Iran Government Censors Blogs

Hoder reports:

Friends in Iran, journalists and technicians, are saying that judiciary officials have ordered all major ISP to filter all blogging services including PersianBlog, BlogSpot, Blogger, BlogSky, and even BlogRolling.

They have also ordered to filter Orkut, Yahoo Personals and some other popular dating and social networking websites.

This is bad news. Iran's previous willingness to let the blogosphere emerge was a sign of progress. Now the regime is showing its fear of people's voices.

I hope some proxy servers and other workarounds get put into place quickly.

Comments

[Craig]

I realize that this looks bad, but these people have been living with this type of censorship for a long time. They'll figure out a way around it.

I've been studying up on distributed attacks and distributed defense, because it's the ideal way to attack a centralized power.

For the bloggers, that means that they open up so many other channels of communication that they overwhelm the government's ability to control them. I think we'll be seeing more of this all over the world in more and more areas as time goes on.

[Scott Whittaker]

I think it was only a matter of time before the governments that depend on controlling information flow started cracking down on blogging.

At least for now, if they are just filtering out blogs based on their URLs (blocking the blog sites rather than looking at the content of all traffic -- a pretty difficult undertaking), anyone who is willing to risk getting busted can still post to servers which aren't as yet blacklisted by the government (i.e. hosted on private servers).

Hopefully, they won't reach a point where they completely restrict internet access, as that seems to be the only way that I can think of to truly stop bloggers from posting.

Thanks.
Scott

[Ajax]

Think it has anything to do with right-wing adoption of blog toolkits? A lot of us identify the medium with our use of it and the networks we establish within it, but there's a contextual image - that overall the 'blog' thing has more fascist placeholders than free-speakers.
Keep in mind that Iran's in the crosshairs of whatever it was that hit Iraq.
Rather than get upset about them clamping down on oppositional expression, why not make a stink about the bully-talk Israel and BushCo have been delivering steadily these last few months?
Or is that too much like asking why everyone's so sympathetic toward tsunami-victims, and yet so unconcerned about starvation in Africa, or the chilling fact that AIDS is killing more young American black women than anything else is?

[Vijay]

A report dated December 28 2004 mentions Bloggers being targeted by the police in Iran.

http://www.persianstudents.org/archives/001243.html

Workarounds will come as they always do. China dulls your hopes though.

[jean-paul PINZUTI]

on december 26th 2003 the BAM earthquaque killed almost 40.000 people just a year before the indian ocean tsunami...today no-one talks about BAM....is it because of lack of freedom of the press ? or probably also because of a "lock-out" by western media ?

[turgan]

this is interesting since even mohammad ali abtahi the
shia muslim cleric who is one of Iran's six vice presidents had a weblog.

[rebecca]

i desperatly need to speak to someone about journalism in Iran . I am writing an article about the supposed 'free media' that we have to day and am intersted to compare the 'free media' in Iran with that in the UK. If anyone can help me i would love to hear from you at my email address hbecci2000@aol.com. Thanks