REZA GHAZINOURI REMEMBERS the importance of pirate radio as a teenager growing up in in the city of Mashhad in northeast Iran. His father tuned in multiple times a day to the banned Farsi version of the BBC transmitted from neighboring countries, to hear the truth about Iranian political scandals like the impeachment of the country's liberal minister of culture, and the shutdown of dozens of its newspapers. While Ghazinouri studied for his college entrance exams in 2003, he'd listen to the US government-funded Radio Farda coverage of student protests against university privatization. "I still remember those programs so clearly," Ghazinouri says, "Every night I'd imagine myself protesting like the students."

Today, Ghazinouri has found his own form of protest. He's one of the creators of an app that aims to bring the same contraband audio to modern Iran in a revamped form: the pirate podcast. Today he and his fellow activists and coders at the Berkeley-based, Iran-focused app developer IranCubator will launch RadiTo, an audio app for Android uniquely suited to the conditions of the country's internet. It navigates slow, expensive data connections, users who speak a variety of languages and dialects ignored by most podcast distributors, and trickiest of all, a draconian digital censorship regime. With RadiTo, the group hopes to evade that internet filtering and bring a rare stream of aural information about the outside world to the country's burgeoning smartphone culture.