Surveillance: a symptom of unchecked power

Revelations from former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden made it clear to people around the world that their digital communications are being tracked and saved by the US spy agency.

That was one of the reasons why the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ were included on the 2014 list of Enemies of the Internet published on Wednesday (12.03.2014) by Reporters Without Borders.

It's been a tough year for freedom of speech on the Internet

"The mass surveillance methods employed, many of them exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, are all the more intolerable because they will be used and indeed are already being used by authoritarians countries such as Iran, China, Turkmenistan, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain to justify their own violations of freedom of information," the report said. "How will so-called democratic countries be able to press for the protection of journalists if they adopt the very practices they are criticizing authoritarian regimes for?"

Inclusion on the press freedom group's list put the US and UK in the company of regimes in Tehran and Beijing, which have both come under heavy international criticism for their long-time censorship and surveillance of the Internet.

Iran: Fluctuation on the surface

Despite some minor loosening of restrictions under Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, authorities in Iran have continued to develop a "national Internet" - the so-called "halal Internet" - that would cut off access to material deemed unacceptable, the report said.

"There have been fluctuations on the surface, including President Rouhani using Twitter, but the depth of the problem is intact," Arash Abadpour, a Toronto-based Iranian blogger, researcher and engineer, told DW. "The filtering regime is a reality, the National Internet is creeping in, and online activity is still criminalized."

A national 'halal' network could remove Iranians from the wider, public Internet

Filtering content, controlling Internet service providers, intercepting communications, staging cyber-attacks and imprisoning bloggers and Internet activists are common practice in Iran, Reporters Without Borders wrote.

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Surveillance: a symptom of unchecked power