The fact that the European Union is one of the Islamic Republic’s most important trading partner is not exactly news, nor is the regime’s particular close relationship with Germany.
However, what may be of surprise to some is the amount of technology European firms are providing the government with the second highest rate of executions, the Islamic Republic.
A Wall Street Journal article discusses how some of Europe’s largest companies are helping the Islamic Republic monitor and track communications inside Iran.
There are some points worth mentioning regarding telecommunication companies operating inside Iran.
First, the regime has absolute authority over these companies meaning the Islamic Republic can at any point ask to eavesdrop on any calls.
Second, the telecoms are in a very powerful position since they essentially control a subscribers cell phone. The telecoms have the ability to push software to a cellphone (OTA, over the air) without the user even knowing.
While the European Union is thumping it’s chest declaring their support for human rights, it’s difficult to believe their rhetoric considering they are providing sophisticated technologies to a regime that has a history of violently suppresing human rights. It is a sad case of irony, that while the EU discusses resolutions for “violations of obligations” by the Islamic Republic, it is helping the very same regime apprehend, arrest and execute political dissidents.
There are steps Iranians inside the country can take, for starters take out cellphone batteries before going to meetings, discussions, etc. It is not enough to just turn your phones off. By doing this, the regime will not be able to track you or listen in via your cellphone. Face-to-face meetings that can’t be eavesdropped via technology means they will have to send a human to track and listen to the conversation. Simple arthietmetic dictates they can’t track everyone, especially since a portion of the Intelligence Ministry is sympathetic to their compatriots.
In short, Iranians must begin using more primitive means of communication as they can’t be intercepted as easily as digital communications.
I recently posted a blog entry of a video clip where Roozbeh and I explain how to organize political campaigns in Iran. An Iranian posted a comment explaining that these “velvet”, “orange”, and other colorful “revolutions” are not possible in Iran, and I completely agree.
To begin with, a revolution means a 180 degree change, however various entities have wrongly attributed the label ‘revolution’ to the various reforms that have taken place in Eastern Europe and else where.
If a political movement is working within the framework of the constitution and electoral laws and they are able to have their preferred candidate voted into office, that is not a revolution. Rather it’s the electoral process working. These countries in which these colorful ‘revolutions’ took place did not have a vetting institution for candidates like the Islamic Republic’s Guardian Council. In addition, these countries’ constitution did not decree that they are the government of God, as the Islamic Republic’s constitution states. Therefore, the relevant democratic institutions and processes existed, very much unlike the Islamic Republic.
As such, the previously- mentioned events that have taken place should really be labeled as ‘reforms’ because there is nothing revolutionary about it.
Just because Iranian reformists were / are able to have one of their candidates vetted by the Guardian Council, and as a result of the [s]election process the reformist candidate wins, does not mean that this constitutes a <pick a color> revolution.
Establishing a secular republic (by default overthrow of the Islamic Republic) in Iran is a real revolution.
So let’s call those working within the system of the Islamic Republic as what they are, reformists and changes within as reforms, not revolutions.
This demonstration took place at Shiraz University.
I’ll paraphrase the slogans for those that don’t understand Persian.
“Jombeshe daneshjoo-e amadeye giam hast” means “The student movement is ready to revolt”.
The next slogans “Ma zando marde jangim, bejang ta bejangim” roughly means we women and men are warriors, fight, so we can fight you back.”
Obviously the movement is getting more and more radical as we had predicated in statements years ago. The slogans the youth are now screaming is a lot more violent then what was uttered during the uprising of 1999.
The Tehran attorney-general’s adviser said on 19 November that the authorities were responsible for filtering out “five million websites.”
I was on a VOA program where one of the guests was claiming that a five-person committee determined what cites would get censored.
Just by using simply arithmetic we can conclude that the regime is using a script / program to analyse contents of sites to determine whether they contain any specific words / phrases that would relegate them to the “black list.”
Let’s take a look of how much effort it would take to compile the “black list” via route good-old-fashion - aka manually.
Even if it took a person a mere 10 seconds to read a page on a site and determine whether to censor the site or not, and then update the database:
Each minute a person could censor 6 pages
5,000,000 websites divided by 6 = 13,888 hours
13,888 hours divided by 24 = 578 days
Even if every site they analysed would get censored, it would take about a year and 7 months to come up with the list of 5 million censored sites (working 24 hours a day / 7 days a week).
Keep in mind that not every site they visit will be censored so even if we go with a liberal censorship rate of 25% of sites they visit will get censored, you’d have to spend more then 6 years to manually create a list of 5 million censored sites.
I found very little mention of the fact that the Islamic Republic’s head of judiciary is an Iraqi!
When it comes to the Islamic Republic religion trumps nationality, for the regime’s founder said so much: “Iranian nationalists are the enemy of the Islamic Republic.”
Once the Islamic Republic is overthrown and an Iranian government comes to power, it will be mandated that all government officials must be Iranian born; in an Iranian secular republic, nationality trumps everything else.
