American taxpayers are now funding anonymous Internet use for the people of Iran. Anonymizer Inc has set up proxy sites for IP addresses located in Iran.
Evidently Iranians can surf over to the Farsi equivialent of www.iranianfreedom.ir and bypass the Iranian government’s censorship of “immoral” websites. Okay, they still can’t get to porn sites, but they can probably get to the SDMB now.
I am certainly not against the Iranian people getting information from sources not controlled by the mullahs. But I can’t help but note the irony of the situation: the privacy of Iranian IP addresses are protected by the US gov’t, while laws like the DMCA & Patriot Acts lessen individual privacy rights here in the United States.
Still no porn? Bad call. Sure, political websites might eventually open their minds to a representative secular state, but hot lesbian action would have the ayatollahs out on the street next week. Sadly it’s unlikely to last long, the Iranians will just track the proxy address and either block it or make examples of users.
Blocking porn is probably smart. The porn link strategy would backfire both here and in Iran.
The Religous Right in the US would go ballistic if they knew their tax dollars were being spent to facilitate the distribution of pornography. The mullahs would have a propaganda field day accusing the Great Satan of trying to corrupt Iranian youths with hot lesbian action.
Plus, I’m thinking the LLBean catalog would be considered porn in Iran.
I am not surprised that we are doing this in Iran, I think it is probably a good idea. The United States should always encourage freedom of the press, freedom of speech and the non-establishment of religion in those parts of the world that lack these basic freedoms.
I suspect that one reason why the US government made such a deal is that they will probably now have access to all sorts of data about what Iranians are searching for. Not only does it fight censorship, it also has the potential to bring in a wealth of intelligence data.
Great Moogly-Googly, Sxyzzx! Great cite, and thanks for the head’s up. I have to admit I’m taking it with a little grain of salt, as I find EFF to be paranoid sometimes (and the government is really out to get foreign students these days, so that guy is paranoid but for the right reasons). But based on the plain text of the law only a little bit of salt – barely enough to season it, and no danger to my cholesterol levels. Yeesh!