Give journalists time and they will get the news. Several days after this blog (and one or two others) ran the story of Iranian bloggers and their importance in the fight against the tyranny of the Mullahs and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Daily Telegraph has decided to run a story on it.
At least, they recognize that this is a story of great importance. The article gives some details of the government’s activity:
“The authorities have reportedly spent millions on programmes designed to filter cyberspace and block access to controversial sites, with names such as "regime change Iran", "free thoughts on Iran" and "women against fundamentalism".
As part of the most recent clampdown, reported in the reformist newspaper Shargh, Iran's Telecom company has ordered all service providers to block access to blogrolling.com, a free service enabling users to track their favourite weblogs and be informed when they are updated.”
Bloggers and their readers use ever more ingenious methods for circumventing all these programmes and clampdowns and the government is clearly beginning to feel that the battle is one it is losing.
It might have been useful for the article to have linked the story of the bloggers and their desperate battle with Iran’s tyrannical government, described by Baroness Nicolls, for some reason as
“an advanced form of democracy in the region”,
with the ongoing attempt to take control of the internet away from ICANN in the United States, but that would be too much to expect.
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