Slashdot Mirror
Iran's Web Censorship Filters Supreme Leader's Own Statement
halfEvilTech writes "Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's own words have now become a victim of Iran's massive online censorship infrastructure. Khamenei, according to a translation by RFE, replied [to a question about the censorship laws themselves]: 'In general, the use of antifiltering software is subject to the laws and regulations of the Islamic republic, and it is not permissible to violate the law.' However, his own use of the word 'antifiltering' apparently triggered Iran's own filtering system, making Khamenei's words inaccessible to most Iranians."
Which seems to be a universal problem with such filters: even for proponents, they tend to backfire.
Ummmmm, no. They are just minorly inconvenienced by it.
He should have said: ant1f1t3r1ng...
If I am not misunderstanding, he basically just laid down a fine line that implies that using anti-filter technology IS ok, as long as you arent doing that specifically in order to commit another crime. A pretty reasonable line to parse - and one that would give anyone caught in simple possession of such tools a nice legal out. "I only got that so I could read the Supreme Leaders statement! "
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Have gnu, will travel.
Irany
How Iranic.
This isn't secret filtering. This is the government (claiming it is only) trying to block out non Islamic content, it's censorship and they probably have similar policies for other media. In that situation it's no secret that they're filtering, or that they're censoring. In fact we censor child pornography in the west, and as a society people know about and are fully aware of this censorship. We don't make an effort to censor discussions of how to get around the censorship of child porn, but if you believe Islamic values will be compromised by exposure to decadent western culture and imperialist thoughts, or zionist propaganda then discussions of how to get around filtering are very much problematic.
Journalists here have a certain amount of power to know things which are censored but they don't talk about, or don't talk about yet. Usually the press gets a pre-brief before official briefings, they know what that loud banging sound at the whitehouse is, they know who is accused of a crime even if their name is protected by a publication ban etc.
Filtering is just an effort to enforce censorship. It's not the only method, and if you're reasonably upfront about what you're censoring then there's no need for secret filtering, it's just filtering in support of existing censorship laws. You may think Iran is not a country of decent laws, but I would argue they are middle of the road. Easily half the world is far more backwards, corrupt and far more arbitrary than Iran. They may not be good, but at least they acknowledge that they're censoring content and using filtering to try and enforce that.
they're not a country of decent laws because there is a group inside which don't need to adhere to them and which can use them as they wish, hence they're not a real republic and a lot of the laws they do enforce are globally considered morally suspect.
the article is about how it's against the law to circumvent the filtering. no specific laws are mentioned actually, just that it's the statement from the religious leader that circumventing it is against existing laws(it's possibly revolutionary? you see, they have blanket laws to cover just about anything they want).
but discussing even the legality of anti-filtering hits the filtering and is illegal to try to find out about, you start making too much noise about the existence of the filtering and how impractical it makes things for iranians and you'll soon find that you don't have a newspaper to work for.
and that is why israel has such easy time finding iranian folk to do their bike bombing.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
US gets most of its oil from Canada, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Venezuela. Only a fraction comes from places it's bombed, so the popular idea that the US bombs for oil has no basis in reality. In fact, after gaining complete military control of Iraq and its infrastructure, the new government was not only free to not sell to the US, but were allowed to sell a majority of their capacity to China, an economic adversary of the US.
You don't get it. It's not about where the US gets its oil. It's about multinationals who contribute to war mongering politicians getting the oil...that's why we went to war. Don't you get anything? These politicians and corporations are GLOBALISTS. They aren't out treasure hunting to bring the spoils back to the US people or even government (supposedly an extention of the people), they're setting their pals who contribute to campaigns up with wars to get their companies into Iraqi oil fields. Where the oil goes once a multinational oil company gets its hands on it is irrelevant. GET A CLUE, OK???
When policies set by upper management have no effect and the network runs smoothly, upper management takes the credit for the network running smoothly. When those policies, no matter how retarded they are, have a negative effect on network performance, the IT department gets blamed. I don't see how this will be any different in Iran.
As though the west doesn't have incompetent policies or mind numbingly stupid implementations? Ever heard of the TSA in the US, bridges to nowhere (also in the US), or the dozens of different rules about who can and can't publish mein kampf? Remember when Ted Kennedy, the US senator (when he was alive) was on the US No fly list? Half of europe still have rules on sunday shopping. You know they used to have rules in the EU about the shapes of food so that it looked like the right quality on store shelves? Ya, the rest of us do some mind numbingly stupid and wasteful things too. Iran doesn't have a monopoly on that.
In the US if you don't like a law and are rich enough you simply pay politicians to remove it for you. If you're in the UK you sit in the house of lords and you vote against laws, and certain laws don't apply to you, even if you don't live in the country and are in prison in a foreign country you still retain these rights and pay by the way (Lord Conrad Black of Crossharbour for example), the same with the commons but it's different rules.
The Iranians system, because they only recently restarted government hasn't formalized the legal dodging of tax by rich people, and all of that stuff the way the rest of us have over the last few hundred years. Do you know that if you rape a child outside of france but are a french citizen they won't extradite you, even to their one of their closest allies? (roman polanski). In Iran they would probably hang you and stone her to death or force you to marry her, or one, then the other 2.
If you have a law that demands filtering circumventing that law would seem striaghtforwardly illegal. It's also a perfectly viable system to allow laws to be written or interpreted by decree by judges or the clergy. Fairly regularly supreme courts (or whatever you want to call them) broadly interpret or re-interpret rules to their liking, the french have a particularly complex set of supreme courts that cover different things. Until 2005 the highest 'court' in the united kingdom were the law lords (i.e. judges who were made lords), but they, as part of the house of lords lost their supreme court function only in 2009, 2005-2009 is a fairly complex arrangement.
The UK very carefully blocked the pirate bay by demanding specific action from ISP's. That's different than saying it is illegal for a person to access the pirate bay from within the UK. Even if we discuss those as being effectively the same thing, they are not. Iran, Saudi etc. would ban even looking at pornography for example, and require ISP's to have filtering to enforce that. Part of their system is to have clerics in government who guide the government on how to keep morals pure. And I mean Iran's guardian council, not the Lords Spiritual in the house of Lords in the UK who theoretically serve a similar purpose but are significantly diluted given that the Church of England doesn't get to write laws.
Iran *is* a republic. They have no monarchy (arguably the Shah is the legal monarchy/government but in exile but that's a whole other problem), and their 'guardian council' is some combination of the presidency and supreme court wrapped into one body. I'm not saying that's necessarily a good idea. But it is a republican system, as they act,, at least officially, with an elected body that is chosen from some defined subset of the population.
and yes, it's ironic that the filtering blocked the supreme leaders comments about filtering. That highlights why filtering is unlikely to be particularly good, but that would apply to equally to any country or government type.
Hitler raced through his surrounding countries like a knife through butter. Saddam fought an ineffectual multi-year, very bloody war with Iran which ground to a stalemate. He couldn't even fly an airplane in his own airspace due to the no-fly zone after Gulf War I. World War III was not an issue here. And ascribing to politicians any great wisdom is truly a mistake.
Quite true. But he was the only one brutal enough to keep the peace in that country. You saw what happened with sectarian violence after he was unseated.
The UN does not tell the United States to do anything.
The UN is a bureaucratic formality.
Politics never stops.
Actually, you are right. Iran is definitely a republic, in the same way Rome was a Republic. In the way way that the Senate and People of Rome was oligarchic, Iran is theocratic. Iran does have elections and more to the point, it does have leaders elected or chosen to carry out governmental tasks that represent others. It does not have a monarch, although the Supreme Leader is pretty darn close to an elective king.
Iran is not is a fully *democratic* republic nor does it have a very large degree of liberty associated with it. You can still have an oligarchy or a theocracy and have it be a republic. Republics get a good name these days because they usually appear after monarchies fell and are usually democratic. The Islamic republic that Iran is set up as is a throwback to an older, more general sense of a republic where the leaders are not necessarily elected in a fully democratic manner or even with reference to the People.
To understand how certain countries work, we need to understand that censorship is a valid policy that makes a lot of common sense, particularly to people who feel that others cannot be trusted to make good decisions when given information freely. What we understand, living under regimes that do not strongly enforce censorship, is that hiding information is a tool that can hurt a lot more than it helps in the long run. Humans have no inalienable right to not be censored, that is purely a Western liberal legend, but we do believe with some justification that people make better citizens on average if they are free to learn the facts without being limited by someone else's rules.
Seems like a Clbuttic mistake