A web-proxy service set up by the US government鈥檚 International Broadcasting Bureau to enable websurfers in Iran to evade censorship is itself massively censoring what they can see.
That is the conclusion of an independent new report released from the OpenNet Initiative, an international collaboration between researchers at the University of Toronto, Harvard University and the University of Cambridge.
Tens of thousands of Iranians log on each day to the US government鈥檚 IBB Anonymizer service, run by government contractor Anonymizer in San Diego, California. The service was set up in 2003 by the US government to allow people in Iran to surf websites blocked by Iranian authorities.
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The sites blocked include those of political dissidents, pro-democracy sites, and western news media such as news.bbc.com. IBB Anonymizer makes these accessible, but the report says it also blocks hundreds of other sites.
鈥淭his simply looks at the domain name鈥�, says Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School, a coauthor of the report, and filters out any that contain words on a banned list.
One banned word is 鈥渁ss鈥�, which blocks some pornography sites but also blocks the sites 鈥渦sembassy.state.gov鈥� and 鈥渨ww.grass-roots.org鈥�, says the report. Other words include 鈥渂reast鈥�, 鈥渂ush鈥�, 鈥済ay鈥�, 鈥渉ot鈥�, 鈥渕y鈥�, 鈥渙ld鈥�, 鈥減ic鈥�, 鈥渟oft鈥�, 鈥渢een鈥�, 鈥渢rans鈥� and 鈥渢v鈥�. 鈥淭hey might as well filter every fifth website,鈥� says Zittrain.
Ghost address
In Iran, internet service providers are configured to prevent traffic between computer IP (internet protocol) addresses registered in Iran and websites with keywords in the domain name that the Iranian censor has banned.
To get around this, the free IBB Anonymizer service allows a computer with an Iranian IP address to adopt a ghost IP address that can be used to connect to banned sites from Iran.
Ken Berman, of the IBB in Washington DC, says he is responding to the report and will discuss improving and publicising the Anonymizer鈥檚 filtering techniques with the company on Tuesday. He says the original motivation for some kind of filtering was to avoid spending US taxpayers money allowing people to surf porn.
Lance Cottrell of Anonymizer estimates that dropping the filter entirely would around double the amount of traffic from Iran, increasing costs. 鈥淭he reason it was put in wasn鈥檛 a prudish impulse but directly to manage costs,鈥� he says.
But Zittrain is unconvinced by these arguments. 鈥淚t should be a service that grants access as if one were sitting in the US,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 giving them a taste of America.鈥�