Rewiring Iran’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei recently announced a reorganisation of Iran’s top internet policy committee. What does it mean for the future of net censorship in Iran?
A few weeks ago, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran (ICHRI) published a fascinating article on personnel changes that might impact internet policy in the country. The piece focuses on Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s recent announcement that authority over Internet policy in Iran will be concentrated in the Supreme Council of Cyberspace (SCC), a body created by the Supreme Leader back in 2012.
Iranian internet policy is an issue near and dear to Small Media’s heart, so we decided to probe this issue a bit further. Drawing on some of our own research into the SCC, we’ve taken a detailed look at the issues raised by ICHRI. Based on that review, we offer the following observations.
Internet Policy in Iran Today
ICHRI’s article calls attention to a number of important points about institutional tensions surrounding internet policy in Iran. Particularly useful is ICHRI’s framing of the issue, which pits a moderate Rouhani government seeking to ease restrictions on the flow of information, against hardliners who aim to preside over a pervasive internet filtering apparatus.
The issue of so-called “smart filtering” lays the tension bare. As ICHRI points out:
“Hardliners have consistently pushed for the blanket blocking of full sites of which they disapprove. The Rouhani administration, in a move tech experts have noted was a bit disingenuous given its technical unfeasibility, argued that a more selective ‘smart filtering,’ in which only objectionable content is blocked, would be sufficient to weed out offensive material, allowing sites to otherwise operate.”
Indeed, Rouhani’s ICT Ministry has consistently championed “smart filtering.” Yet as ICHRI observes, technical challenges make this approach difficult to implement — smart filtering only works on websites or apps that don’t use the TLS protocol (HTTPS) to encrypt data. Back in January, large scale disruptions on Instagram were rumoured to have been caused by the smart filtering system. However, as researchers Mahsa Alimardani and Frederic Jacobs argue, “with Instagram adopting HTTPS in the latest releases of their mobile apps, we suspect that the intelligent filtering capabilities of Iran will become obsolete.”
Another great merit of the article is that it calls attention to the repressive insularity at the heart of conservatives’ policy objectives. Examples mentioned by ICHRI include condemnation of Western social media platforms, a push toward data localisation requirements, a drive to strengthen domestic social networks to attract more users, and a predilection for limiting internet speeds. By covering these important issues, ICHRI paints a detailed picture of the challenges facing Iranian netizens.
The Implications of SCC Reform
Alongside the strengths discussed above, there are a few claims mentioned in the article that differ with Small Media’s interpretation of recent events and what they mean for future Iranian internet policy.
In what follows, we’ll discuss the points where our analysis of Khamenei’s statement diverges from the perspective offered by ICHRI. Much of what we present will be based on our report on the Supreme Council of Cyberspace, published in February of last year. We do so in the hopes of beginning a dialogue ultimately aimed at a greater understanding of internet policy in the Islamic Republic.
1) The Council’s “newcomers” are old faces
In its article, the ICHRI mentions that Khamenei’s reforms would see an expansion of the SCC’s membership:
“In the re-appointment letter on Khamenei’s website, he also announced three new members to the Supreme Cyberspace Council, of which two, Reza Taghipour and Seyed Ezatollah Zarghami have been designated by both the US and the EU as human rights violators and sanctioned as such.”
ICHRI is absolutely right about the sanctions, but neither of these two men is new to the SCC. Our February 2014 report (see pg. 5) on the SCC notes that both Taghipour and Zarghami were already on the council at that time. Taghipour was first placed on the council in his official capacity as ICT Minister, but was then appointed to the council by Khamenei when he left the Ahmadinejad government in late 2012. Zarghami also sat on the SCC owing to his position as Director-General of state broadcaster Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB). When he was replaced in that role, Khamenei appointed him to the SCC, allowing him to remain on the council.
Moreover, the man who replaced him as IRIB Director-General (Mohammad Sarafraz) was also already on the SCC as of our 2014 report. At that time, he was a direct appointee of Khamenei. Today, he sits on the council in his official capacity as IRIB Director-General. In other words, Sarafraz and Zarghami have essentially just switched places, although both were previously, and remain, members of the SCC (as does Taghipour).
The visualisation below shows how the composition of the SCC has changed as a result of the newly-announced reforms. The number of Rouhani-nominated ministers in the group has increased markedly, and it’d be fair to say that the system has received less of a radical overhaul than it has a minor reshuffle.
2) Ideological balance on the SCC is unchanged
As of February 2014, the SCC had a total of 22 members: 13 representatives from government ministries and state bodies and 9 people appointed by Khamenei. Khamenei’s announcement two weeks ago lists 8 appointed members, and 17 state representatives (since the announcement, Khamenei has also appointed former SCC secretary Mohammad Hassan Enterzari, bringing the total number of appointed members to 9). All state and government bodies mentioned in our 2014 report retain representation on the council, with the addition of four new representatives: the Attorney General, the Minister of Education, the Minister of Defence, and the Vice President of Science and Technology.
This means that Khamenei’s changes actually increase the number of representatives from Rouhani’s cabinet. Indeed, of the new departments added, 2 are headed by moderates/reformists (Education and Defence), one by a conservative (Attorney General), and while the affiliation of the Vice President for Science and Technology is unclear, it is reasonable to assume that he is relatively moderate, as he was appointed directly by Rouhani, without the requirement for parliamentary approval.
In other words, it’s possible that Khamenei’s changes actually increased the number of moderates on the SCC. (It’s important not to overstate this point. In the Iranian context, terms such as ‘moderate’ and ‘conservative’ are vaguely-defined labels that aim to give a sense of a politician’s ideological affiliations, and are sometimes open to debate. The categorisations mentioned above have been assigned by Small Media based on our assessment of their records.)
3) Rouhani may stand to gain
Lastly, the ICHRI article claims that Rouhani will wield less influence in the reformed SCC than in the previous iteration of the body:
“Any other organization involved in Internet policy is to be dissolved and all Internet decision-making power concentrated in the Supreme Council. The decision will effectively cut the Rouhani administration out of Internet policy.”
Small Media is not convinced that concentrating internet policy decision-making powers in the SCC necessarily marginalises the Rouhani administration. On the contrary, it was through his position as SCC Chairman that Rouhani launched one of his most consequential interventions into a public debate about internet censorship.
When the Committee to Determine Instances of Criminal Content (CDICC), a body that oversees filtering actions, sought to block WhatsApp, Rouhani asserted his authority as SCC Chairman and publicly opposed the proposed block. After a tense standoff between Rouhani’s ICT Ministry and CDICC Chairman Abdolsamad Khoramabadi, the latter eventually backed down, and WhatsApp remained unblocked in Iran.
At this point, a confession of sorts is in order. In our 2014 report on the SCC, we argued:
“Rouhani’s government does hold some nominal power within the SCC — President Rouhani remains the Chairman, and the moderate Mohammad Hassan Entezari was elected as its Secretary. Yet for these figures to push any filtering reductions past the rest of the SCC remains a fairly unlikely prospect.”
Rouhani’s willingness and ability to use his position as SCC Chairman to thwart censorship attempts certainly surprised us. After discussing this incident in our 2015 Revolution Decoded report, we concluded:
“The authority of the SCC has been asserted most vociferously by members of Rouhani’s cabinet, with ICT Minister Mahmoud Vaezi arguing that President Rouhani and the SCC are responsible for managing all policy relating to social networks and that CDICC must comply with all SCC rulings.”
Khamenei’s recent statement did not remove Rouhani from the SCC, nor did it affect ICT Minister Mahmoud Vaezi’s status on the Council. Moreover, as mentioned above, Khamenei’s statement added 4 members of Rouhani’s cabinet to the SCC. Small Media therefore believes that Khamenei’s statement consolidating internet policymaking power in the SCC does not necessarily sideline the Rouhani administration.
As for the parallel bodies to be dissolved, Khamenei didn’t offer any specifics, and we may have to wait until the next high profile fight over internet policy to see how any new institutional tensions play out. Yet it’s worth noting that there are a number of bodies involved in this field, including the Information Technology Committee, the High Council of Information Technology, and the High Council of State Information.
Conclusions
None of this is to challenge the central framing of ICHRI’s article, which usefully outlined the tensions between moderates like Rouhani and conservatives like Khamenei at the heart of internet policy. It is certainly possible that powerful conservatives like Khamenei will attempt to cut the Rouhani government out of the internet policy process in the future. However, we’d argue that Khamenei’s recent statement on the SCC was not targeted to that end.
