hope, from Robert Fisk's coverage of the demonstrations (which got a nod from Slog commenter Toe Tag):

They jostled and pushed and crowded through narrow laneways to reach the main highway and then found the riot police in steel helmets and batons lined on each side. The people ignored them all. And the cops, horribly outnumbered by these tens of thousands smiled sheepishly — and to our astonishment — and nodded their heads towards the men and women demanding freedom.

The military has announced neutrality—and who's to say that on the big day tomorrow (tonight for us), some police won't be showing up to work?

... are over at the Boston Globe.

Let's hope this photo is prescient and sums up the story of the green revolution—dissent, then beating, then bystanders rushing in to break up the brutality. Let's hope those heroic women succeeded. Let's hope all the heroic Iranians succeed.

UPDATE

A reason for hope from the New York Times:

Top Cleric Calls for Inquiry as Protesters Defy Ban in Iran

The ayatollah’s call — announced every 15 minutes on Iranian state radio throughout the day — was the first sign that Iran’s top leadership might be rethinking its position on the election.

And another exciting photo, on Nico Pitney's blog:

Vaclav Havel has expressed solidarity with the demonstrators pouring into the streets of Iran. I was thinking about Havel today as I read about the protests in Tehran, and wondering if he was going to say something publicly about the protests. Now he has.

The massive demonstrations in Prague in November of 1989 that came to be known as the Velvet Revolution began with protesters—students mostly—being beaten in the streets and ended with the fall of that country's communist regime and chants of "Vaclav to the Castle." (Prague's castle is the seat of government and the presidential residence.) My then-boyfriend and I were living in Berlin in the fall 1989—living in West Berlin—and we'd just witnessed the impossible: the fall of the Berlin Wall.

After the first demonstration in Prague we went to a black market in downtown Berlin, exchanged the last of our money, and boarded a train for Prague. On the way into Prague we saw tanks and troops lined up outside the city, ready to roll in. The Czechoslovakian government was speaking openly of a "Tiananmen solution" to the "chaos" in the streets of the capitol.

Walking around the city the morning we arrived we were approached by three Czech students. After determining that we were not secret police—jeans, leather jackets, and American accents made us likelier to be secret police—they gave us some flyers. They implored us to carry the flyers out of the country with us when we left. They made sure we understood that we would have smuggle the flyers out. We would have to hide them from border guards. We would need to conceal them in our luggage, or rolled up and stuck in our toothpaste tubes, or in our underwear.

Would we take that risk for them?

They took us to the philosophy building at the university and showed us into a study hall with a long table down the center of the room. There were two dozen students seated around the table, each sitting in front of a typewriter. These students were typing and re-typing the flyers we'd just been given. The Czech people had no access to photocopiers—the communist government saw them as a threat—so each copy of the flyer had to be typed out by hand. The students seated at the table typed flyers until they'd produced enough copies to send small groups of students out into the city to look for foreigners who might be willing to smuggle them out of the country.

We stayed in the building and listened to students and professors give speeches in a large lecture hall. One of the students we met on the street translated from Czech to German so my boyfriend could follow along; my boyfriend translated from German to English so that I could. They were certain that a crackdown was coming—the Tiananmen solution—and that many of them would soon be dead or imprisoned. They were keenly aware that they were risking their lives and their futures. Before we left the philosophy building they asked us again to please take the flyers with us when we left Prague, to smuggle them out of the country, to deliver them to newspapers and television stations in the West. That way, weeks or months after it was all over, the world would find out what really happened in Prague.

Now the world is finding out in real time—via Twitter and YouTube—what's really happening in Tehran right now. It's the revolution in more ways than one. And here's hoping that the demonstrators in Iran—like the students we met in Czechoslovakia—live to tell their own stories.

I still have the flyers.