Iranian Government Cuts Off Internet Access Again

AlbionTourgee writes "It is reported that Gmail and Yahoo mail at least have been blocked in Iran, along with many English-language sites. While news of demonstrations seems to be getting out of the country, the government appears to be trying to prevent people within Iran from communicating and from learning what's happening. It remains to be seen whether TOR and Freenets can be effective to combat this sort of effort to block communications, and whether the general circulation of information about the protests around the world will help."

Comments

This is their right.

[Anonymous Coward]

They are the Government of that country, whether or not we happen to agree with their policies. If they want to ban automobiles and have everyone ride around on horses, it is their perogative. We can get our undies in a bunch as much as we want, and hem and haw and harrumph about the situation. They are a sovereign nation and may make their own laws as they please. If you don't like it, revolt. Oh that's right, you don't live there but would like to impose your views and laws on them.

Re:This is their right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pah. The US government didn't mind wiping their collective arses with "inalienable rights" when they coined the term "enemy combatant" and stuffed a bunch of people in that oubliette called GitMo.
I think that the founding principles of the USA are fantastic.
I also think that anyone who believes that the USA actually still functions on those principles is a deluded moron.

Re:This is their right.

[King_TJ]

This is true, but there's also a thing called "personal responsibility". The United States has gotten itself into a massive debt (weakening its status in the world in the process), in no small part because of our propensity to try to protect those inalienable rights for people who aren't even our own citizens.

I wish the people of Iran the best in this situation, but it's really THEIR fight to fight. If there's a small way people in other countries can assist with technology (hosting Tor servers or proxies or what-not), that's great! But individual rights and freedoms are only as "valid" as one's willingness to fight for and demand them. (Even United States law recognizes that people typically have the opportunity to "sign a right away", if they wish to waive it.)

Re:This is their right.

[DoofusOfDeath]

They are the Government of that country, whether or not we happen to agree with their policies. If they want to ban automobiles and have everyone ride around on horses, it is their perogative.

If we follow that logic, then it would have been wrong for Germany's neighbors to make a fuss about how it treated Jews during WWII.

Are you sure that your policy is a good one?

Re:This is their right.

[ph1ll]

"The USA was founded on the premise that human beings have some inalienable rights endowed by their creator."

Unless you were one of the million or so Africans who were shipped over to live and die as a slave.

Some perspective, please...

Re:This is their right.

[Shakrai]

And if Iran was the USA, you'd have a point.

What part of "inalienable rights" is so hard to understand?

Re:This is their right.

[shutdown -p now]

Rights, inalienable or otherwise, really don't mean a lot to the person holding all of the guns. At a certain point you're only as entitled to your rights as the people who hold the power think you ought to be and your own willingness to fight them to the death for those rights. You can parrot on about your rights as much as you want, but they'll just shoot you in the head.

The thread is about how people who are not living in Iran can justifiably criticize its actions, and actively promote change inside, not just by words, but by actions (including directly supporting the opposition in political struggle and even armed uprising), regardless of the notion of state sovereignty. The inalienable rights theory gives a theoretical foundation for this - if all people have those rights, and they transcend state boundaries, then defending those rights is a right thing and a duty for all people who already have them, sovereignty be damned.

We don't care

[petrus4]

The only people who do care, are gullible, interventionist Americans.

I'm fed up with the Middle East. The region is this planet's equivalent of a high school oval. It's the traditional venue that pretty much everyone goes to when they want to have a fight. There is conflict of some sort happening there constantly, on a literally second by second basis.

These endless conflicts also are not ours. The rest of the world very rarely has any real stake in them, for the most part. Oil is about the only legitimate interest anyone else has there. Semitic monotheism, and who owns a particular mosque or church or whatever, is utterly meaningless as a legitimate incentive for war.

If the Iranian government wants to completely exterminate its' constituency, let it. If the Arabs and Jews want to mutually remove each other from human memory, let them.

At least if that were to happen, the rest of us might finally get some peace and quiet.

Re:We don't care

[Warhawke]

"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to stand by and do nothing."

- War and Peace

Re:We don't care

[Anonymous Coward]

"These endless conflicts also are not ours. The rest of the world very rarely has any real stake in them, for the most part. Oil is about the only legitimate interest anyone else has there."

I disagree. Because there is this thing called "history" in which both the U.S., Britain, France, the USSR, and several other countries had many decades (and in some cases a good century or more) of meddling invested. It's hard to say whether the countries in that part of the world would have been better off with or without that meddling. Some things might be better, some worse. But one thing is pretty certain: most of the borders weren't defined by the countries that now exist there. They were defined by outside powers. And that is rather inconvenient when it comes to cultural and political issues in the region (case in point: the kurdish peoples, which are split between 3 countries, but there are many, many other such examples). On top of that you have the issue of Palestine and Israel and a whack of religiously-motivated fanaticism in most of the countries -- a small fraction of the population resorts to violence on that basis, but it's an annoying fraction.

Oh, this sounds so unique, doesn't it? No. Look back in European history: it's the same fricking story for centuries. Sectarian religiously-motivated wars that went on and on and on. Heck, the situation in Northern Ireland is only somewhat settled, and the former Yugoslavia was and continues to be a horrible mess. The U.S.A. was practically founded on people that wanted to leave the religious wars of Europe.

Then there's the final element: oil. You can't get around the fact that that part of the world was geologically blessed with something over half of the currently-known oil reserves. No, there is no sign of this ever changing for decades at least. That means money and power flows into the region from all over the world. The people in power there have to do something with it (build up their military and pick fights with each other over ancient grievances), while the rest of the world takes a keen interest because so much of their own economic lifeblood flows from the region.

Yes, it's very nice to suggest "hands off" or "let the idiots turn each others' countries into parking lots", but A) your hands were already in there decades ago and there is a certain amount of responsibility (hello: the Shah of Iran?), and B) your economy would go into an even more serious tailspin than it is now if full-blown war broke out again between major oil producers in the region.

Oh, there is also the humanitarian aspect of caring about fellow human beings and hoping for a better future for them. They do have to ultimately sort it out for themselves, but there's nothing wrong with being supportive in a limited and cautious fashion. That's rather different from going in with an invasion force on a trumped-up rationale, of course.

Re:Silly Mudslums

[eldavojohn]

Their religion tells them to oppress and be oppressed...

Uh, I don't think that's true. At least not from what I've read in the Qur'an, there wasn't anything detailing what's going on in Iran right now and saying that that is how you must run your nation state. In fact, if you look at a lot of laws like the extreme forms of Sharia they are more founded on what leaders after Muhammad's death decided he meant. In my mind I liken it to the perversion that several Popes have put in place ... in the name of The Bible. Despite the Popes calling themselves Christians, they spent their lives very comfortably unlike Jesus Christ. Similarly certain leaders today call themselves Christians and Muslims yet do not live their lives like either Christ or Muhammad. Usually it's not safe to compare religions like this but I'm trying to illustrate that these historical religious figures suffer distortion today across the world in Iran and the United States. Perhaps one is worse than the other but your criticism of "mudslums" religion telling them to be oppressed is no more apt than me saying that Christianity tells Christians to be oppressed. Indeed, speaking for any religion that has hundreds of diverse sects is a ridiculous act in and of itself.

I might also warn you that Western media (especially in the United States) concentrated on only the bad things from "The Middle East" from the 1980s to the 1990s. Although it's recently become much better, I read a book by Edward Said called Covering Islam that itemized a few publications and looked at the hilarious slant. Granted, he cherry picked those works and the book was not as even handed as I had hoped, he did point out to me that I do not know the average life of a regular citizen in Tehran ... much less most of "The Middle East." Because we weren't paying our media outlets to disperse that, we were only rewarding them on shock reporting mostly spurred by the Iranian hostage crisis. That's all we saw of Iran on the news and for a while that's all Iran was to us, a hostage crisis ... not a country with millions of citizens doing a lot of the same stuff we do here in the states.

Here come moral relativists

[Robert1]

Sorry, no. Moral relativism is complete bullshit. Some things are morally wrong ABSOLUTELY. One of them is supressing your populace's ability to communicate. I'm sick and tired of people justifying morally corrupt behavior just because it's state-sanctioned. Sorry, forcing women they have to wear a head-dress is absolutely not acceptable. Denying them basic human rights is absolutely not acceptable. Persecution of homosexuality is absolutely not acceptable. EVEN IF ALL THESE THINGS ARE STATE SANCTIONED. I'll take that one step further and say that it is even absolutely morally unacceptable for a radical state to possess nuclear weaponry, even more absolutely morally unacceptable for such a regime to have such unabashed hatred based on another people's religion.

The difference between a state and a mob is that one controls the military and one does not. Simply being a group does not magically grant anyone moral superiority or the ability to redefine basic human rights. Saying that its ok for ANYONE to do that is fucking retarded, and something that is continued by apologists. Your moral 'relativism' is the reason why atrocities like this are allowed to perpetrate.

Re:Tor can be blocked as well.

[Nadaka]

I just don't think they would tolerate becoming prisoners in the their own nation.

People who preach unquestioning submission would *never* tolerate becoming prisoners. Riiight...

Quite possibly "riiight". Its not necessarily the people teaching unquestioning submission that would tolerate becoming a prisoner to the state, its that those same people coming to power may use the state to force that unquestioning submission on others. I fear that America has far more in common with Iran than a lot of us would like to admit.

united states

[MrSpiff]

tell me again, how is this different than the bill to allow the president of the united states to "shut down the Internet" in case of emergency? or is this simply a case of different intentions?

Re:SAVAK, anyone?

[Shakrai]

The United States government saying ANYTHING about Iran silencing dissent is hypocrisy of the worst kind.

What makes you think I have anything to do with the United States Government? Nice bit of redirection ya got there though.

Re:That's news to me...

[Shakrai]

Iran hasn't committed a war of aggression in more that 200 years.

One could argue that their sponsorship of Hezbollah represents acts of wars against Israel and Lebanon.

Re:Tor can be blocked as well.

[DavidTC]

Especially the bombing of a military barracks in a war. One side of which we were, in fact, supporting. (Granted, we weren't actually fighting yet, but that just means their actions were, duh, a declaration of war against us for supporting their enemies.)

Remember kids: Bombs dropped from airplanes on civilian targets to kill military personal that might be inside, and certainly kill a bunch of civilians: Normal war.

Bombs driven up in trucks to military barracks to kill only military personal: Terrorism.

Re:That's news to me...

[Eli Gottlieb]

Or we could argue that the Arab countries and associated terrorist organizations declaring wars of extermination against Israel are acts of war against Israel, which has a right to be there whether or not the Arabs want it.