On October 3, Iran resumed jamming BBC Persian, Radio Farda and Voice of America’s Persian Service, affecting reception from Morocco to Eastern Europe to Indonesia. Eutelsat confirmed that the intermittent jamming was coming from inside Iran.
Eutelsat last week appealed to the French government to take up the issue with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) as a primary matter. It said it had been making appeals since May 2009 for action “to put an end to unacceptable deliberate jamming of broadcast signals” by Iran.
But on Monday, when the EU adopted new sanctions on Iran, Eutelsat swiftly pulled the plug on all Iranian radio and television broadcasters using Eutelsat’s Hot Bird satellites.
The action blocks nine television channels and 10 radio stations operated by Iranian state broadcasting and sent around the world via Eutelsat.
Most of the Iranian public receives those broadcasts over the air and is not effected by the Eutelsat satellite action. But outside Iran, recipients depend on satellite broadcasts. The main impact of the action will not be on Farsi broadcasts, but rather on the Arabic language Al-Alam, which has been trying to influence people in the Arab world. The English language PressTV will also be shut off from its main audience, though that is not believed to be large like Al-Alam’s.
PressTV told its viewers there were seven ways to continue getting its broadcasts, The easiest was over the Internet at http://www/presstv.com/live.html.
The latest jamming began the day after Tehran police confronted anti-regime protests in the streets. The jamming may have been intended to block news of those protests and forestall protests on succeeding days.
PressTV threatened to sue Eutelsat “to compensate for any material and spiritual damages.” It said the cutoff decision “shows that the European Union does not respect freedom of speech and Ö is a step to mute alternative news outlets representing the voice of the voiceless.” It ignored the years of complaints of Iranian jamming of Western news outlets.
At one point several years ago, VOA broadcasts were being blocked in the Western Hemisphere on the uplink—that is, on the broadcast from the ground in North Carolina to satellites overhead. The origin of the jamming was tracked to Cuba and the US complained. The jamming stopped immediately. US officials believe Iran never told Cuba that it had made its embassy in Havana into a jamming station.
Jamming is prohibited under the rules of the International Telecommunications Union, of which Iran is a member.
The US Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) said one of its Internet anti-censorship vendors reported that traffic from Iran using its software and servers increased substantially after the jamming resumed this month. This suggests that Iranian listeners and viewers shifted to the Internet to receive news.
The BBG is a US government-owned corporation created by Congress decades ago to run all of the US government’s international civilian broadcasting efforts.