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June 26th, 2005, 17:38 GMT

Iran Tightens Grip on the Internet

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As we've told you in some of out previous articles, the sense of freedom people can enjoy while surfing the Internet is in grave danger in some parts of the world. Since everything else is already subjected to censorship, now some of the governments for which the idea of free speech is a mortal enemy are imposing a higher level of control over their citizens' online activities.

This is the
case of Iran, since the latest reports from Western researchers say that the Iranian government is tightening its grip on the internet, blocking content in the Farsi national language and restricting what citizens can publish on web journals.

In the beginning, the targets were only English-language web sites based out of the U.S. and Europe, but then the Iranian government slowly began censoring Iranians posting Web journals and blogs. Internet service providers have strict orders to prevent Iranians from communicating with each other, by blocking posted messages, which contain Farsi keywords.

John Palfrey from Harvard University says that Iran shows a high level of sophistication in filtering, matched only by that of China and of few other countries.

Well, given these circumstances, all that we can hope for is that maybe, one day, this kind of thinking will be considered obsolete and all the people will be able to express themselves freely in the true "land of the free", the Internet.

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