For two years now Iran has been more energetically getting into
Information War. This includes defense (a special Internet censorship
unit) and offense (a Cyber War operation that is being detected more
frequently on networks outside Iran).
While the Cyber War attacks have the attention of thousands of
Internet specialists world-wide, fighting the censorship campaign
against Iranian Internet users depends on volunteers, especially
Iranians living abroad. There are actually thousands of these, often
just informally helping family and friends back in Iran. But there are
some volunteers who are extremely annoying for the Iranian censors. The
Revolutionary Guard in Iran has made it clear that it is very angry with
these expatriate Iranians and there is some fear that they might resort
to assassination to eliminate the most troublesome of these expatriate
Internet experts. Such killings are rare these days.
But from 1980 to the late 1990s Iranian assassins killed over 110
Iranian exiles who had been marked for death by the new religious
dictatorship in Iran. International outrage forced the Iranians to back
off and that pushback turned into more and more sanctions against the
religious fanatics running Iran. After September 11, 2001 it became even
more difficult for Iran to carry out these murders, because Western
nations were much alert to the presence of Iranian killers and Iranian
agents in general. But these killing still take place, or at least they
are planned. In the last few years several assassination operations have
been discovered and shut down before anyone got killed. But the
Iranians are still trying.
The Iranian government is having more success at cutting most
Iranians off from the Internet. The primary effort is building an
internal Internet just for those in Iran who cannot be trusted with the
World Wide Web.
That means most Iranians are finding it more and more difficult to
reach the international Internet. Late in 2012 Iran introduced a heavily
censored local version of YouTube, as YouTube itself is banned in Iran.
China is helping Iran, as well as a lot of other countries, to censor
use of the Internet.
China is leading a worldwide tendency for police state governments to
tightly control how their subjects use the Internet. While China is
considered the most vigorous and effective censor of the Internet, many
other nations are using the same techniques and equipment, often
obtained from China. These include Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Myanmar, North
Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. None
of these nations are democracies.
All are police states or monarchies determined to keep their
subjects from having free use of the Internet. In most cases, the real
purpose is to prevent the people from overthrowing the rulers. But there
are many other nations, most of them democracies, who are also striving
to control the Internet to protect their citizens from unsavory
material. These nations include Australia, Bahrain, Belarus, Eritrea,
Malaysia, Russia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey, and the
United Arab Emirates. Most other nations are watching these efforts, as
there are many people on the planet who see the Internet as more of a
threat than an opportunity.
China leads the way in all this. But it isn't all about politics.
Iran, for example, wants to block its citizens from seeing pornography,
anything critical of Islam and most Western entertainment. China, has
made a major effort to "protect" adult Internet users from pornography,
and children on the Internet from, well, everything. The government does
this via its Great Firewall of China (officially the "Golden Shield")
system, that filters, and eavesdrops on, Internet traffic coming into,
and leaving, China. In fact, Golden Shield is more about controlling
what is said by Internet users inside China, than in controlling what
they have access to outside China.
The growing number of governments seeking to control Internet content
is all concerned about how they have lost control of information flow
because of the Internet. This control is a matter of life and death for a
dictatorship, but can be very annoying for leaders (honest or
otherwise) in a democracy. No leader (elected or not) likes to have
contrary opinions popping up. Something must be done.
Iran, like North Korea, is trying to create its own Internet, and
prevent most Iranians from having any access with the international
Internet. This is only possible if your economy is not highly dependent
on worldwide Internet access. That is the case in North Korea, but Iran
has an economy that deals a lot with foreign suppliers and customers.
That is changing, because of the growing list of international
economic sanctions placed on Iran because of their nuclear weapons
program and support for terrorism. Iran also wants more control over
Internet use inside Iran because it fears that foreign spies, saboteurs
and assassins are using it to collect information about targets and
carry out operations
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