Attorney General: Every mobile phone is a channel from the enemy

Mohammad Jafar Montazeri called mobile phones a tool with which they “operate against the Islamic Republic.” He therefore emphasized the need for filtering. This is despite the fact that officials have not yet reached a clear agreement on filtering.

On Thursday, January 31, Mohammad Jafar Montazeri, the country's Attorney General, called internet filtering "a need of the country and a form of enjoining good and forbidding evil," and said: "Filtering must always be in place so that young people do not deviate."

Stating that “the enemy has launched a cultural war in cyberspace,” Montazeri said, “We must prevent young people from going to the slaughterhouse.”

He called every cell phone "a channel from the enemy" that "is easily in the hands of various groups and they are constantly working against the Islamic system."

About 40 million Iranians use Telegram. Instagram is a close second. Many businesses in Iran also rely on internet channels, including Telegram, which has been filtered by court order.

30 million 100 thousand people bypass Telegram filtering through filter breakers. Every week, about 16 to 20 thousand Telegram channels are filtered, which, according to the Attorney General, is "still not enough."

After Telegram, Instagram filtering is in the midst of a challenge between the government and the judiciary, and although there are whispers of its filtering, it has not yet been implemented.

The filtering ball is being tossed around between its supporters and opponents in Iran, while the triangle of the government, the conservative representatives, and the Supreme Council for Cyberspace under the supervision of the judiciary have not yet been able to reach an agreement on it, to the point that Abdolsamad Khorramabadi, secretary of the working group for determining instances of criminal content, said that filtering has become a "joke."

Disagreement between Rouhani and the Minister of Communications

Reports from media outlets close to the government report that President Hassan Rouhani personally opposes filtering, while also pointing to some "differences of opinion" between him and Mohammad Javad Azari-Jahromi, the Minister of Communications and Information Technology.

Previously, Javad Karimi-Ghodousi, a representative from Mashhad in the Islamic Consultative Assembly, quoted Azari-Jahromi as saying, "We will filter Instagram soon."

Azarjahrami, however, tweeted in response that there was no "government pressure" on the ministry under his management to filter.

This is despite the fact that Mahmoud Vaezi, the head of the presidential office, spoke of some "pressure" to filter Telegram in the final weeks of his tenure at the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.

Mr. Vaezi also assured that the Telegram messaging software would not be filtered in Iran, but rather that the ability to send stickers within the country might be disabled.

“Ultimately we have to turn off the power”

Opposition to filtering is also heard from some “provincial” representatives in the parliament. Alireza Beigi, a member of the provincial representatives’ faction, believes that filtering will fuel the market for filter breakers. He not only does not consider “prohibitive measures” to be adequate for today’s conditions, but also says that this will deprive “committed” individuals of opportunities.

The MP is referring to a speech by Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, who said not long ago: "Young people should intelligently turn cyberspace into a tool to punch the enemy in the mouth."

Jalil Rahimi Jahanabadi, head of the border dwellers and Sunni factions in the parliament, also wrote on his Twitter page in opposition to filtering: "If we want to filter all the messengers in the world, we will eventually have to cut off the electricity."

The head of the Majlis' Communications Committee, as an opponent of filtering, does not consider the result of some officials' "insisting" on stricter filtering to be wise: "With filtering, there is no guarantee that unprincipled ways of entering cyberspace will not become more widespread among Iranian youth than in the past."

The financial network behind the filtering?

Internet filtering in Iran, according to reformist political activist Saeed Shariati, has an “extensive financial backstory” that has been tried in various ways over the past twenty years.

Without providing any documents or evidence of this extensive financial backstory, Shariati has referred to billion-dollar contracts from the Ministries of Communications and Information, the Supreme Council for Cyberspace, the Iranian Broadcasting Corporation, and some other organizations for filtering in Iran.

“The law is not clear”

According to the law in Iran, the main decision-making body for filtering is the Supreme Council for Cyberspace. However, some institutions influence the decision-making process.

Mohammad Kazemi, a member of the Committee for Determining Instances of Criminal Content, considers filtering to be the duty of this committee or the Supreme Council for Cyberspace, and points out that the judiciary has now entered the decision-making process. He says: "Given that cyberspace is a new environment, we have not been successful in legislating it and the task is not clear. In addition, the law has given duties to each organization; the judiciary has been given certain powers, and the Committee for Determining Instances of Criminal Content and the Supreme Council for Cyberspace have other powers."

The Committee for Determining Examples of Criminal Computer Content has not held a meeting for a long time, and the judiciary is currently deciding on Internet criminal examples.

Iran has long been known as an enemy of its citizens' free access to the Internet. Hardliners in Iran insist on filtering the Internet and denying foreign servers access to the information of users and organizations in Iran.

Source: DW