After a disruption of access in Iran to Google’s e-mail services and other international Web sites starting last Thursday, access appeared to be restored on Monday, raising questions about whether it was a censorship test by the government for coming elections or an effort to quell possible street protests.
It was a year ago on Feb. 14 that the Green movement leaders Mir Hussein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi were placed under house arrest for contesting the results of the disputed 2009 presidential vote. Observers of Iran questioned whether the recent disruption may have been an effort to restrict encrypted communication before the parliamentary elections on March 2, prevent demonstrations on behalf of the imprisoned leaders or perhaps conduct a test for a widely anticipated government-run internet.
Since Iranians turned to social networks and the streets during the disputed election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, the government has blocked access to YouTube.com and other sites. Over the last two years, people have reported that Twitter and Facebook and other major social networks have also been largely inaccessible, according to data collected by Herdict.org, a project by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard that examines access to the Internet around the world.
The recent disruption affected international sites using the Secure Sockets Layer protocol, which displays addresses beginning with HTTPS, allowing users the ability to send and search encrypted messages and avoid government scrutiny.
“Last fall Google switched to encrypted search by default, and the situation in Iran might represent a focus on restricting encrypted traffic — information that’s more difficult for the government to eavesdrop upon,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and co-founder of the Berkman Center.
Twitter and Facebook have moved in the last year toward using the Secure Sockets Layer protocol to increase security for their users.
Since the Iranian government has not assumed responsibility for the outage, Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, said it was impossible to say precisely what was behind it. He said Iranian leaders had spoken in recent months about creating a “clean internet, safe for the moral values they hold.”
“They want to nationalize the internet,” said Mr. Deibert, who is also one of the principals behind the Open Net Initiative. “This may have been a test to prepare the groundwork.”
Many people in Iran are able to get around government blockages, however, using proxies and VPN.
Amin Sabeti, a blogger and researcher who writes about Iran from Britain, said the Iranian government wanted to create its own version of the internet because it viewed the Internet as an enemy. He said that government leaders began to attack Google more aggressively two or three months ago, claiming it was “a spy tool.”
“Today, one of the members of Iran’s Internet filtering council said Google is using SSL and we cannot monitor it, therefore we’ve blocked Gmail and Google’s services,” Mr. Sabeti said.
On Global Voices, the international blogging platform, some bloggers said they suspected the disruption was aimed at limiting communication in the weeks ahead of the election and among people supportive of the Green movement. “This blocking can be considered as the regime’s attempt to stop Green activists from informing people to take part in demonstrations in the final days of February,” said a writer for the blog, Azadi-Esteqlal-Edalat.
Iran’s Ministry of Communications and Technology has denied knowing of the disruption, saying the origin was elsewhere.
“Everything is up now and running as normal,” said Earl Zmijewski, vice president and general manager of Renesys, a New Hampshire-based company that analyzes global Internet traffic.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 15, 2012
An earlier version of this post misspelled the surname of Ronald Deibert.
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