In recent years, some Iranian bloggers have been sent to jail and many have had their sites filtered. If the Iranian parliament approves this draft bill, bloggers fear they could be legally executed as criminals. No one has defined what it means to “disturb mental security in society”.

Such discussion concerning blogs has not been unique to Iran. It shows that many authorities do not only wish to filter blogs, but also to eliminate bloggers!

A state policy to control blogs

About a year and a half ago, the Iranian government demanded that bloggers should register and provide their names and addresses on a site called Samandehi. Many people believed such a process would facilitate legal action against them.

Bloggers resisted and many published an “I do not register my blog/site” banner on their blogs. The Government then realised it cannot have real control of the situation, or force bloggers to register.

In the footsteps of Yemen?

Unfortunately, the Iranian case is not unique to the Middle East and to the world. In April, MidEastYouth talked about new repressive measures adopted by Yemen, quoting Walid Al-Saqaf, YemenPortal.net’s administrator:

“This week, the government’s Minister of Information threatened to file lawsuits against news websites on the justification of ‘inciting hatred’ or ‘harming national interests’ and the other usual excuse they often use to prosecute journalists. The threat is even more severe for websites because the government would use the penal code instead of the press law. This means that website owners could receive even death penalties.”

“Don’t be upset, we’ll execute you legally”

Nikahang, a leading Iranian online cartoonist and blogger, says [Fa]:

if this draft bill becomes law, everything will be based on interpretation and a simple blogger will be considered a center to destroy people’s religion! What can I say? Only people who disturb people’s mental security could support such a thing.

Mirza Kasra Bakhtyari writes [Fa] that Ali Larijani, the Iranian Parliament’s President, supported discussing this draft bill and added that they have talked for hours with the Judiciary about it.

Ghomarashegahneh says [Fa]:

Mentioning ‘blogging’ among crimes such as kidnapping, raping, armed robbery makes accusing bloggers easier than before… Such a law will harm the mental security of society more than the poor bloggers, who do not know what awaits them.

The blogger adds that the real causes of mental security problems are the economic crisis and repressive government policies.

Bazri warns [Fa]: “We should do our best to stop members of parliament from approving this draft bill. Tomorrow it will be too late. It is easy to accuse a blogger of apostasy and corruption. Let’s tell the Parliament that to think differently is not a crime that should be punishable by death.”

Balocuh has published a cartoon where a cleric tells a woman about to be executed: “Don’t be upset, we’ll execute you legally.”

Nikahang, a leading cartoonist and blogger, has published another cartoon where Ali Larijani,parliament speaker, is “executing a blogger.”

Credit: Nikahang

The morning session has started and in the opening remarks the co-founder of Global Voices Online Ethan Zuckerman thanked everybody who came to the summit. Sami Ben Gharbia, the Advocacy director of Global voices noted that some activists could not make the summit due to visa problems and other restrictions.

Some pictures from the summit as it progresses:

The Morning Session:

Rob Faris listening to Rebecca MacKinnon

Some of the panelists

Some of the participants

Nart Villenueve: Detecting internet filtering

More participants

Roger Dingledine: Discussing TOR

Chris Walker: Between TOR & Psiphon

Afternoon Session:

Robert Guerra discussing the user perspective

Participants get interactive

Xiao Qiang on how to empower citizens’ voices

Paul Maassen questioning “is there a need for a fund for cyber activism?”

Participants placed their views

Brainstorming session

Please keep tuned in the summit website and this site for more updates.

MohammadR is very satisfied with the response “FreeAccess Plus!” has garnered so far within the Iranian blogsphere. On Balatarin (which means “the highest” in Persian) an Iranian version of Digg, 23 people have voted for a story that praises the FreeAccess Plus! extension as something that is “making miracles” (معجزه میکنید)“.

“Some major Persian bloggers wrote about this extension before it was made available on “Mozilla Addons” site,” MohammadR told Global Voices Advocacy. “Only during the first week, FreeAccess Plus! has been downloaded 150 times. Now, after about one month from it’s release, it has been downloaded more than 3500 times,” he added.

MohammadR said that FreeAccess Plus! is very simple to install (see the video tutorial below). “Just go to “https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6139“, and on the bottom of the page, click “Install Now” button. This will pop up a new window where you will be asked to confirm the installation, click again on “Install Now”. Note that you need to restart Firefox before the extension works.”

Just install the plugin and restart your browser; and Firefox will do the rest! You will be able to access Youtube, Flickr, MySpace and all websites listed on the add-ons page.

The current version of “FreeAccess Plus!” does not support the option to add websites to those currently listed. MohammedR said, however, that this feature — an editable and configurable list — will be added in a future version of the program.

MohammedR hops that his “FreeAccess Plus!” plugin will serve his fellow citizens by helping them bypass the censorship that is targeting the social web. “Most of the Iranian bloggers were unhappy about the unreasonable blocking of Web 2.0 and social networking websites” he says.

P.S: For more information about the web 2.0 censorship and anti-censorship, please refer to our Access Denied Map.