Recently in Iran Category
I've decided to re-integrate my political and Iran-related postings into TechnoSocial. It's hard enough managing one blog, two was too much. They'll be categorized as "Politics", "International" and/or "Iran" as appropriate. Read or ignore as you wish.
This is a good article with a brief history of Iran/U.S. relationships, and how they color (and hurt) our interactions today. I recommend reading the rest of it.
The report summary can be found here (United States Institute of Peace). The PDF of the report is here.
Photo Credit - souroshbagherzadein the "Iran Project" pool on Flickr.
Yesterday my daughter Shireen asked me again to help her get around the filters at school. She can get to her email, but she can't get to DeviantArt, where she posts photos and artwork. Nor can she use her IM client, and she'd wanted to ask me a question while she was at school. I pointed her at a web IM client that would probably work, and promised to set up an encrypted proxy server on our web site so she could browse wherever she wanted. I also pointed out that her problem is in miniature the same problem faced by millions of folks in Iran, China and other countries that try to restrict the flow of information to and from the internet.
While I can sympathize (in theory) with people who see the internet as a corrupting influence, I do not sympathize with the view of "the State as parent", and furthermore, I believe the correct solution to corrupting influences (whether you are a parent or a country) is education and knowledge—not hiding them under a rock and pretending they don't exist. If your meme can't win the battle of information, then it doesn't deserve to survive. (I suppose it's not terribly surprising that such a darwinist approach to ideas doesn't go over well with theocracies. :-) And of course in the case of Iran and China, two of the biggest censorship offenders (how nice to know that Iran is using American software to do the job), the censorship has far more to do with maintaining power than any particular ideology.
In any case, while looking for something completely different this morning, I came across the following Firefox web browser extension.
I actually hadn't realized that Iran blocked Flickr, there's an active Iranian community there.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. But it's a pity, Flickr's a great way to see what Iran really looks like right now.
I've started a separate blog focused primarily on news about Iran. There is certainly some overlap (the first post is on Yahoo & Microsoft banning Iranian email users, which certainly fits right into the techno-social space), but I've kept it separate since a lot of it will just be politics and news references. If you are interested, you can find it (and an explanation of why I'm doing it) at Iran Outside In.
Here is my letter to Newsweek on the subject of Google censorship in China.
The question of whether to work within an oppressive regime, or hope that a boycott will force change, is always a hard one; and I'm not going to judge Google on their decision. Keep in mind that such censorship requests don't just come from China--even France and Germany wish to censor external web sites. Nonetheless, there is no question in my mind that Yahoo overstepped the bounds when they turned over identifying information on a blogger.
However, in all this fuss we are missing an even more important example of censorship complicity by American companies. At the same time that the United States is encouraging the people of countries like Iran to exercise their right to disagree with their government, American technology is being used to prevent freedom of speech in those countries. Iran, and other countries in the Middle East, use software from companies like Secure Computing to block their citizens from accessing everything from Iranian bloggers to the BBC Persian News Service. While Secure Computing denies having sold the software to Iran, there is no question that they didn't provide sufficient safeguards to prevent the dissemination of the software to such countries. In a age when word processors get shipped with restrictions which require them to validate their license with a remote server, it seems to me that software which can be used to limit the liberties of people around the world should be locked down quite a bit tighter. At least Google has the excuse that they are expanding access to some information. This software is designed solely to provide censorship. It is a weapon against freedom of speech, and it should be regulated like any other weapon.
For more details on the use of American censorship software in other countries, see the OpenNet Initiative at http://www.opennetinitiative.net/.
"Iran's Internet filtering system is one of the world's most substantial censorship regimes. Iran has adopted this extensive filtering regime at a time of extraordinary growth in Internet usage among its citizens, as well as a tremendous increase in the number of its citizens who write online in Farsi.... The Internet has become an important information resource in Iran. Polls show that people trust the Internet more than any other media outlet, including domestic television and radio broadcasts. Beginning in 2000, Iranians began to create internal news sites to circumvent the state's controls over traditional media sources. Blogs, both Iranian and from elsewhere, are increasingly popular, and Iranian servers host thousands of blogs." - http://www.opennetinitiative.net/studies/iran/
