Babak Namdar

The fact that the Voice of Islamic Republic, er - sorry - Voice of America has been censoring Iranian opposition figures is not exactly news.

I remember when I was on their show as an IT expert they wouldn’t even introduce me as ‘Babak Namdar from Marze Por Gohar’ citing that the show was about technology and not politics.  If you are scratching your head wondering what that has to do with me being a member of MPG you are not alone.  The discussion of filtering software to prevent open communication is very a political matter.

Even the screenshots they had requested, which I stayed up late to furnish were not used - why?  Because I had watermarked MPG’s logo on them.

Ken Timmerman from Foundation for Democracy in Iran has written a great piece about VOA and censorship, and to what extent VOA is going to ensure MPG’s activities do not get mentioned and if they do that they strip the name MPG from it.

Here’s a excerpt:

Voice of America purposefully omited the name of the opposition Marzeporgohar party in its TV and radio reporting, or on its website. ” Iran’s official news agency says two photographers detained earlier this month have been accused of new links with an unnamed movement seeking the overthrow of the Iranian regime,” VOA reported. In fact, the official IRNA dispatch, quoted here, specifically mentioned Marzeporgohar (MPG)

Read the full story here

According to Reporters without Borders:

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.