Iran's crackdown on internet

2005-06-22 09:09

Washington - Iran has among the strictest internet censorship in the world, blocking access to sexual content, political websites and information on women's rights and "blogs," are routinely blocked, a study by internet researchers showed on Tuesday.

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 United States company, Secure Computing, calling the firm "complicit" in the censorship.

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

The researchers found about 34% of tested websites blocked.

"The Iranian state has effectively blocked access of its citizens to many pornographic online sites, most anonymiser 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.

The 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 Centre 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."

- AFP