While Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in New York saying some words nobody believes, his cronies at home are shutting every single one of their citizens out of the internet. Their excuse: ‘we may get attacked by zionist viruses!’ But of course!
On Sunday, the Iranian television announced that Google and Gmail would be blocked “within a few hours.” The ban will remain in effect until further notice.
Meanwhile, a government deputy minister announced they were going to put all their citizens in a “domestic internet network.” While Iran has blocked sites that go against the government’s views in the past, this will cut citizens off the internet completely.
This time they are planning to take everyone off the grid and into their own government-controlled corral. People are not longer going to be able to use virtual private networks to bypass governmental censorship and access any information around the world freely.
The deputy communications and technology minister Ali Hakim-Javadi says the operation is already under way: “In recent days, all governmental agencies and offices… have been connected to the national information network.”
Officially, every Iranian will be in this cage by March 2013 but the government has not announced yet when they will effectively shut down access to the internet.