Iran stocks up on censorship tools

Iran joins China in a club of countries developing filters for internet traffic.

By Tom Abate - Global Post
Published: July 7, 2009 06:00 ET
Page 2 of 2

For instance, the relatively new messaging service, Twitter.com, delivered more than 2 million brief reports from inside Iran during an 18-day period, according to one post-election analysis. Villeneuve said Iranian authorities tried to stop the message flow by blocking access to Twitter.com, but many Iranians knew how to evade such measures by relaying their “tweets” through unblocked proxy servers.

Villeneuve said some nations, notably Burma and Nepal, have simply cut themselves off from the internet during periods of civil unrest to deny protesters a world audience, but international actors like Iran and China seem reluctant to go to such extremes, preferring selective censorship instead.

This suggests that the contuining battle between free speech and censorship will involve Western companies whenever they do business with repressive regimes. A total embargo on countries that don't adhere to Western norms is unlikely and perhaps unwise. As Nokia Siemens Networks spokesman Ben Roome noted in an email to GlobalPost, the number of Iranian cellphone subscribers went from 12 million to 53 million in a two-year period. “Would people in Iran be better off without access to telecommunications?” he asks rhetorically.

Activist groups hope to force Western tech companies to avoid supporting censorship. Reporters Without Borders used the Iranian crisis to focus renewed attention on the Global Online Freedom Act, a proposal that asks the U.S. Congress to impose fines on American companies that make or modify technologies that aid internet censorship.

Meanwhile, Iran's efforts to develop its own filtering technologies suggest that whatever Western nations and companies do, repressive governments want to enjoy the benefits of technology while minimizing challenges to their authority — even when their tactics seem downright foolish.

For instance, the Open Net Inititative report notes that in 2006, the Iranian government told its internet service providers not to offer home access faster than 128 kilobytes. Whether this was to discourage the downloading of porn or the uploading of protest images, according to the report, the policy makes Iran “the only country in the world to have instituted an explicit cap on internet access speeds for households.”  

More on Iran:

How to run a protest without Twitter

It has become more difficult to bomb Iran

The flight from Tehran

Iranian rockers find their voice

Protester vs. protester in Iran

Young, Iranian and ready for change

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