Iran Shuts Down US Virtual Embassy 451
bonch writes "Less than 12 hours after the U.S. launched a virtual embassy for Iran, the Iranian government blocked access to the website, directing visitors to a government page proclaiming the site illegal. The White House condemned the move, calling Iran's internet policies 'an electronic curtain of surveillance and censorship around its people.'"
Yeah, America would never censor a website... (Score:5, Informative)
for political reasons.
Unless it wanted to [nytimes.com], of course.
Pot, meet kettle. (Score:5, Informative)
Laundry list of past attempts -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_United_States
(CDA, COPA, DMCA, COPPA, CIPA, COICA, and my favorite named DOPA.)
Re:Really now? (Score:5, Informative)
USA isn't as bad as X, therefore USA is good?
I hit my wife with an open hand...it's okay, 'though, because this guy I know hits his wife with a baton and at least I'm better than that.
I am an American and I live in the USA. Don't forget that "the courts" are also part of the government. The federal government often and egregiously oversteps the specific privileges granted to it by the constitution; the courts, supreme and otherwise, often allow this to happen. Our government, the judicial part of it included, have made great strides in the restriction of personal freedom, including the field of censorship.
Don't get me wrong, the USA is pretty cool, and our government is definitely an open-handed beater, but just because Iran's government sucks more, that doesn't mean that our government doesn't suck quite a bit on its own.
Re:U.S. (Score:5, Informative)
I think you'd find that there are a lot of U.S. citizens that are pretty disgusted with the way our country is behaving right now, both domestically and globally, if you actually asked any of us about it. Do you think that we're all over here cheering this crap on or something? There's people protesting in almost every major city in this country right now.
Re:U.S. (Score:2, Informative)
So please explain Iraq. Oh yes and the 1953 coup in Iran that got rid of a democractically elected government. And half a dozen countries in South America. And......
Care to make an explaiantion?
Re:U.S. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:U.S. (Score:0, Informative)
Try your foreign policy.
Re:U.S. (Score:5, Informative)
The Islamic Republic of Iran wouldn't exist without the US. Remember, we destroyed their democracy in 1953 because they were trying to nationalize their oil fields, and kick us out. British Petroleum began its life as Anglo-Iranian Oil, which was known as Anglo-Persian Oil before that. The company was literally founded on the outright theft of all of Iran's oil, along with a handful of American companies that got their cut after Operation Ajax was complete. We installed the Shah, he repressed and radicalized the population with our money and training, and then the people revolted, as they often do.
We helped Britain divide and administer their post-war winnings after WWII that largely has started all of this mess. (Do you think oil-rich Iraq was divided equally into Kurdish, Shiite, and Sunni populations by accident?) We backed Saddam to punish the newly independent Iran after they overthrew our Shah. We participated in the proxy wars which destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran in the 80s. We allowed Pakistan to develop nuclear weapons -- as in, we certified them as nuclear free every year -- during the 80s in exchange for helping us smuggle weapons into Afghanistan. We backed Mubarak. We were pals with Gaddafi while he was torturing and murdering people because he was selling oil to us, but that was all the way back in 2009. We allow Turkey to murder and suppress Kurds at their whim because they are an ally. We didn't say much about Syria at first because it was one of our blacksites. We're still watching Bahrainis get murdered because we like the sitting government that allows our fleet that we use to project power into that Middle East to have a massive billion dollar operations base.
The US isn't the root of all evil, but in the modern Middle East, it's the root of most of it.
Re:U.S. (Score:5, Informative)
Functionally, companies in the United States block Al-Jazeera. I challenge you to actually watch their CNN-like feed on your local cable station. The best I can do is their half-hour daily news program broadcast alongside BBC America and (that wretched) RT News on KCET in Los Angeles; today I consider Al-Jazeera's reporting premeir among broadcast television.
We at slashdot all know it's easy to intercept and redirect DNS (unless you're in Sweden, those fine adopters of DNSSEC), or insert in a transparent Squid/whatev with a hosts file, but I'm confident at least they're probably not using Websense, years ago I installed the mod_geoip ruleset to deny access to daily updates for requests originating from embargoed nations.
Last time I was in Syria Facebook was blocked at the port 80 level. But ssh forwarding 3128 worked fine, hopefully no one was etherealing 53. Funny it took Syria three years to finally ban iPhones, I lost a brand-new 3G getting out of a taxi in Damascus... the one time I didn't photograph the license plate of the car I was getting into.
Seeing "Persian" instead of "Farsi" struck me as odd, but I suppose I'm the odd one.
Re:An electronic curtain of surveillance & cen (Score:1, Informative)
Stop with the anti-American propaganda you liar.
Javed Iqbal was arrested in New York in November 2001, on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States and fraud in relation to identification documents. He was plead guilty to fraud, went to jail, then later released and deported to Pakistan.
Re:U.S. (Score:5, Informative)
calling the US "everything that's wrong with the world" is so moronic that it evokes outrage.
The main difference between all of those countries doing wrong and the United States is that we do evil in other countries, and they do it within their own borders. That's doesn't make us better, it's just a reflection of our status as the world's only superpower and the relative health of our electoral system. We watched Syria and Egypt and Tunisia and Turkey murder for decades without saying much about it, because we found them useful. And back when we controlled Iran with a dictatorship, we shut down the free press just as we did after we invaded Iraq.
Hypocrisy is indeed what is wrong with the world. Grow the fuck up already.
Re:I agree! (Score:3, Informative)
PROTECT IP Act was introduced by Patrick Leahy (D-VT)
Re:U.S. (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, there's a lot of things going haywire in this country right now, but you know what? I feel pretty confident in saying that I feel safer and more free here than there in Persia. I've never been to the region, granted, but I'm a proud European born imperialist American who celebrates American hegemony. America is not everything that is wrong in this world as the first poster claims, pretty far from it. America has certainly failed a lot of tests, but then my Britain and my Germany have as well, so it's hard for me knock the US for being self interested and imperfect. I would hope that Americans would know about the dark past of Chiquita back when it was called United Fruit and called El Pulpo by the locals it fed on, but most likely don't just as they don't know about the horrible things American companies like Abercrombie & Fitch have done in Saipan. That said, the world is big, but not so big we can't easily find human rights violations committed in other countries by governments, private industries, and state run businesses.
But since we're going to claim in this thread that the US is inciting rebellion in Iran with this site, let's look at some of the horrible imperialistic things that the US has done using this virtual embassy. From a quick glance, there's:
1. A section explaining visas; how they work, what type there are, how to read one.
2. A section for document reqs for birth registration and a PPT application
3. A bookmark of links to various US cabinet and mission websites.
4. Instructions for renewal of passports
5. Information on how to study abroad in the US.
That's all pretty scary stuff, isn't it? There are a couple of things that challenge Iran's fundament human right to control what its residents see and read like annual reports on human rights, trafficking, country reports on terrorism, and an International Religious Freedom Report on Iran. There's also an Open Societies page that seems to paint the US as some kind of defender of women's rights, religious freedom, etc.
Yeah, America has its bad days. So does every other nation in the world that has aspired to be more than San Marino. I know, I know, I'm being unfair in ignoring that one time when San Marino violated its neutrality during WWI as a result of 10 partisans joining the Italian Army. The Virtual Embassy is a good endeavor.
Re:I agree! (Score:4, Informative)
PROTECTIP was introduced by a Democrat
Re:An electronic curtain of surveillance & cen (Score:5, Informative)
[citation needed.]
From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/24/AR2006082401461.html [washingtonpost.com], is this:
You wouldn't be a(nother) pro-American propagandist liar, would you? Yes, it looks like you are. Couldn't even get the year right on your dissemination, could you?
Re:GAME THEORY - CREATED TO BE BLOCKED (Score:4, Informative)
holding 52 hostages captive for 444 days after invading the U.S. embassy in Tehran and having those actions sanctioned by their Supreme Leader
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat [wikipedia.org]
Re:GAME THEORY - CREATED TO BE BLOCKED (Score:4, Informative)
Re:U.S. (Score:0, Informative)
The American people have been spoon fed certain concepts for the past 70 years that they are so engrained that they don't even consider the possibility of other solutions, other ideas or other perspectives. I'm probably going to get modded down as flamebait or whatever else people use to express their disagreement with me but I'm going to say this anyway.
American foreign policy would be a joke if it didn't come attached with the consequences of death, poverty and destruction because of it. I'm going to talk about Israel first so anyone who just wants to call me an Anti-Semite because I dare to criticise the government of Israel should just skip ahead. Israel has performed some of the worst acts any government has committed in this past decade. They are directly responsible for the deaths of countless innocent civilians in the West Bank and Gaza. They have demolished whole neighbourhoods and leave the population with nothing but rubble without any compensation, any housing alternative, no basic sanitary conditions and without so much as an explanation for why they did it. Israel have killed at least 9 journalists in the last 10 years despite many of them wearing the required PRESS and TV related flak jackets, some being British and Italian, one being killed from as close as 10 metres. They have committed violations of the Geneva conventions in the form of collective punishment, establishing civilian populations in occupied territories as well as the countless number of human rights violations. They have continued to develop their nuclear arsenal in secret refusing to allow inspection of their facilities. Israel commits many of the acts which the US condemns of other regional players and yet not only does it not condemn these actions, it actively supports them. These aren't just some AC's opinion either, it is the opinion of the UN Council on Human Rights, the International Red Cross, the EU Parliament, Amnesty International and a half dozen other independent international organisations. Despite widespread condemnation of individual atrocities by the Israeli state which have received near universal condemnations from the world community, the United States still supports and funds Israel without any reservation on its actions.
The US continues its policy of supporting governments which will be sympathetic to the US economic and military interests without any regard for the massive human rights violations that those regimes will commit in the mean time. They have replaced one dictatorship with another, directly overthrown legitimately elected governments, have flooded money, weapons and training to terrorist (by US definitions at any rate) organisations which are attempting to seize power from legitimately elected governments. The US has launched attacks in foreign countries with little regard for civilian deaths so long as it achieves their aims, a double standard of the highest order. It supported tyrannical organisations which oppressed and enslaved their own people simply because they weren’t communists. All of this happened in South American and Central American in such high amounts that it has left the regions economically crippled in some cases to this very day. I once saw a testimony by a US official who suggested that Hugo Chavez doesn’t have the US interests at heart of course he doesn’t, he’s the leader of Venezuela, he has Venezuelan interests at heart! But the arrogance of the US to think that if you don’t support the US that you are against democracy or freedom has left the world feeling very resentful of such a statement in the face of such overwhelming hypocrisy.
The US citizens need to realise the actions of their past governments will not be healed overnight by electing a Presiden
Re:U.S. (Score:4, Informative)
Personally I love the quote from the website that sites Hillary Clinton (speaking as a member of the current Administration) saying that behaviors of the current Administration are a demonstration of the government failing its citizens.
Re:GAME THEORY - CREATED TO BE BLOCKED (Score:5, Informative)
You're right, it's not like the US ever did anything to provoke the storming of their embassy, like orchestrating the overthrow of Iran's democratically elected prime minister, supporting the toruture and murder of thousands of Iranian citizens and installing their hand-picked despot to ensure the US and UK continued to control of Iran's oil for the next 26 years.