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Iran Shuts Down US Virtual Embassy
bonch writes "Less than 12 hours after the U.S. launched a virtual embassy for Iran, the Iranian government blocked access to the website, directing visitors to a government page proclaiming the site illegal. The White House condemned the move, calling Iran's internet policies 'an electronic curtain of surveillance and censorship around its people.'"
for political reasons.
Unless it wanted to, of course.
> Really? If the US dissapeared tomorrow, just what do you think would happen to the world?
Canada would slide south and we'd be that much closer to real Mexican food!
SOPA -> http://articles.nydailynews.com/2011-11-17/news/30412322_1_ip-act-rogue-websites-sopa
Laundry list of past attempts -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_United_States
(CDA, COPA, DMCA, COPPA, CIPA, COICA, and my favorite named DOPA.)
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
What does any of that have to do with the Iranian government censoring a website? You actually believe that such an act of information control is in the best interests of the citizens of Iran?
No wonder you posted anonymously.
It is hard for the US to call out other countries on their censorship when the US government itself is pushing for censorship. Here is what the conversation looks like:
US: Hey, Iran! Stop blocking foreign websites!
Iran: We are just blocking websites that break our laws. You did the same thing when it came to copyright infringement!
US: Well that was different. Copyright infringement is theft!
Iran: Yeah well those foreign websites amounted to an attempt to coerce our citizens to rebel against the government! That is even worse!
US: Well uhh you see...you are doing it for political reasons, so that is bad!
Iran: Well what is up with your copyright lobbyists and the influence they wield over your congress and executive branch?
US: herp derp.
Palm trees and 8
USA isn't as bad as X, therefore USA is good?
I hit my wife with an open hand...it's okay, 'though, because this guy I know hits his wife with a baton and at least I'm better than that.
I am an American and I live in the USA. Don't forget that "the courts" are also part of the government. The federal government often and egregiously oversteps the specific privileges granted to it by the constitution; the courts, supreme and otherwise, often allow this to happen. Our government, the judicial part of it included, have made great strides in the restriction of personal freedom, including the field of censorship.
Don't get me wrong, the USA is pretty cool, and our government is definitely an open-handed beater, but just because Iran's government sucks more, that doesn't mean that our government doesn't suck quite a bit on its own.
It is the place of the US to stand up for unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
How's that been working for you lately? Before answering, you should probably consult your Homeland Security Potential Terrorist Interaction Manual for the proper response, Citizen. Remember, the threats are amongst us.
...Steve
No, the poster is reacting to the idiocy of the post. In a world with Putin grabbing power in Russia, North Korea investing in nukes while its people starve, Iran's theocracy feverishly working on bombs, Syria slaughtering its citizens, etc, calling the US "everything that's wrong with the world" is so moronic that it evokes outrage.
I think you'd find that there are a lot of U.S. citizens that are pretty disgusted with the way our country is behaving right now, both domestically and globally, if you actually asked any of us about it. Do you think that we're all over here cheering this crap on or something? There's people protesting in almost every major city in this country right now.
Press TV IS a web site set up for US citizens to read propaganda and it IS still up. You are an idiot.
No, just like the guy who can't grasp that the idea was bad, you've STILL got this idea that they have a right to an opinion on Iran because they live in the US.
And somebody, I *think* it was one of those naughty middle east countries, I can't quite remember which, has to pay for those twin towers! Right?
Over, and over, and over, and over again...
And now it's to the point where they think they can blatantly push their propaganda and nobody will call them on it. They just stand and crank the war-machine in plain view and we are supposed to go "hmm yeah, democracy and shit, we're awesome"?
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
The Islamic Republic of Iran wouldn't exist without the US. Remember, we destroyed their democracy in 1953 because they were trying to nationalize their oil fields, and kick us out. British Petroleum began its life as Anglo-Iranian Oil, which was known as Anglo-Persian Oil before that. The company was literally founded on the outright theft of all of Iran's oil, along with a handful of American companies that got their cut after Operation Ajax was complete. We installed the Shah, he repressed and radicalized the population with our money and training, and then the people revolted, as they often do.
We helped Britain divide and administer their post-war winnings after WWII that largely has started all of this mess. (Do you think oil-rich Iraq was divided equally into Kurdish, Shiite, and Sunni populations by accident?) We backed Saddam to punish the newly independent Iran after they overthrew our Shah. We participated in the proxy wars which destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran in the 80s. We allowed Pakistan to develop nuclear weapons -- as in, we certified them as nuclear free every year -- during the 80s in exchange for helping us smuggle weapons into Afghanistan. We backed Mubarak. We were pals with Gaddafi while he was torturing and murdering people because he was selling oil to us, but that was all the way back in 2009. We allow Turkey to murder and suppress Kurds at their whim because they are an ally. We didn't say much about Syria at first because it was one of our blacksites. We're still watching Bahrainis get murdered because we like the sitting government that allows our fleet that we use to project power into that Middle East to have a massive billion dollar operations base.
The US isn't the root of all evil, but in the modern Middle East, it's the root of most of it.
Functionally, companies in the United States block Al-Jazeera. I challenge you to actually watch their CNN-like feed on your local cable station. The best I can do is their half-hour daily news program broadcast alongside BBC America and (that wretched) RT News on KCET in Los Angeles; today I consider Al-Jazeera's reporting premeir among broadcast television.
We at slashdot all know it's easy to intercept and redirect DNS (unless you're in Sweden, those fine adopters of DNSSEC), or insert in a transparent Squid/whatev with a hosts file, but I'm confident at least they're probably not using Websense, years ago I installed the mod_geoip ruleset to deny access to daily updates for requests originating from embargoed nations.
Last time I was in Syria Facebook was blocked at the port 80 level. But ssh forwarding 3128 worked fine, hopefully no one was etherealing 53. Funny it took Syria three years to finally ban iPhones, I lost a brand-new 3G getting out of a taxi in Damascus... the one time I didn't photograph the license plate of the car I was getting into.
Seeing "Persian" instead of "Farsi" struck me as odd, but I suppose I'm the odd one.
Just the one with the most prisoners. And legal bribery of your politicians. And more military than basically the world combined. Yeah, just your average modern utopia.
calling the US "everything that's wrong with the world" is so moronic that it evokes outrage.
The main difference between all of those countries doing wrong and the United States is that we do evil in other countries, and they do it within their own borders. That's doesn't make us better, it's just a reflection of our status as the world's only superpower and the relative health of our electoral system. We watched Syria and Egypt and Tunisia and Turkey murder for decades without saying much about it, because we found them useful. And back when we controlled Iran with a dictatorship, we shut down the free press just as we did after we invaded Iraq.
Hypocrisy is indeed what is wrong with the world. Grow the fuck up already.
Gitmo. Corporate p0wnership of your election process. Countrywide/BofA and the bank and wall street bailouts. Not one bailout bankster in jail. The clamp-down on the OWS movement, which is a fundamental free-speech issue.
There's 5 to get you started. The shutdown of the "virtual embassy" is small potatoes in comparison. It was also a really, REALLY dumb idea to begin with. After all, it would be easy enough for the Iranian authorities to track who accesses it, make a list, check it twice, find out who's been naughty ... same as the US has been doing for a couple of decades with Echelon..
Um....the CIA and British operatives worked together to make the coup happen. The British government was extremely unhappy that Iran had nationalized their oil production (nullifying the contracts they had). The Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat) is a decent jumping off point on this one. A lot of what we see in the region is a legacy of British Imperialism and attempts by the CIA to control the political landscape. It's not very dissimilar to the CIA training and funding of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia to change the politics of that region (French Indochina) as well. We saw how that turned out...
This is not to say that we can excuse all actions by a people, but we would do well, I think, to consider the legacy of Old World Imperialists and the Super Powers when viewing the geopolitical landscape. Further, it is perhaps as unwise to consider a people synonymously with the actions of their government as it is to consider our own way of doing things--whichever way that is--as being necessarily superior to any others. Patriotism is a laudable trait. Nationalism is a fetish that the world could do without.
The "Electronic Embassy" was "gamed" to begin with.
If you want goodwill on the path to normalizing, you don't do it by sidelining diplomatic channels and messaging unilaterally. That's hostility - not diplomacy.
If the US State Dept wanted full relations with Iran, they could open up shop tomorrow. But everyone there knows that Israel would cut off their lobby-enslaved testicles. The barriers to entry are US and Israeli.
The "Electronic Embassy" was created TO BE BLOCKED
Now, the "evil Iranian government" can be used to generate a thousand obfuscating talking points - and to frame Iran for "blocking dialogue" - when in fact, it is the US which has PERPETUALLY refused relations and negotiation.
This is a ruse. Iran is not some Western Asian version of North Korea, propagandized with some false lampoon of the US that dominates popular imagination.
As I indicated in the earlier story, there is little or nothing that Iranians need to know about the US, that they don't already know, either by watching satellite TV (which every Iranian has) or by calling their cousin in LA, which half of all Iranians have.
Iranians tend to be the most Amerophilic people you will encounter - but the US has been able to do extensive damage to that impression in the past few years. They seem to be on the path of eliminating all good graces.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Before judging blindly, have the decency to look at the website : http://iran.usembassy.gov/
There seems to be some strange reflex that everything the US does, must be for some evil agenda.
I'm European , so i recognize the tone. However, our own leaders are just as bad ( if not worse ).
Slipping shoelaces ?
From http://iran.usembassy.gov/
"In democracies, respecting rights isn't a choice leaders make day-by-day, it is the reason they govern."
"When a government hides its work from public view, hands out jobs and money to political cronies, administers unequal justice, looks away as corrupt bureaucrats and businessmen enrich themselves at the people's expense, that government is failing its citizens," stated U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the opening of the multi-country Open Government Partnership (OGP) Forum last week.
-- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
I would argue that the U.S. has already failed its citizens.