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an ominous sign of the online repression to come. Even as the Iranian authorities
have become more sophisticated in their approach towards combating cyber-crime,
technological advances have continued to outpace user knowledge among less techsavvy
members of the IRI’s law enforcement apparatus. The lack of understanding of
how online tools and software work, coupled with the enormous breadth and vague
language of the Computer Crimes Law, has led to persistent confusion over who bears
the ultimate individual responsibility for online content.
According to Foad Sojoodi Farimani, a university student who was arrested and
imprisoned in Ward 2-Alef of Evin prison in 2010 for allegedly insulting Islam, his
interrogators had little knowledge of the functions of an RSS feed aggregator, and
targeted him for his activities on the now-defunct Google Reader:
After they were able to access my Google Reader posts, they told me that I have
insulted Islam. I told them that I had only reposted the material, but they wanted
me to confess to writing them myself.
Unfortunately for Farimani, this faulty evidence pool formed the main thrust of his
forced confessions:
The interrogators really didn’t have any evidence against me and I would say about
80 per cent of what [they forced me to] confess to was related to what I had posted
on Google Reader. The other 20 per cent was for taking part in protests.
While the Iranian authorities appear to have come a long way in understanding the
online space from the days in which imprisoned bloggers claim that their interrogators
did not even know what an email was, it remains to be seen what impact the
codification of laws expressly penalising certain activities on computer networks and
in the online space will have on criminal penalties for forms of expression, both online
and off.
Ultimately, when the computers, internet connections and social media platforms
are stripped away, the traditional forms of repression against any form of expressed
dissent or non-conformity – however minimal – remain intact. In the days immediately
following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the possession of contraband, leftist literature
could land a person in jail; now, an individual’s “anti-Revolutionary” weblog writings
can.
It’s the same repression, just with different tools.
The Intersection of Cybercrimes and National Security
Tori Egherman 138
Early on during our stay in Iran, my husband and I often found ourselves in the
company of a judge who worked in Iran’s criminal court system. The man wore all
black, all the time, made a show of averting his eyes if I entered the room without a
headscarf, and spoke often of “a dialogue of civilisations”. His father, he told us, called
him a kafir (unbeliever) because he had spent time studying the Torah and the New
Testament.