Report: Google and Gmail now filtered in Iran

Jadi, a 27-year old blogger in Tehran, tells BoingBoing that Google and related services, such as Gmail, are now blocked by a number of major ISPs inside Iran. Link.

Update: ...and now they're unblocked, at least for the time being. Link (thanks, Seth Finkelstein)

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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Burz

I wonder to what extent the Iranians and others are afraid that Google is being used to spy on people and map their social networks (and intentions). This is information one country’s military would use to invade another and tear any local resistance to shreds… or set various groups against each other. The civil war in Iraq is working out very well for ExxonMobil and BP.

People at all levels of society tend to use Google, and the searches with accompanying ads are a reflection of what people are thinking at a given moment.

If the country you governed were being loudly threatened with the regional steamrolling that is going on across the Middle East, how would you regard people blindly typing all that information into a central American repository?

Maybe Google-blackouts at critical times amounts to a security measure.

Yeah, I just read Cory’s short story. I do not think it is paranoid.

There is more to this than censorship.
Anonymous

The full report in persian:
http://www.syavash.com/portal/users/siavash/blogs/farsi-google-is-filtered-in-iran-fa
Seth Finkelstein

Supposedly unblacklisted now:

http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,22434601-5005962,00.html

Iran blocks and then unblocks Google

From correspondents in Tehran

September 17, 2007 07:51pm

IRAN has unblocked access to the Google search engine and its Gmail email service after briefly filtering them owing to an “error”, the Fars news agency reported.

“Due to an error, the Google site was filtered on Sunday evening but the error was corrected and now Google and its different sites like Gmail can be used,” said an official from the state-run communications company.

Earlier today, Hamid Shahriari, the secretary of Iran’s National Council of Information, had confirmed that the sites were being filtered, without providing further explanation.