Last week, I blogged about
protests in Geneva against
the Iranian government’s expanding program of Internet and
satellite censorship. Taking place outside of Iran (and
consisting of what appears to be a fairly small crowd from the
pictures in this
post), the protest was a mostly symbolic act—but we’re likely
to see more and stronger reactions to what Supreme Leader Ayatollah
Khamenei calls his country’s
soft war against Western cultural influence in the months to
come.

This week the Iranian supreme court
upheld the death sentence handed down to an Iranian-born
Canadian resident named Saeid Malekpour, who was arrested while he
was inside Iran visiting his ailing father. Malekpour is charged
with “insulting the sanctity of Islam” and “corruption on earth,”
two regularly invoked grounds for execution in Iran, because of
photo-uploading software he designed that was then “used by a porn
website without his knowledge,” reports
The Guardian.

This is equivalent to Mark Zuckerberg being put on trial because
someone uploaded a nudie pic to his or her Facebook profile.

According to the Amnesty
International report, there were at least 600 executions in
Iran last year, compared with 43 in the United
States. Last year Iranian-Dutch citizen
Zahra Bahrami was executed before Dutch officials could move
for her release from Iranian custody, and recently, American
citizen and former U.S. Marine
Amir Mirza Hekmati was sentenced to death in Iran on highly
questionable espionage charges.

Confessions from both Hekmati and Malekpour were broadcast on
national television, but the letter Malekpour wrote after more than
a year in solitary confinement in the notorious Evin Prison sheds
serious doubt on his and any other political prisoner’s
confession:

Some of the confessions they forced me to make were so
ridiculous and far-fetched that they are not even possible. For
example, they asked me to falsely confess to purchasing software
from the UK and then posting it on my website for sale. I was
forced to add that when somebody visited my website, the software
would be, without his/her knowledge, installed on their computer
and would take control of their webcam, even when their webcam is
turned off. Although I told them that what they were suggesting was
impossible from a technological point of view, they responded that
I should not concern myself with such things.

He also elaborated on the conditions under which his confession
was extracted:

While I remained blindfolded and handcuffed, several individuals
armed with their fists, cables, and batons struck and punched
me. At times, they would flog my head and neck. Such mistreatment
was aimed at forcing me to write what the interrogators were
dictating…Sometimes, they used extremely painful electrical shock
that would paralyze me temporarily. Once in October 2008, the
interrogators stripped me while I was blindfolded and threatened to
rape me with a bottle of water.

Read Malekpour’s
full letter here (Persian and English).

The recent increase in Internet censorship, arrests, and
intimidation are widely viewed as an effort by the government to
preemptively suppress protests during the country’s upcoming
parliamentary elections in March. Considering the massive protests
following the highly disputed 2009 presidential election, the
results of which were apparently counted at miraculous speed and
announced
only two hours after ballots were cast, it’s not hard to
understand why the ruling powers might be a little nervous.