AN ANATOMY OF IRAN’S INTERNET CENSORSHIP
The Islamic Republic is one of the world's most Internet-unfriendly regimes, employing a sophisticated system of filters and restrictions to limit access to the World Wide Web by its citizens, a new report from the political freedom watchdog Freedom House has concluded. "Estimates of Iranian internet users range from 18 to 23 million," the study, entitled Freedom on the Net, notes, "putting the user penetration rate at over 25 percent" of the country's population – significantly higher than that of other countries in the Middle East. To cope with this growing online presence, the Iranian regime has erected "one of the world's most sophisticated apparatuses for controlling the internet and other digital technologies." The Islamic Republic's online censorship is built around "a mutually reinforcing set of decrees, legal regulations, and institutions" that enforce "an opaque and arbitrary conception of Islamic morality outlined by the constitution, the press law, and the penal code," the study details. (Freedom House, April 1, 2009)
THE WAR ON IRANIAN BLOGGERS
Iranian Internet activists face extreme persecution, even death, in their pursuit of free expression within the Islamic Republic. So says a leading Iranian blogger, Mojtaba Saminejad. In a recent exclusive interview with the Washington Times, Saminejad detailed the extensive constraints placed by the Iranian regime on online media – and the high costs of running afoul of the regime’s strictly-enforced limits on the medium. According to Saminejad, bloggers are "frequently jailed for 'un-Islamic' content,” content which the Iranian regime arbitrarily determines to be “against the national security interests of the country." And since last year, life for Iranian bloggers has gotten even more dangerous, thanks to a new legislative measure enacted by the regime in Tehran. "Under this law," Saminejad says, "any freedom-seeking blogger can face the death penalty for promoting illegal activities." (Washington Times, April 20, 2009)
THE HIGH COST OF ONLINE ACTIVISM
Examples of this type of persecution abound. In mid-March, for example, Iran’s feared clerical army, the Pasdaran, arrested a group of web developers and Internet users for seditious activities. The twenty-six people are charged with establishing “a number of anti-religious, obscene and anti-revolutionary web sites" in violation of Iranian national security. According to official Iranian news sources, authorities there believe the websites were established “with the aim to take forward the enemies' goals as part of the soft revolution project.” "Thanks to God... the main and active elements in these networks... were identified, arrested and handed over to judiciary officials," one Guardsman has been quoted as saying. (Reuters, March 19, 2009)
[Editor’s Note: The new detainees join prominent Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan in captivity. Derakhshan, widely recognized as a seminal figure in Iran’s blogging revolution, has been held by Iranian authorities since December on charges of espionage on behalf of Israel.]
A NEW MEDIUM FOR EXTREMISM
None of this, however, means that the Islamic Republic is not also actively exploiting the Internet for its own purposes. Quite the contrary; at least one radical Iranian group, the Association of Supporters of Islamic Resistance, has developed a new "Islamic" messaging service intended to bolster the security of communications between its followers.
The model for the software, the group says, can be credited to Lebanon's Hezbollah militia. "The key to Hezbollah's success in Lebanon's 33-day war against Zionism was due to the fact that it did not use existing communication systems, eliminating the possibility of the enemy investigating or eavesdropping," the Association's deputy chief, Zeynab Shari'atmadar, has told reporters. "Today, in cooperation with individuals waiting for the emergence of His Holiness Vali-e Asr [the Mahdi], the Association of the Supporters of Islamic Resistance has succeeded in designing an Islamic resistance messenger service and indigenising [sic] it. This service provides the possibility of establishing text, audio and video communication between different resistance groups all over the world, and continuous communication has already been established between Islamic resistance groups all over the world." (BBC World Monitoring, March 18, 2009)