Users leery of Iran's plan to 'purify' cyberspace

Iran is rapidly bolstering its already extensive cyber censorship defences to combat what it calls a "soft war" being waged by the West.

In the past month, an institute affiliated with Iran's ministry of communications and information technology called on domestic companies to help "purify" the internet, which it said has been polluted with "immoral sites".

The institute tactfully left out more pressing reasons why building a cyber-fortress is a top priority for Iran's leaders: they fear internet espionage and virus attacks from abroad and want to stifle opposition outlets at home.

"We have identified and confronted 650 websites that have been set up to battle our regime," Hamid Shahriari, a conservative cleric who is a member of a recently established council to censor the internet, said in March. "Thirty-nine of them are by opposition groups and our enemies, and the rest promote western culture and worshipping Satan, and stoke sectarian divides."

The call for assistance to construct "a healthy Web and organise the current filtering system" rang alarm bells among Iran's vibrant but harassed online community.

Many were concerned it means the authorities are accelerating long-standing plans to develop a separate halal, or "clean", national internet that would operate independently from the World Wide Web (WWW).

Journalists, cyber activists and many ordinary Iranians fear that once a home-grown and controllable "intranet" is in place, authorities will cut off access to the global internet.

Iranian officials deny any such intention, branding recent reports that Tehran plans to do so in August as "baseless" western propaganda. But they have provided few details about their intranet project, other than to say it will be launched in the near future.

In a related scheme, Iran said last month that it would unveil its own Internet search engine before the end of the year. This, according to Iran's police chief, Esmail Ahmadi Moghadam, means Iranians no longer have to use western search engines such as Google, which he branded an "instrument of espionage".

The Iranian government has already established a national email system which requires users to give their names and phone numbers.

But many experts doubt that Iran, ranked the No 1 enemy of the internet this year by the French media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF), has any immediate plans to sever access to the WWW.

"Some business companies affiliated to the government would lose a lot of money if that happened," said Amir Bayani, of the London-based anti-censorship group Article 19. He hopes their opposition will scotch any attempt to stop cyber contact with the rest of the world.

Cyrus Farivar, a technology journalist and author in Oakland, California, agreed. "The internet is simply too important for financial transactions," he said. "It seems to me Iran wants what China already has."

China's "Great Firewall" tightly controls the Web and cuts links at any signs of politically uncomfortable chatter, but does not restrict business activity.

Iran's call for help to filter the internet could indicate that any plans to cut access to the WWW are a long way off, Mr Farivar said: "Why invest in such a project if it's going to be shelved anyway?"

Instead, there are suspicions that the Iranian regime is aiming at what RSF called a system of "digital apartheid". The government, along with the Revolutionary Guards, big business companies and religious leaders would have access to the WWW while most ordinary citizens would be limited to a fast but censored intranet.

Iranian authorities already block millions of websites and blogs. Nineteen cyber dissidents are in jail, four of them sentenced to death, RSF reported.

Managers of cybercafés are compelled to install cameras on their premises, take customers' details and list the websites they visit. Millions of Iranians who use virtual private networks to bypass the country's internet censorship have been warned they are committing a crime.

The regime is particularly jittery about social networking sites. Although filtered, Facebook has some 17 million Iranian users, an official for Iran's paramilitary Basij militia said last year.

At a military parade in Isfahan last month, jeeps carried banners denouncing Facebook as an instrument of the West's "soft war" against Iran. There was a symbolic stoning of Facebook and YouTube at an exhibition of digital media in Tehran last year.

Taking its lead from China, which blocks Twitter but has established its own well-received equivalent, Iran is creating its own versions of popular but banned outlets as it gears up to launch its intranet.

A copy of the BBC's filtered Persian website surfaced two weeks ago, featuring stories that cast Britain in a bad light and sniping at Queen Elizabeth II.

Underscoring the regime's view that Iran's online community is a destabilising threat, the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in March established a centralised structure to oversee web censorship.

The "Supreme Council of Cyberspace" includes the president, heads of intelligence, media chiefs and the Revolutionary Guards, which recently said they have recruited and trained a 120,000-strong "cyber army" over the past three years.

The Revolutionary Guards also launched their own secure internal communications network for senior commanders.

Iran first floated plans for a national intranet in 2006. Officials say it would reduce bandwith expenses, protect public morality and improve security.

Left unsaid is the regime's prime motivation: to prevent any repeat of the protests that convulsed Iran in the wake of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election in 2009, when millions took to the streets in demonstrations largely organised and documented online.

More recent events, however, have confirmed Tehran's fears about cyber security on the foreign front. There was a suspected malware attack last month on Iran's main oil export terminal and on the oil ministry. The virus drew comparisons to the Stuxnet worm that targeted Iran's nuclear facilities and other industrial sites in 2010. Tehran blamed Israel and the United States for that attack.

Ironically, analysts said, such cyber assaults help the Iranian regime argue that its Draconian measures against the internet stem from legitimate security concerns, rather than a desire to cut the free flow of information.

mtheodoulou@thenational.ae
source http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/users-leery-of-irans-plan-to-purify-cyberspace