New Roadmap for Filtering and the Leader’s ‘Will’
Iranian parliament representatives rejected an emergency proposal to “organize social messengers” on Sunday, December 11. Supporters of the bill, which included 95 parliament members, including 22 members from the Hope faction (reformists), intended to add it as two notes to section 3 of article 67 of the sixth development plan law, but failed to secure the necessary votes.
Article 67 of the development plan is primarily devoted to policies related to the national information network.
The “social messengers organization” bill is currently under normal review in the cultural commission of the Islamic Consultative Assembly. Within two months after the final passage of this 32-article bill, “all domestic and foreign messengers” are required to comply with it.
Efforts to organize social messengers have a long history, followed through multiple sessions of the “Supreme Cyberspace Council” from January 2, 2017 to June 6, 2017, resulting in the passage of an upstream document titled “Policies and Actions on Social Messengers.” According to article 11 of its internal regulations, the council’s resolutions are announced by the council’s secretary after the leader of the Islamic Republic is informed. This process was completed by August 2017, and on August 17 of the same year, this upstream document was circulated to relevant agencies.
After circulation, the Islamic Consultative Assembly sought to convert this upstream document into law, with two institutions, the “Parliament’s Cyberspace Committee” and the “Parliament Research Center,” becoming active in this field. The result of these efforts has been the controversial bill “social messengers organization.” But why is this bill controversial:
1) The first controversial issue in this bill is the formation of a “Supervisory Board,” an institution similar to the press supervisory board, but broader, longer, and more targeted. In this 13-member body, representatives of institutions affiliated with or close to the leader of the Islamic Republic (judiciary, state broadcasting, Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Islamic Propaganda Organization, law enforcement, civil defense organization, and seminary) number seven, ensuring relative control over the supervisory board.
This board is “tasked with supervising domestic and foreign messengers and deciding on the continuation of their activities based on the decisions of the Supreme Cyberspace Council.” More precisely, work that was previously scattered among the “National Cyberspace Center,” the “Working Group on Determining Criminal Content,” the “Deputy for Cyberspace Affairs of the General Prosecutor,” and judicial branches would now be decided and enforced by this supervisory board, with the “judiciary” serving as its executive arm for implementing punishments provided for in the law.
One notable punishment in this bill is imprisonment or fines for those who have created channels or groups on filtered messengers like Telegram. Furthermore, individuals or organizations seeking to operate effectively on messengers and “create channels and groups” must obtain permits. The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance is to announce the conditions for effective operation, but if this resolution includes personal channels, individual citizens seeking to launch a channel would need to obtain permits.
According to a report published in February 2018 by the National Cyberspace Research Institute under the National Cyberspace Center, the number of Farsi channels on Telegram reached over 754,000 by February 2, 2018. Even if we assume that 20 percent of these channels were shut down after Telegram was filtered, based on the provisions of the new law, we have only about 500,000 illegal channels on Telegram whose activity is inherently law-breaking and would need to obtain permits to operate on other messengers after leaving Telegram. This number alone demonstrates the disorder and impracticality of such a law.
2) According to this bill, “only after the complete launch of the National Information Network” and its verification by the Supreme Cyberspace Council will foreign messenger activity be permitted. The National Information Network launch has been on the agenda of the Iranian parliament and government since 2005 and was supposed to be completed by the end of 2016 according to the fifth development plan.
Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, Iran’s communications minister, stated on March 12, 2018, that finalizing all projects related to this network requires two years, and it appears that at least until the end of 2019, there is no news of the complete launch of the National Information Network. It can be said that the bill’s authors, with this article, have effectively denied the possibility of foreign messenger activity until further notice, so resources would be completely monopolized by domestic messengers.
3) Another controversial article in this bill is the implementation of “digital border patrol and cyber defense” centered on the “General Command of the Armed Forces” and approved by the commander-in-chief. Currently, the primary controllers of internet gateways are the communications and information ministries. Iran’s communications minister, who declared his opposition to these changes on November 6, 2018, stated: “Some believe that the communications ministry and operators lack the necessary authority to enforce governmental regulations and purify cyberspace.”
To better understand this issue, one can refer, in a realistic simulation, to the activity of the IRGC’s intelligence organization alongside the Ministry of Intelligence, which has gradually caused the government and Ministry of Intelligence to be overshadowed in many cases and security and intelligence activities. Gholamreza Jalali, head of the Civil Defense Organization, emphasized on November 13, 2018, that “the government or ministries of intelligence and communications should not worry about one new security layer being placed beside them,” saying: “The Cyber Defense Command is responsible for the country’s digital border patrol, and the recent plan merely validates the legal identity of this command.”
Based on the provisions of the “National Cybersecurity Defense Strategic Document” issued on June 12, 2015, with the approval of the leader of the Islamic Republic and signed by the chief of staff of the armed forces, the “Cyber Defense Command” operates under the supervision of the “Civil Defense Organization.” This organization has been appointed by Ayatollah Khamenei’s order since 2013, and its head is also appointed by the suggestion of the chief of staff of the armed forces and the order of the commander-in-chief.
Thus, if the bill is finalized, the appointees of the leader of the Islamic Republic, in addition to controlling the supervisory board, would also gain control of internet gateways. In recent years, it has been repeatedly reported from the leader of the Islamic Republic that “if I were not the leader, I would follow up and be the head of cyberspace.”
The “social messengers organization” bill can be described as a new step toward operationalizing this desire. Ayatollah Khamenei, who entered this field in March 2012 by forming the Supreme Cyberspace Council, now, with executive arms in the field of monitoring and controlling social messengers and internet gateways, has a new roadmap available to implement his wishes.
This new roadmap, of course, following usual procedures, requires financial and logistical support, and on this basis, the bill has also made strange proposals to support domestic messengers, including that “issuing mobile phone licenses and activation” is conditional on pre-installing effective domestic messengers. The Central Bank grants these messengers permission to use and offer “cryptocurrency,” “electronic payment,” and “e-wallet,” and a “Fund to Support Content and Domestic Messengers” is also formed with the goal of “strengthening superior Iranian Islamic content.”
These various proposals were put on the table while in the past six months, despite allocating a five billion toman loan, five gigabytes of free bandwidth, and a 70 percent reduction in domestic messenger usage fees, it was announced that government support for five messengers would be stopped, and domestic audiences continue to prefer using Telegram through VPNs—whose usage has tripled. These reports clearly indicated the failure of the policy to localize messengers.
On October 10, 2018, Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi said in the television program “Handwriting” that in December 2016, “one of the country’s high-ranking officials said domestic social networks told us we can cover 40 million subscribers today…I told them it’s great that they have confidence, but their capacity is one and a half million. They didn’t accept from me. When the events of December 2016 happened and Telegram and Instagram were removed, they went to social networks, but they couldn’t reach one million and all faced problems. That official then called me and said I now have confidence in what you said that day, believing you were right and they didn’t have this capacity.”
Based on available evidence, the communications ministry, after December events, took action to satisfy the views of high-ranking officials by being generous and granting numerous financial and logistical facilities to domestic messengers. Despite the failure of these disbursements and gifts, it seems that the authors of the “domestic messenger organization” bill want to lay a richer table for domestic messenger managers. Something that is not surprising and in Iran’s politics and economics, there is a lot of hand over hand for wasting resources; for now, bread is in soft power.
Source: Radio Farda
