Do Not Search, Access Denied

Shahram Raffizadeh, Rooz Online:

The news coming from Iran indicates that new controls and obstacles are on their way for the Iranian scientific and research communities in their access to the international scientific community websites.

Reporters Without Borders issued a statement condemning the Iranian government in its efforts to increase its control of the Internet, including its efforts to set up a new online censorship system through Delta Global company. The report specifically says that these new measures are because of the “ideological hardening in the Iranian government and a desire by the new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to centralize authority.” This report comes at a time when filtering is on the rise in Iran, even for websites that are run by the right wing groups. One such website is Baztab owned by Mohsen Rezai currently the secretary of the powerful State Expediency Council and a former Passdaran Revolutionary Guards commander, sent shock waves even among right wing circles in Iran, but also indicating the intense power struggle going on in the country. READ MORE

The first news website, Emrouz (meaning Today) was put up in the summer of 2001 by the reformers in Iran. It was launched at a time when Isfahan’s Friday Prayer, ayatollah Taheri resigned from his position and there were no newspapers to report on his views. Conservatists soon saw the power of the Internet in this regard and launched their own site, Dariche (meaning an opening or gateway). In those days, the growth in the number of such sites and the way they operated, denied the government any controls over them. So they were free to operate and publish as they pleased.

As newspapers got closed by the Judiciary in Iran, more and more news websites were launched with rapidly increasing readerage. As the government continued its crackdown on students, on newspapers and on dissidents, the role of these Internet sites became critical to the reformers and opposition groups inside Iran. So displeasing were the sites to the government that it approached foreign companies to help it block their access. For example a Chinese company was approached to do just this at the height of the student unrest in 2003. They succeeded in filtering scores of news websites. So after that, some 21 webloggers and journalists were arrested by the Judiciary as well. But the result was even more aggressive work by the bloggers. But the imprisoned journalists soon became an international headache for the government as numerous international organizations supported the rights of these webloggers and condemned the Iranian regime for its suppressive policies. When Ahmadinejad came to power, this issue was high on his agenda.

During the June 2005 presidential elections, two moderate candidates, Mostafa Moin and cleric Mehdi Karoubi used the Internet and weblogs to publicize their viewpoints, when they were denied equal access to the state radio and TV. Right wing groups in Iran were of course alarmed that their controls were not having the intended results and people still heard the voices of the opposition and dissidents. Once these hardliners and right wingers won the presidential race through Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, their efforts to further filter dissident websites intensified rapidly. An Internet analyst says that currently some 7 million Iranians have access to the Internet, which is a very large number compared to just 2 years ago. Since last year alone, 514 towns, as opposed to 121, have access to Internet data. In just a few years, it is estimated that 50 percent of Iranians will be able to connect to the global cyber community.

The problem of course is not just that news sites are filtered by the government. More recently websites specializing in women’s affairs too have been cut off. www.womeniniran.com, www.irwomen.com, www.womeniw.com are just a few examples. These websites disseminated social news and the denial of access to them has prompted them to write to international bodies protesting the move of the Iranian government. Parasto Dokuhi, a writer for one of these sites says “our site has been filtered out because we use the word women a lot. We are forced to create proxies, but they still catch up with us.”

What is now even more alarming is that scientific websites are the target as well. This too has intensified with Ahmadinejad’s arrival. Lookspire.co, farstec.com, flickr.com are examples of such filtered out sites. One internet user said he tried a few keywords in Google and was rather surprised to see that he was denied access to many sites that he used to regularly visit.

This concern even infuriated the official political community when Baztab website was shut down, with a message that it was filtered by the order of Iran’s Judiciary. Political analysts and observers point to this event more than any other to show that the power struggle is reaching new heights within the regime where even current officials are denied the means to express their opinions if their opinions differ from what the government wants to propagate.

The words of Reza Rashidi the CEO of Fanavari company in Iran ring a bell when he says that if there are sites that have been unjustly filtered out, they should be reported to the company which will take every measure to restore its accessibility. In short, websites are not innocent, unless proven otherwise.