US sanctions Iran over Internet, media censorship

Washington unveiled sanctions Thursday against top Iranians and national bodies, including the communications minister and the culture ministry, hitting back for media and Internet censorship.

The move against Communications Minister Reza Taghipour came after he was blamed for ordering the jamming of international satellite TV broadcasts and restricting Internet access, a State Department official said.

The United States was determined to stop the "Iranian government from creating an 'electronic curtain' to cut Iranian citizens off from the rest of the world," said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland.

Four individuals and five bodies were placed under sanctions by both the State Department and the US Treasury for "censorship or other activities that prohibit, limit or penalize freedom of expression or assembly by citizens of Iran."

They were also accused of limiting "access to print or broadcast media, including by jamming international satellite broadcasts into Iran," Nuland said in a statement, denouncing the "regime's insidious actions."

Internet users in Iran were temporarily unable to access their Gmail accounts from late September to early October.

Mohammad Reza Miri, a member of the telecommunications ministry committee tasked with filtering the Internet in Iran, was quoted by the Mehr news agency as saying that the Gmail block was an "involuntary" consequence of trying to reinforce censorship of Google's YouTube video-sharing site.

"Unfortunately, we do not yet have enough technical knowhow to differentiate between these two services. We wanted to block YouTube and Gmail was also blocked, which was involuntary," he said.

"We absolutely do not want YouTube to be accessible."

Iran has censored YouTube since mid-2009, after opposition demonstrators protesting the re-election victory of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in polls they believed rigged started posting videos online of their gatherings.

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US sanctions Iran over Internet, media censorship