Hello Oonitarians,

Today, in collaboration with ASL19, ARTICLE 19 and Small Media, the OONI team released a new research report: *Internet Censorship in Iran: Network Measurement Findings from 2014-2017.*

You can read the report here: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/iran-internet-censorship/

We also published a summary of the report on the Tor blog: https://blog.torproject.org/internet-censorship-iran-findings-2014-2017

https://twitter.com/OpenObservatory/status/913454524450447365

This study involves the analysis of thousands of network measurements collected from 60 networks across Iran over the last 3 years.

OONI data confirms the blocking of 886 domains (and 1,019 URLs overall), most of which include news outlets and human rights sites. The breadth and scale of internet censorship in Iran is pervasive, since we found a wide range of different types of sites to be blocked, with the blocking extending beyond a simple definition of legality.

Blocked domains include search engines (such as google.com and duckduck.go), online social networks (e.g. facebook.com, twitter.com, plus.google.com), media sharing platforms (e.g. instagram, flickr.com, youtube.com), blogging platforms (e.g. wordpress.com, blogger.com), and communication tool sites (such as viber.com and paltalk.com). We also found Facebook Messenger to be blocked by means of DNS tampering.

But**blocked domains also include opposition sites, pro-democracy sites, and even the sites of digital rights groups in our community, such as: EFF, CDT, Freedom House, ASL19, ARTICLE 19, Global Voices, The Citizen Lab, and Reporters Without Borders.

Iranian ISPs appear to have shifted their practices from applying "smart filters" (only censoring specific webpages) to "blanket censorship" (censoring entire sites). Previously, they used to limit their censorship to specific webpages hosted on HTTP. But over the last years, as more sites have adopted HTTPS, we found that most ISPs blocked access to both the HTTP and HTTPS versions of sites (since it's not possible to target specific webpages when a site is hosted on HTTPS).

What's interesting is that we found internet censorship in Iran to be non-deterministic.**By this we mean that we found ISPs to be flipping between blocking and unblocking sites over time, possibly in an attempt to create uncertainty or to make the censorship more subtle.

Internet censorship in Iran is sophisticated because we found ISPs to be serving blockpages by means of DNS injection and through the use of HTTP transparent proxies. But another reason why it is sophisticated is because it is reinforced through the blocking of multiple censorship circumvention tools. We even found the Tor network to be blocked most of the time across most networks, but on a positive note, Tor bridges were partially accessible.

Iranian ISPs also appear to be taking extra steps to reinforce internet censorship and limit circumvention. We found various online translators to be blocked. Pasting a URL into an online translator will provide access to the site's content, even if that site is blocked. Online translators can therefore provide a form of censorship circumvention, likely explaining why we found them to be blocked.

Political relations appear to influence how information controls are implemented in Iran. This is strongly suggested by the fact that we found multiple Israeli and U.S. domains to be blocked. Israeli domains even appear to be blocked almost indiscriminately. US export laws and regulations, on the other hand, restrict the use of services in Iran, which is why we found Norton, Virus Total, and GraphicRiver to be inaccessible in the country.

Internet censorship in Iran also appears to serve as a tool for the reinforcement of geopolitical dynamics of power. This is strongly suggested by the fact that we found multiple Kurdish sites to be blocked.

Much more can be said about this study....but this email is already quite long. :)

We encourage you to explore the data we published!

Thanks for reading.

~ The OONI team.