IRAN: Crackdown on cyber-dissidents continues
Maybe it was just a coincidence.
But two concurrent incidents shed light on Iranian authorities’ crackdown against blogs and opinion websites.
On Wednesday, Iran’s official news agency announced that the Islamic Republic had crushed a network of allegedly anti-religious websites.
On the same day, international human rights groups said that a young blogger -- Omid-Reza Mirsayafi -- had died in jail, where he was serving a sentence for “insulting authorities” on his website.
In the statement, officials said that they had “succeeded in identifying and destroying an organized anti-religious and anti-cultural Internet network through a smart and accurate tracking operation.”
Describing the so-called intelligence operation as if it were an achievement worthy of James Bond, the statement said that authorities had put an end to these websites “through a set of complicated technical-intelligence operations.”
The Web pages in question were characterized as:
“... insulting religious sanctities and desecrating religious beliefs, insulting the Holy Koran and the innocent imams, promoting very deep ethical deviations in individuals and family members, advertising prostitution of Iranian girls, breaking the privacy of individuals, preparing hidden films and encouraging Iranian users to produce obscene and anti-religious contents.”
Authorities accused “intelligence services of foreign countries” of supporting the vicious network in order to carry out a “soft coup.”
Reporters Without Borders classified the Islamic Republic as one of 12 “enemies of the Internet” in a report last week.
The press-freedom watchdog said that Iran has itself declared blocking 5 million websites in 2008. The country blacklists a large number of websites regarded as “illegal.”
Despite the censorship, the country remains home to the most outspoken cyber-dissidents in the region, some of whom are serving jail sentences on political charges, the report said.
A crackdown on political bloggers increased during the country’s run-up to the presidential election scheduled in June, the report added.
Tragically, on Wednesday, one of these bloggers, 29-year-old Omid-Reza Mirsayafi died in Tehran’s Evin Prison, according to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.
The group suggested that Mirsayafi had committed suicide, quoting another prisoner and physician who said that the blogger was suffering from “deep depression” and had taken “extra doses of his medication.”
Mirsayafi was sentenced to two years and a half in prison for reportedly “expressing his opinions” on his private blog.
-- Raed Rafei in Beirut
Photo: Omid-Reza Mirsayafi. Credit: Reporters Without Borders
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two days ago I got the following from my web hosting service in U.S:
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Due to the current US Sanctions, we are required by Federal Regulation to terminate all business with countries or people from countries listed at: http://www.ustreas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/programs/
When you sign up, your IP address is logged and tracked to the country the signup originated from- this IP address was tracked to a country on the US Sanctioned list. The issue is where you were physically located when the account was started, not where you currently operate the site from.
At this time we must ask that you please seek an alternative hosting provider. We will allow you 15 days from the date of Deactivation to remove your content from our servers. You now have CPanel and FTP access to your account so you may backup your files and transfer your domains as needed.
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I am a New Zealand citizen and an English resident. I currently live in the UK and my company is registered in the United Kingdom and does no business in Iran.
I can't help it be feel that I am being discriminated against on the basis of national origin. It is true that I set up the web site when I was in Iran on holiday but I am sure you know I could have set up my site using an HTTP proxy service. Anti filtering sites are used by people inside Iran to access the internet as there is heavy filtering of internet in Iran. I could have used one of those services and had I done that you would have seen a different IP address than the one you have in your records.
It is not just Iran that is attacking the cyper dissidents it is US too!
Posted by: Zurvan Namdar | March 21, 2009 at 08:23 PM