As Iranians head to the polls, the existing government has tightened its grip on the internet and even turned its firewall against politicians close to the current rulers, say researchers who have detected a shift in the kind of sites blocked over the last two weeks. But a total shut down of the web on election day – rumoured last week – has so far failed to materialise.
According to the OpenNet Initiative, an international organization that investigates internet filtering and surveillance, Iran employs the greatest degree of filtering of any country it monitors.
While there was not a massive jump in the number of blocked sites in the days preceding the election, the type of sites filtered has taken a more political turn, says Mahmood Enayat, who is studying Iran's filtering at Oxford University's Internet Institute in the UK.
Pornographic and politically dissenting sites have always been subject to web blocks. But over the last few days the Iranian government has for the first time targeted political and religious groups that are relatively close to its own political stance.
Enayat says that at least four political websites belonging to elements of the ruling conservatives critical of current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have been blocked during the last two weeks. Even the personal website of Fatemeh Rajabi, wife of Ahmadinejad's spokesman and chief of staff, Gholam Hossein Elham, has been blocked.
Fatemeh Rajabi has a track record of criticising key figures from all political factions within the current Iranian regime, including Ahmadinejad, his predecessor as President Mohammad Khatami and the head of Iran's judiciary Mahmoud Shahroudi.
Enayat also discovered increased filtering of sites belonging to ethnic groups inside Iran and groups outside the country that promote religions other than Shiite Islam, which is supported by the Iranian state. He says these changes show that the government is starting to use the web as a tool to contain political rivals to the established conservative administration and keep a close eye on the activities of ethnic and religious groups.
Targeting websites belonging to non-Shiite religious groups is most likely a response to the perception that the US is using them to undermine the existing government, he adds.
Babak Rahimi, a reseacher at the Program for the Study of Religion, University of California, San Diego, US, points out that the Iranian government not only uses filtering to control the web. "The government slow the internet down and forbid ISP's to provide transfer rates above 128 kilobytes per second," he says.
Since the Iranian government's filtering of the web began in 2001-2 anti-filtering software from Dubai and Turkey has been in high demand, he adds, although it can do nothing to get around the speed limits.
No comments:
Post a Comment