But many inside and outside Iran believed the regime was just taking advantage of the outrage over the video to act against an email system and search engine it cannot control.
“Due to the repeated demands of the people, Google and Gmail will be filtered throughout the country until further notice,” Abdol-Samad Khoramabadi, a deputy minister charged with Internet regulation, told the Fars news agency Sunday.
Khoramabadi said the decision was a response to growing outrage over the “Innocence of Muslims” video, which has incited violent, anti-American demonstrations.
Critics paint the govern-ment’s move as an effort to block access to competing ideologies and tools that can be used for populist organization, but the government insists it is not doing so. Instead, Minister of Telecommunication Reza Taqipur said the move would prevent other countries from compromising Iran’s state secrets. He didn’t say how Gmail or Google Search could touch anything in Iran that people inside Iran didn’t wish it to touch.
Iranians have access to the World Wide Web, but it is anything but unfettered. State filtering, wholesale blockades of sites like YouTube, and the routine shuttering and censorship of social sites like Facebook and Twitter provide a crippling experience that has come under attack from democratic and human rights advocates in the past. Iran has always maintained that these policies are not aimed at censorship, but meant to “protect” citizens from offensive material—but the regime’s definition of offensive material includes criticisms of the regime.
Mahmud Tajali-Mehr, an Iranian telecommunications expert in Germany, told the BBC that Iranians routinely bypass government firewalls with VPNs (virtual private networks) to access blocked Western sites. “Every schoolchild knows how to bypass restrictions by using VPNs, it’s very common in Iran,” he said.
The unsecured version of Google Search without the secure “https” prefix is still available in the Islamic Republic. But the lack of security eliminates any guarantee of privacy.