Developing national email providers has also been a component of government efforts to control and access online content and activities. In 2012, Reza Taghipour, Minister of Telecommunication in the Ahmadinejad administration, wrote letters to his deputy and the Central Bank of Iran insisting on ...

The Iranian government has employed two means to ensure the widespread use of its national SSL security certificates (and thus achieve their root certification). One is through the Iranian web browser, Saina, which is provided by state agencies and into which the authorities have built ...

National (government-issued) SSL security certificates are also a central component of Iran’s National Internet. SSL certificates ensure that the connection used in any Internet transmission is encrypted and thus secure. When they are issued by a legitimate source, they do indeed ensure security. The government ...

In 2013, Reporters Without Borders named Iran one of the world’s five worst enemies of the Internet, along with China, Syria, Bahrain and Vietnam. This report by the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran has shown that if the Iranian government is able ...

The other means employed by the Iranian government to spread the use of its SSL security certificates is through the national operating system, “Zamin” (or Earth). Zamin was jointly developed by the Information Technology Organization and the Iran Telecom Research Center and released as ...

As part of the National Internet, the Iranian government has also developed services such as a national search engine and national social networks, which are designed and implemented largely by the Ministry of Telecommunication’s Information Technology Company. Hadi Malek, research director at the Information Technology ...

While Hassan Rouhani campaigned for the presidency in Iran on a platform explicitly promoting Internet freedom, one year into his presidency there has been little progress to date on this front. In fact, as this report has shown, development of Iran’s National Internet continues, the ...

In spite of all the authorities’ efforts to censor the Internet and punish those who seek to use it for social or political activism, the government has yet to achieve full control over the Internet and its use. Recognizing that Iran’s National Internet and all ...

In addition to the Iranian state’s efforts to develop the technological infrastructure of Internet control, the Judiciary and security organizations have also pursued the identification and prosecution of online activists. This is done through a variety of organizations, some of them official, some semi-official, and ...

One of the principal ways that Iranians have been able to maintain access to the global Internet has been through the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which allow users to circumvent government filters by providing encrypted links to networks based abroad, effectively enabling a ...

Censorship and state control over the Internet in Iran is changing: it is becoming more systemic and less detectable, posing an ever-greater threat to Iranian users. Increasingly, the state is focusing on developing the technological infrastructure to effectively control access to the Internet inside Iran ...

The Rouhani administration has pushed back some--a statement defending the need for open Internet access is made, a block on an application is removed--but it ...

The National Data Centers are one of the most important infrastructure components of the National Information Network. These Centers will be set up in Tehran and other cities across the country, and will house the various telecommunications and storage systems used by the Network and ...

Officials in Iran have attributed the delays and uneven progress in the development and implementation of the country’s National Internet to technological problems, difficulties created by international sanctions against the country, and budgetary constraints. Yet these delays must also be seen within the context of ...

HISTORY While the state devoted considerable resources and institutional capacity to filtering the Internet up to this time, a new dimension began during the Ahmadinejad period (2005-2013) regarding Iran’s approach to the Internet. Namely, the development of a national infrastructure that would give the authorities full ...

The Internet first became available in Iran in 1993 with the start of dial-up services. Over the next few years, there were no clear guidelines for filtering sites and filtering remained relatively limited, with only intermittent instances of blocking of political or dissident sites, ...