A "Halal Internet" for Iran?

Is it really possible to cut an entire country from the World Wide Web? Well at least, it seems like some are trying. The Iranian authorities have announced the lauching, from 2012 on, of an “Iranian internet” which should substitute progressively to the foreign searching engines and foreign hosted websites. They indicated in the end of December that they had already repatriated the hosting of 90% of the official websites for reasons of security, and encouraged the companies to do so too. The “Iranian internet” should thus function as a national intranet and be cut from the rest of the world. The information was released by Iran’s ministry of information and communication technology. Despite this project, the government has also been reported to be working on new ways of surveillance, such as software robots aimed at analyzing the content exchanged in emails and private chats. But why "Halal"? Because the new Intranet would be "authentically halal from the ethic and moral point of view", and completely free of any "obcene website".Those measures should help the government control and survey in a more effective way the online activities of Iranian users. Though it was said that those programs were primarily aimed at defending Iran’s military, sensitive data and banking information from outside attacks, it is clear that Iran is walking in a direction that doesn’t seem reassuring.

It is no mystery that Iran is not exactly the best friend of “netizens”. Bloggers and cyber activists (or just people who dare expressing on the net their disagree with the regime) are regularly arrested, the country faces regular internet shutdown, and has recently passed a law that forces every cybercafé in the country to keep very detailed records about their users’ identities and activities on the internet. In March the authorities have cut, for the first time, any access to the Virtual Private Networks, which until then allowed companies to go beyond the blockings to work with foreigners, and Iranian people to communicate freely with the outside world via social networks like Facebook or Twitter. The Iranian ministry of technologies and communication, Reza Taghipour, had said in November that the use of VPN constituted an infraction. “The VPN is illegal and we have the technical means to prevent its use » he declared.

With more than 36 million of people using the web for 75 million of inhabitants, Iran is the country in the Middle East that is the most connected to the internet, which played a major role in the popular demonstrations that agitated the country after the reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009. Since then the authorities have been cutting or reducing internet liaisons when they fear demonstrations from the opposition. The regime is also regularly accusing the Western countries of using the Web to lead a non official war aimed at making Iran weaker, some officials are even affirming that Google and Yahoo! constitute a threat for the country’s national security. Sure, the process is not going on smoothly and more and more initiatives are working on fighting the censorship and control of the internet, such as the website http://www.blockediniran.com/ which is testing in real time if any website is at the moment accessible or not from Iran. But despite all the efforts, Iran is making unstoppable progress towards their project.

The report of 2012 on the enemies of the internet written by Reporters Without Boundaries thus gives a good overview of how the cyber freedom is being repeatedly violated by the authorities.

The report can be found here.

As the report exhaustively explains, other countries have been following this path: Cuba or Syria for example. And it is very well known that North Korea has been completely separated from the rest of the world, with a blocked access to all Western based websites for the inside population, and the launch of internal websites which can’t be accessed from the outside. But while in those country, the determination of people to fight for their cyber rights seems able to make the country walk in a better direction, Iran seems to be walking backwards. In China, North Korea or Cuba, despite all the measures from governements to enforce the censorship, we can see that efforts are constantly being made to open the country to the outside world. On the contrary, Iran is being more and more protected from it, and more more focused on itself. The result could be the apparition of the same thing that already exists in North Korea: an almost completely blocked access to the World Wide Web, combined with an exclusive intranet, intranet that would be concording with the country's official identity. The tendency can be observed not only with the Internet, but also with economy, security, and information. So is Iran really going to cut itself from the general globalisation movement? It is very unlikely that the generation who conducted the "Green revolution" in Teheran will let that happen...