Today’s headline: Iran blocks Facebook access as election nears
“There has been no official word, but most observers assume the government was trying to minimize the effect the site might have on June 12 presidential elections.”
Does that work? Aren’t there multiple paths to any site?
And aren’t a lot of communications via satellites, obviously not controlled by Iran.
What exactly would they block?
They can block every outgoing terrestrial path of every terrestrial ISP leading to the addresses of Facebook. That might be a list of 1000 addresses, but that’s readily doable.
They can also tell any ISP who has a satellite overhead and a business presence in Iran that they will be arrested and thrown in prison UFN if anyone with a dish gets to that particular list of IP addresses.
So the only people who are going to get to the blocked site are people who have access to a satellite run by a company with no presence in Iran. But how exactly does that company get paid for providing this service? SO there arent’ too many people with such a service.
In short, this much filtering will stop 99% of the end-users from getting to Facebook.
The other big loophole which governments try to block with varying success, from nil to pretty good, is anonymous proxies. These are services set up to bypass blocks like I described above.
From Iran, you go to a proxy site in, say, South Africa. And it in turn, forwards your page request to Facebook & when the response comes back, they forward it on to you.
But these too can be blocked. In sufficiently police-state counties, the mere fact you visited a known proxy site is proof you were trying to do something otherwise prohibited. So maybe the secret police stop by for a chat tomorrow, no?
There are no leak-proof filters. But you only have to stop maybe 2/3rds of the traffic to destroy the mass-movement potential of any web site. And filtering upwards of 90% while deterring a lot of the rest is commonplace.
Yup. The Great Firewall of China is probably the best-maintained national censorship firewalls, but other countries do it best. I remember that back when Paul in Qatar was Paul in Saudi, he would often have to get people to describe links to him because the Saudi government blocks a lot off internet sites.
Even non-repressive governments do this, or would like to. There was a hullabaloo recently about the the Australian government censoring certain sites. It seems that the policy has not been enforced yet, though, and is widely unpopular.
Here’s a Wikipedia article about Internet censorship in Iran.
Oddly enough Iran is a main source for finding p2p copyrighted material in the Western World