Iranian Internet Censorship

Five million internet websites are currently being blocked by the Iranian government, a website called 'Rooz' reported, quoting the Iran's prosecutor general as its source.

The report is the first ever in which a legislative source from Iran has divulged information about the regime's censorship policies.

During a conference in the country Prosecutor General Abdolsamad Khoram Abadi explained that most of the sites were blocked because they contained unethical content, a reference to pornography and other anti-Islamic entertainment.

Ismail Radkani, a spokesman for the company responsible for the blocking of websites in Iran, also spoke during the conference. He said over a thousand such sites were being automatically withdrawn from the public eye every month, according to legislature passed down from the government.

Abadi estimated the internet as a more imminent danger than satellite dishes, because of the fact that the internet is more accessible. Thus, he called for the establishment of an internet police in his country.

Update: Bloggers Under Duress

24th November 2008. See article from advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org

Iranian authorities recently jailed two cyber writers. Paris based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) reports online journalist Shahnaz Gholami's arrest at her Tehran home on 9 November. She was the editor of Azarzan blog. RSF reports also that theologian and online journalist Mojtaba Lotfi was arrested on 8 October for posting a sermon by a well-known opponent of Supreme Guide Ayatollah Ali Khamenei online.

At the end of October Mojtaba Saminejad, a former jailed blogger, writes that security forces threatened his wife and him because of his blog and political ideas. The blogger adds that his wife has been under pressure by security agents to complain against him. he has not updated his blog since 29th of October.

The annual publication, Iran - Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband, provides a comprehensive overview of the trends and developments in the telecommunications and digital media markets in Iran.

It reports that Internet censorship is strict. By November 2008 the number of banned sites was put at over 5 million.

Iran is very stony ground for any form of digital media to grow or flourish due to the government's strict control and censorship of Internet media and its banning of satellite TV dishes to receive the wealth of free to air DTH satellite TV channels available in the region.

The Iranian judicial authorities have published a long list of banned Internet websites in a new crackdown on online networks, including those deemed immoral.

They said the list, drawn up by a committee of experts, bans any site that contains pornography, prostitution, sexual deviation or anything considered to be contrary to the morals of society in the Islamic republic.

Websites containing material contrary to security and social peace as well as those seen by the authorities as hostile to government officials and institutions bound to lead to crimes are also banned.

According to the list published in several Tehran newspapers, anyone found guilty of using such websites could be jailed for several years in line with a law on Internet offences passed in parliament more than a year ago.

Internet users are also prohibited from posting articles that violate religious values, that insult Islam and other recognised world religions, saints and prophets, the reports said.

Any articles that insult Imam Khomeini and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are banned, the reports added in reference to the founder of the Islamic republic and his successor. Articles contrary to the constitution, that support hostile political groups or are used as propaganda against the regime of the Islamic republic are also banned.

The sale of software that can bypass bypass filter systems used by the authorities is also forbidden, the reports said.

Iran's telecommunications agency announced what it described as a permanent suspension of Google's email services, saying a national email service for Iranian citizens would soon be rolled out.

A Google spokesman said in a statement, We have heard from users in Iran that they are having trouble accessing Gmail. We can confirm a sharp drop in traffic, and we have looked at our own networks and found that they are working properly. Whenever we encounter blocks in our services we try to resolve them as quickly as possibly because we strongly believe that people everywhere should have the ability to communicate freely online.

The move marks another effort by the regime to close the gap with its opposition in controlling Iranian cyberspace, according to Internet security experts. The government has a tight grip over old media—television, radio and newspapers—but learned during the unrest following the contested election last June that the opposition and its supporters dominated new media, including social networking Web sites like Twitter and Facebook.

The primary purpose for doing this is to control communication and mine that communication, so the government can crack down on dissenters and people who threaten the government, said Richard Stiennon, founder of Internet security firm IT-Harvest: If the government can induce the population to use a state-controlled email service, it would have access to the content of all of those emails, he added.

Silencing the Opposition

Based on article from news.bbc.co.uk

The US has accused Iran of seeking a near-total information blockade to silence anti-government protesters.

The allegations came after opposition supporters clashed with security forces as Iran marked the anniversary of the 1979 revolution. The US government said it had information that the telephone network was taken down, SMS messages blocked, and internet communication throttled.

Official events were held across Iran, but the main gathering was at Tehran's Azadi Square. State TV showed tens of thousands of people filling the streets. Amateur footage purportedly showing opposition protests has been appearing on the video-sharing website YouTube, including at least one rally in the Tehran underground.

According to Reuters, many online news sources including Reuters itself and Yahoo News are newly blocked in Iran.

Harder news stories from foreign outlets have been replaced by government-approved suggestions.

With protests in Egypt gaining momentum, Iran is hedging its bets by limiting the influx of breaking news out of its Middle Eastern neighbor.

In Iran, Political unrest remains from when the country exploded into social media-fuelled 'Green' protests following the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last June.

Supporters of President Hosni Mubarak have begun violently attacking journalists reporting on the streets of Cairo today, a shift in tactics from recent media censorship, the Committee to Protect Journalists said. CPJ calls on the Egyptian military to provide protection for journalists.

The Egyptian government is employing a strategy of eliminating witnesses to their actions, said Mohamed Abdel Dayem, CPJ's Middle East and North Africa program coordinator. The government has resorted to blanket censorship, intimidation, and today a series of deliberate attacks on journalists carried out by pro-government mobs. The situation is frightening not only because our colleagues are suffering abuse but because when the press is kept from reporting, we lose an independent source of crucial information.

Internet Restored

See article from bbc.co.uk

Internet access in Egypt appears to have returned to normal, according to firms measuring traffic levels in the country.

Facebook and Twitter are now available and the four major Egyptian internet service providers are back in business.

Dozens of foreign journalists were arrested, attacked and beaten as the Egyptian government and its supporters embarked on what the US state department called a concerted campaign to intimidate the international media.

Human rights workers also fell victim to crowd violence, while police raided the offices of two groups in Cairo, the Hisham Mubarak Law Centre and the Centre for Economic and Social Rights, and arrested observers. Amnesty International said one of its staff was detained at the law centre, with a Human Rights Watch colleague.

A group of reporters from Daily News Egypt, an independent, English-language paper, were among those targeted. They were set upon by a group of passers-by in Dokki, west of the Nile, that quickly swelled into a 50-strong crowd after they ventured out of their offices to investigate a story about rising petrol prices.

It was terrifying, said Amira Ahmed, the publication's business editor. They were chanting: 'We've found the foreigners, don't let them go,' and calling us traitors and spies.  Like many who were caught up in similar incidents today, Ahmed said the most chilling part of the encounter was the mob mentality that took hold: the people who were showing up had no idea why we were the targets. They just took up the cry of 'foreigners' and 'journalists' and joined in. There was no leader we could appeal to for reason.

The Egyptian interior ministry arrested more than 20 foreign journalists in Cairo, including the Washington Post's bureau chief and a photographer. Al-Jazeera said three of its journalists were detained.

On the streets, it was impossible to interview protesters without a crowd gathering, shouting accusations and jabbing fingers. The antipathy to the media appeared to extend to both opponents and supporters of the regime.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs described the systematic targeting of journalists in Egypt as unacceptable, and called for those detained to be freed. The leaders of France, Germany, Britain, Italy and Spain said in a joint statement that the attacks against journalists are completely unacceptable.

Iran is moving towards introducing a new aggressive form of censorship, a national Internet that could, in effect, disconnect Iranian cyberspace from the rest of the world.

The initiative appears part of a broader effort to confront what the regime now considers a major threat: an online invasion of Western ideas, culture and influence.

Iran, already among the most sophisticated nations in online censoring, also promotes its national Internet as a cost-saving measure for consumers and as a way to uphold Islamic moral codes.

The Wall St Journal quoted Reza Bagheri Asl, director of the telecommunication ministry's research institute, as telling an Iranian news agency that soon 60% of the nation's homes and businesses would be on the new, internal network. Within two years it would extend to the entire country, he said.

Ali Aghamohammadi, Iran's head of economic affairs, said the new network would at first operate in parallel to the normal Internet-banks, government ministries and large companies would continue to have access to the regular Internet. Eventually, he said, the national network could replace the global Internet in Iran, as well as in other Muslim countries.

Iran has stepped up online censorship by upgrading the system that enables the Islamic regime to block access to millions of websites it deems inappropriate for Iranian users.

The move comes one month after the United States announced plans to launch new services facilitating internet access and mobile phone communications in countries with tight controls on freedom of speech, a decision that infuriated Tehran's regime and prompted harsh reactions from several Iranian officials.

Despite the blocking, many Iranians access banned addresses with help from proxy websites or virtual private network (VPN) services. The upgrade is aimed at stopping users bypassing censorship.

More than 5 million websites are filtered in Iran. Media organisations including the Guardian, BBC and CNN are blocked. On Google, the Farsi equivalents for words such as condom, sex, lesbian and anti-filtering are filtered out.

Iran is believed to be worried about the influence of the internet and especially social networking websites as pro-democracy activists across the Middle East use them to promote and publicise their movements.

In April, the Tehran government announced that it intended to launch halal internet, a country-wide intranet and a parallel network that conforms to Islamic values with the ultimate goal of substituting for the global internet.

Iran's opposition believe that Iran is buying its filtering technology from China.

The use of VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) and proxies is a crime, Iran's Minister of Communications and Technology has announced.

ISNA quoted the minister saying: Now VPNs have been cut off in the country because their use is a legal violation.

A VPN is an encrypted communication through which internet users can get access to websites blocked by Iran without Iranian authorities being able to monitor communication content such as web browsing or email.

Iranian internet users have been using VPNs and proxies to circumvent extensive internet blocking.

Iranian authorities claim that their enemies are trying to destabilize the country through cultural and social influences, which they refer to as the soft war.

Iran has blocked the website of the British embassy in Tehran following a diplomatic crisis last month that led to the closure of the UK mission.

The Foreign Office said that the government's website in Iran, which had continued working despite the closure of the embassy, had been deliberately filtered by the Iranian authorities.

People inside Iran who try to visit ukiniran.fco.gov.uk, are re-directed to a web page that reads: Access to the webiste is denied according to [Iran's] computer crimes regulations.

The foreign secretary, William Hague, said: Britain's website in Iran has now been added to the list of thousands of other internet sites deliberately censored by the Iranian authorities. Hague said Iran's move was counter-productive and ill-judged:

It will also make it harder for Iranian nationals to access information about visiting the UK. And it is further proof to the rest of the world the Iranian government's dire record on freedom of speech and human rights in general. This action will not deter Britain from continuing to engage with the Iranian people, including through the internet.

A member of Iran's Corporate Computer Systems reports that Iran will be cut off from the World Wide Web once the country launches its own national internet network next month.

Iranian media report that Payam Karbasi, the spokesman for Corporate Computer Systems of Iran, said: With the launch of the national internet, the internet providers can increase the speed of access to their desired websites by two megabytes... however, it will be just like a corporate network, which cannot be accessed by outsiders, and some material cannot be accessed through that network.

The national internet network will allow service providers to decide which sites the users can be accessed speedily, which sites will be provided at the lowest speed, and of course which sites will be totally blocked.

In the past two weeks, Iranian internet users have reported an extreme reduction in internet speed. While access to government sites remains easy, using proxies to access blocked sites only via the slow lane.

Karbasi said: Imagine there is a monitoring system that checks all the internet packages and then allows it to pass through or regards it unclean. Because of the high volume of internet packages, they remain in a line-up in order to be checked, and this causes the reduction in the speed of access.

With the launch of the so-called clean internet network, Iranian authorities aim to separate Iran from the World Wide Web in order to block access to supposedly immoral content and maintain control of what Iranian users can access.

Update: Spy in the Caf

9th January 2012.  See article from rferl.org

Iran's cyberpolice have issued new restrictions for Internet cafes that appear to be part of the Iranian establishment's efforts to impose further controls on the Internet.

According to the new rules, the personal information of citizens visiting cybercafes, such as their name, father's name, national ID number, and telephone number, will be registered. Cafe owners will be required to keep the personal and contact information of their clients and also a record of their browsing history for six months.

Another new rule that has been announced requires cybercafe owners to install closed-circuit cameras and keep the video recordings for six months. The guidelines also say that installing circumvention tools that allow access to banned websites will be illegal at Internet cafes.

Deputy cyberpolice chief Mohsen Mirbehresi has said that owners of Internet cafes should deny Internet access to those who do not show their IDs. Internet cafes have 15 days to implement the restrictions, which were announced on January 3.

Iran is closing down the country's internet access. The government cut has blocked major websites leaving millions without email and social networks.

The shutdown comes at a time when inhabitants are preparing to celebrate the 33rd anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, complete with rumours of anti-government protests.

Gmail, Google and Yahoo have been blocked and users have been unable to log in to their online banking. This seems related to the secure internet protocol https being totally blocked.

Last month, the country's Information Minister announced plans for a government-run intranet as a replacement for the internet.

Chief internet censor

Iran's supreme leader has ordered the creation of an internet censorship agency that includes top military, security and political figures in the country's boldest attempt yet to control the internet.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei claimed that the grandiously named, Supreme Council of Cyberspace, will be tasked with preventing harm to Iranians who go online, state TV reported.

The report did not spell out specifically the kind of harms that the council would tackle. But officials have in the past described two separate threats: computer viruses created by Iran's rivals aimed at sabotaging its industry, particularly its controversial nuclear program, and a culture invasion aimed at undermining the Islamic Republic.

The Supreme Council of Cyberspace Censorship will be headed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and includes powerful figures in the security establishment such as the intelligence chief, the commander of the powerful Revolutionary Guards, and the country's top police chief. It also includes the speaker of parliament, state media chiefs, government ministers in charge of technology-oriented portfolios, and several cyber experts.

Tehran has blocked another UK Foreign Office website in Iran as part of its ever-tightening stranglehold of censorship, the foreign secretary has said.

William Hague said UK for Iranians was launched on March 14 to reach out to its citizens but access from the country was blocked on March 17. Iran had already blocked the main British embassy website in December 2011.

Britain last year closed its embassy in Tehran and expelled Iran's diplomats. It followed an attack on the embassy building, which Iran described unacceptable behaviour by a small number of protesters. However, British diplomats said they believed it was likely the attack had state backing.

In a statement Hague said the UK for Iranians website had been established to explain UK policy and engage with Iranians and that the blocking of the site was only a very small part of what Iranians endure daily. He said Iran's government had jammed international television channels, closed film and theatre productions, rewritten traditional Persian literature and banned the publication of some books and newspapers.

17 gay rights activists were arrested at a May Day rally in St. Petersburg, Russia. The group that was detained were trying to unfold rainbow flags and raise posters. They were charged with failing to co-operate with police officers.

St. Petersburg recently passed a law that bans homosexual propaganda, becoming the 4th city in Russia to pass such a law. Politicians are attempting to pass similar legislation at a federal level, with pressure from the Russian Orthodox Church.

Please tell the Russian government to drop all charges against these gay rights activists -- who were simply fighting against discrimination and hatred -- and not pass a federal law that will severely hurt gay rights.

...Sign the petition