Iran's web censorship among world's strictest: report

Yahoo News:

Iran has among the strictest Internet censorship in the world, blocking access to sexual content, political websites, information on women's rights and "blogs," a study by Internet researchers showed.

The OpenNet Initiative, a partnership of researchers from Harvard University, the University of Toronto and University of Cambridge, noted that Iran uses technology from the US company, Secure Computing, calling the firm "complicit" in the censorship. READ MORE

But they said that Internet content controls "have support at the highest levels of the Iranian state."

The researchers found some 34 percent of tested websites blocked.

"The Iranian state has effectively blocked access of its citizens to many pornographic online sites, most anonymizer tools, a large number of sites with gay and lesbian content, some politically sensitive sites, women's rights sites, and certain targeted Web logs (blogs), among other types of sites," the researchers wrote.

They found that online content in the Farsi language is more likely to be blocked than comparable content in the English language.

"Iran has put in place one of the world's most extensive and sophisticated Internet censorship regimes," said John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.

"Along with China, Iran has committed to adapting its filtering practices with changes in Internet technology, which suggests that the cat and mouse game between those who would speak freely and those who would stop them is bound to continue.

Bloggers who write in Farsi in Iran have a much harder job today in trying to reach their audience than bloggers in most other parts of the world."

"Our report on Iranian filtering of the Internet shows that not only are freedom of speech and access to information under threat, but that there is a growing commercial market for the technologies that diminish them," said Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.

"By providing filtering systems to non-democratic regimes, the US company, Secure Computing, is complicit in Iranian breaches of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. This thriving Internet censorship market -- spread like a virus from China to Iran to an increasing number of countries worldwide -- calls into question not only the trumpeted slogans of high-tech firms that the Internet represents 'freedom' and 'connectivity,' but simplistic divisions between 'us' and 'them' as well."

We need to investigate Secure Computing. They are apparently a publicly traded company. I wonder if their investor know what they are doing. Anyone want to help with this?

By the way, if you are a regular reader here you may have noticed that we typically have an Iranian observer(see the list of flags in the right hand sidebar). Since most people in Iran are blocked from our site, unless they use some sort proxy server that overcomes Iranian content filters they can't reach this site. It is therefore likely that our observer is someone associated with the government. They have open access to the internet.