Kamangir (Archer)

More Crackdown on Blogs, on the Way?

Kamangir | August 7, 2007 | Category Human Rights, Islamic Republic

To understand what happens in Iran, you have to be patient and follow the events diligently. This is an example,

1- On December 2006, the Islamic Republic announced a new mandate for Iranian blogs and websites to register in a state-run website and give out all their private information. The issue faced sever restraint from the Iranian blogosphere and was even ridiculed when the bloggers managed to prove that the design of the website was illegally copied from another source. Further investigation revealed that even the president has not registered his blog (he has not done it yet, as of the time of writing these lines).

2- On July 2007, couple of major Iranian blog services were seemingly hacked into. Two of the service providers move to .ir domains.

3- A few days ago, it was claimed that by moving into local hosts, which operate inside Iran, the security of the Iranian websites can be increased [Persian] .

Masoud Lavasani, an Iranian journalist, is afraid [Persian] the hack has been an inside job to cause a big immigration into local hosts. Asking “What has the big brother planned for the Iranian blogosphere?”, he discusses the idea that the administration is planning to impose more control over the blogosphere. This is all in time with rumors of a more extensive filtering to be carried out and to create a national Internet under strict control of the administration.