CLOSING THE CYBERGATES

Hey world! Pay attention to us!" Hossein Derakhshan is tired of listening to the debate over Iran's nuclear-weapons program while the world turns a blind eye to oppression inside Iran. So he's making this plea--on his blog (hoder.com). He is one of 60,000 Iranian Internet geeks who are in an uproar over the country's latest plan to clamp down on their cyber-freedoms. The government is planning to roll out an alternative network, called Shaare'2, that it hopes will eventually close off Iran's Web users to the outside world, and allow in only what the state approves.

The move comes in response to rapidly expanding Internet access. More than 2 million Iranians now use the Net on a regular basis, up from only a few thousand four years ago. According to the government's figures, only 15 percent of Iranian Web sites are hosted inside the country, which means the others are beyond the reach of government censorship. Iranian authorities claim they are building Shaare'2 because they are concerned about obscenity and security, but they clearly also want to stifle dissent, which has thrived among the nation's blogging class both inside Iran and the diaspora. "The sole purpose of the plan is to censor undesirable Web sites in the eyes of the government," says an engineer at Iran's Data Communication Co., the government agency that's putting the new network in place.

In recent years, the mullahs stood by while the Internet grew willy-nilly, and now nobody knows how many Internet service providers operate in Iran and how their networks snake in and out of the country. Shutting down the current networks would be difficult, not least because the government itself depends on them. Still, the mullahs take hope from China, which from the beginning allowed Internet access only through a backbone of government networks. Iran plans to build Shaare'2 as a parallel network, lure users by offering them five gigabytes of storage space for a nominal fee, and eventually dismantle the current networks by busting nonapproved ISPs.

Beating the bloggers, though, won't be easy. China, the gold standard of oppressive regimes, is having trouble keeping hackers in line. Unlike China, Iran can't get the latest American-made network routers that would help control the flow of data. And the Iranian government is spending millions of dollars on filtering software that bloggers can already beat with software circulating freely on the Internet.

Still, even if the bloggers are computer-savvy enough to get around the system, ordinary users may no longer be able to read them. "The government is determined to shut down freedom of speech and unrestricted access to the Internet," says Derakhshan. His pleas could soon be even more plaintive.