Iranian Gov keeps eye on Web

By ALI JAAFAR The Iranian government has already started its crackdown on the Web. Its Revolutionary Guard recently bought technology to jam signals, a frequent tactic. Many sites, including the BBC's popular Farsi service, have been blocked and filtered (often using North American-made software). In a sign of the government's increasing media savvy, Hossein Saffar-Harandi, the country's minister of culture and Islamic guidance, publicly endorsed blogs in February and decreed that regulation of them would now come under his purview. Furthermore, the government has employed hundreds of its own bloggers to spread pro-regime messages. Iranian state TV announced in December plans to launch its own English-language satcaster by the end of 2006 to counter "Western propaganda against Iran." Iran already has an Arabic satcaster, Al-Alam, which launched in 2003 shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq. Suspicions also abound that Your TV, a London-based Persian satcaster, is secretly funded by the Iranian administration. Many Iranians are determined to get past the attempted curbs. "I have at least 4,000 visitors to my Web site every day even though my site is blocked and censored heavily. The Iranian students are finding a thousand ways to get past the censors. They're even telling me that they're now building their own antijamming devices," says Ali Nourizadeh, who presents a nightly one-hour show, "Window on the Fatherland," on the privately funded Channel One. http://www.variety.com/VR1117944505.html