As Elections Approach, Iran Uses "Far More Advanced" Internet Censorship (dailydot.com)

Patrick O'Neill writes: Election time in Iran means increased censorship for the country's tens of millions of Internet users. But this months parliamentary election, experts say, comes with a new level of aggressive censorship from a government notorious for authoritarianism in cyberspace. "What's happening [right now] is far more advanced than anything we've seen before," said Karl Kathuria, CEO of Psiphon Inc., the company behind the widely popular encryption and circumvention tool Psiphon. "It's a lot more concentrated attempt to stop these services from working."

Comments

Sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, these guys sound real awesome. I know! Let's give them $150 billion dollars in order to pretend they're not building nukes for a little while! And then when they break the agreement, we'll just pretend they didn't. Let's also pay them a nice bribe of another billion to return our soldiers they took hostage. But doing that would make our President look incompetent, so we'll still do it but just have our buddies in the media completely ignore the story.

Re:Sweet

[khelms]

Depose the Libyan government or fail to depose the Syrian government. It doesn't seem to work well either way, does it?

Re:Sweet

[gtall]

You are President Truman. You have lost nearly 300,000 servicemen and women, plus many more civilians. You have just helped to defeat a very nasty Germany. The Japanese have defended the near islands (Saipan, Guam, Iwo Jima) to nearly the last man. Those fights were nasty The home islands have been mobilized down to even school children with pitchforks. An unbeaten Japan means you will have to deal with them for years in the future. The American people are damn tired of war. To invade Japan, your military leaders tell you, will take anywhere from nearly all you have lost so far to upwards of 1 million, they cannot be precise. The Russians are establishing their asses in Eastern Europe, Stalin likes to make trouble. They have kicked Japanese butt in Manchuria but have no fleet to assail the home islands.

You have some nukes which may or may not work, and which may or may not cause Japan to capitulate. And you only have 2 or 3 of them. What do you do Mr. President? You must act one way or another. To leave an unbowed Japan means to declare defeat and tell Americans they've wasted all those lives in the Pacific. And you have to tell them there will be a low grade military conflict for the next 10 years which could lead to another war just as bad as the current one.

The U.S. made the correct decision. Attempting to re-write history with all the accumulated facts it took 50 years to uncover and then accuse the U.S. of being negligent in not knowing all them at the time (and I'd dispute that "current" analysis) is just disingenuous.

The U.S was attacked by Muslim nutjobs who declared war on the U.S. The U.S. tries to minimize civilian casualties. To leave the Muslim nutjobs unfought means to hand them the tools to attack the U.S. mainland, which they have pledged to do time and again. You are President Bush or Obama, you must act or watch Americans die at the hands of Muslim nutjobs claiming it would be wrong to fight back. What do you do Mr. President?

The Muslim nutjobs didn't need any reason, and indeed had none, to attack the U.S. They did it because it is a means to political power in attracting recruits. If the West didn't exist, they would need to invent it. Religion is beside the point for them other than it is a very convenient recruiting tool.

Re:Obama abandoned Iranian people in 2009

[quantaman]

Iranians were in open revolt in 2009

If Obama were a Islamic Manchurian candidate, what more could he have done for radical Islam?

Well he could have attacked the Iranian regime with heavy rhetoric and publicly allied himself with the protesters. That would have made it easy for the regime to discredit and kill the reformist movement.

Instead he stayed back and a few years later got a relatively reformist president who's on much better terms with the west.

He's allowed ISIS to grow.

Because a Whabbist Sunni Arab movement is totally relevant to this discussion about a Shia Persian country.

He gave nukes

Yeah, because there's no more effective way to give someone nukes than by having them shut down their nuclear program and undergo a level of inspections generally loved by weapons inspectors.

and $150 billion to the Iranian mullahs

Shame on him for giving Iran back their own money!

And leaving the mullahs in power wasn't based on non-interference principles. Just ask Muammar Gaddaffi about that...

Brilliant idea, take the Muslim country in the middle east with the most sympathetic population to the US and then launch an unprovoked war again them, that's the way to combat terrorism!

Great point using Gaddaffi as a reference too, because Libya is doing absolutely great since then!!

The U.S. is much more civilized

[SuperKendall]

Instead of censoring the internet, we use superdelegates to fix elections, and let people say whatever they like. After all the opinion of the people are irrelevant so why not?