Crumbs of human rights

For years, the Iranian regime has talked about a giant Intranet that the government wants to build for all of its citizens, which would isolate the Iranian cyberspace from the rest of the world. The country already has one of the world’s toughest Internet censorship regimes: it routinely blocks thousands of websites deemed offensive, immoral or threatening to the country’s national security. Not long ago, the government unveiled its next step in their efforts to control ordinary people’s online activities: it launched an Iran-only search engine called “Yooz” . www.yooz.ir According to the project manager, Mehdi Naghavi the domestic search engine will help Iranians circumvent the US-led economic sanctions  and will introduce the Persian web to academia. But as always, the pervasive filtering and the harsh restrictions have had an unintended consequence: large numbers of Iranians internet users have become skilled in using various circumvention technologies such as ...