This is nothing new for Iranians, they already have one of the biggest internet filters in the world and they are already unable to reach tons of other sites. The citizens believe that their government is banning sites like Facebook and YouTube to prevent massive riots that happened in North Africa, but also in Iran after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was reelected as President of Iran. The solution to this problem is using the VPN networks, but not everyone is able to do so since you have to know a thing or two to use them of course.

The government plan is to connect everyone to their national network, so they can completely manipulate what sort of information the public will receive. All governmental agencies and offices are already connected to that network and by March 2013 it should be fully implemented for all households. Iran doesn’t want anyone to mess with their business and after they got hacked and injected with a worm in their nuclear program back in 2010 they have become even more rigorous. Iran also wanted to press charges on Google once they removed the term “Persian Gulf“ from Google Maps  and left it nameless, even though all Arabian countries call it the “Arabian Gulf”, that name is completely unacceptable for this Islamic country.

[Ed – this is not the first time that this has been talked about or even attempted in Iran. There are many ways to get to the “real” world through the firewalls and blocks that are sure to be put in place. The TOR Project has more than a few including a proxy network and a method for obfuscating the packets you are sending so that they appear to be regular packets to get around protocol blocking. Of course there are some in the US that are pushing for similar filtering of “unacceptable” items on the Internet just look at bills like SOPA, PIPA and others that are establishing the ground work for censorship. We are betting that some of these same people will be the first to denounce what Iran is doing...]

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