Google – AFP, 8 November 2012
 |
An Iranian
man fixes his satellite dish as his sister watches, on the roof
of their
apartment bloc in Tehran in 2002 (AFP/File, Behrouz Mehri)
|
WASHINGTON
— Washington unveiled sanctions Thursday against top Iranians and national
bodies, including the communications minister and the culture ministry, hitting
back for media and Internet censorship.
The move
against Communications Minister Reza Taghipour came after he was blamed for
ordering the jamming of international satellite TV broadcasts and restricting
Internet access, a State Department official said.
The United
States was determined to stop the "Iranian government from creating an
'electronic curtain' to cut Iranian citizens off from the rest of the
world," said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland.
Four
individuals and five bodies were placed under sanctions by both the State
Department and the US Treasury for "censorship or other activities that
prohibit, limit or penalize freedom of expression or assembly by citizens of
Iran."
They were
also accused of limiting "access to print or broadcast media, including by
jamming international satellite broadcasts into Iran," Nuland said in a
statement, denouncing the "regime's insidious actions."
Internet
users in Iran were temporarily unable to access their Gmail accounts from late
September to early October.
Mohammad
Reza Miri, a member of the telecommunications ministry committee tasked with
filtering the Internet in Iran, was quoted by the Mehr news agency as saying
that the Gmail block was an "involuntary" consequence of trying to
reinforce censorship of Google's YouTube video-sharing site.
"Unfortunately,
we do not yet have enough technical knowhow to differentiate between these two
services. We wanted to block YouTube and Gmail was also blocked, which was
involuntary," he said.
"We
absolutely do not want YouTube to be accessible."
Iran has censored
YouTube since mid-2009, after opposition demonstrators protesting the
re-election victory of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in polls they believed
rigged started posting videos online of their gatherings.
Iran's
ministry of culture and Islamic guidance was also sanctioned for closing down
newspapers and detaining journalists.
Other
entities targeted included the Press Supervisory Board and the Center to
Investigate Organized Crime, which helped "identify Internet users who
published material insulting government officials," the US Treasury said
in a statement, adding some of the people were later arrested.
"Finding
that balance between preventing technology that could constrain and permitting
technology that would expand their access to information is kind of a difficult
question," a senior State Department official told journalists.
Also
included in the designations were Ali Fazli, a deputy commander of the Basij
militia blamed for launching attacks on foreign websites, including foreign
media organizations, and Iran police chief Esmail Ahmadi Moghaddam, who is in
charge of tracking Internet activities in the country.
Iranian
software companies AmnAfzar Gostar-e Sharif and PeykAsa, as well as their
founder, Rasool Jalili, were also targeted for monitoring Web traffic,
including moves to block access to Facebook, eBay and YouTube.
The Iranian
government was engaged in a campaign to "curtail" freedoms and
"prevent the free flow of information both into and out of Iran,"
Nuland said in her statement.
"Countless
activists, journalists, lawyers, students and artists have been detained,
censured, tortured or forcibly prevented from exercising their human
rights," she added.
The new
designations resulted from an August 2012 act that came into force on Thursday
and mean Americans are banned from doing any business with the targeted
Iranians, who are also barred from traveling to the United States.
Any of
their assets in the United States will also be frozen.
Other newly
rolled out sanctions focused on individuals designated for sponsoring
terrorism, in particular the Kata'ib Hezbollah group responsible for violent
attacks in Iraq.
A third
tranche of the designations targeted the support network of the Iranian
Revolutionary Guards Corps -- including the National Iranian Oil Company, which
is already under sanctions, and two Tehran universities.
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