Serial Box Crime

We get paid to blog they get killed for blogging… what an awful world we live in. In Iran this past week parliament members began discussing a draft bill which will create stronger penalties for blogging. Actually in their own words which no one seems to be quite clear on are, “toughen punishment for disturbing mental security in society.” They go on to say such things as “establishing websites and weblogs promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy” would be added to the list of things that are punishable by death!

This draft is not solely about blogging it talks about the obvious crimes that if convicted of will already be sentenced to death such as rape, murder and armed robbery. They now want to include blogging which consists of discussing your personal life, sexuality, work, government and anything else you feel like writing about. This draft bill also states that punishment handed out in these cases “cannot be commuted, suspended or changed.” I guess there’d really be no way your sentence could be contested when the law is simply no blogging. At least with murder cases theres the chance of indisputable proof in favour of someone else.

Sometime just before January 2007 the Iranian government put up a website samandehi.ir and instructed all bloggers to register their websites and blogs and provide full names and addresses but of course most were too afraid to do so and assumed they would be arrested shortly after registration. Iranian bloggers began posting articles publicly refusing to register and posting banners as well as forming committees to resist the governments attempt to filter and control more web content than they already do.

Elsewhere in the world people blog for a living others as a hobby and some just to vent… I guess in Iran you do it in secret.

A translated English copy of the proposed legislation is here.

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