Fascists:

A scary anecdote from Iran. A trusted colleague - who is married to an Iranian-American and would thus prefer to stay anonymous - has told me of a very disturbing episode that happened to her friend, another Iranian-American, as she was flying to Iran last week. On passing through the immigration control at the airport in Tehran, she was asked by the officers if she has a Facebook account. When she said "no", the officers pulled up a laptop and searched for her name on Facebook. They found her account and noted down the names of her Facebook friends... it means that the Iranian authorities are paying very close attention to what's going on Facebook and Twitter (which, in my opinion, also explains why they decided not to take those web-sites down entirely - they are useful tools of intelligence gathering).

They're also not above attacking overseas sites when those sites try to undermine that intelligence gathering.

The Iranians have a habit both of tracking online activity and of being hypersensitive to content. On the tech side, our toothless export regime - we can't even stop HP from selling them printers - has done little to prevent them from importing robust surveillance technology. Nokia confessed to selling them equipment that probably allows super-scary Deep Packet Inspection, though they insist that it's not that that complex (good to know!)

On the content side, the bastards simply lock you up when they find you. Half a year ago they arrested an Iranian peace activist blogger for being an Israeli spy. They promptly got him to "confess":

An Iranian blogger who visited Israel at least twice in the past three years, and who was twice interviewed... about his efforts to "humanize" Israel for Iranians and vice-versa, has reportedly been arrested in Teheran and admitted to spying for Israel. According to a report in Jahan News, which is close to Iran's intelligence community, quoted by the Middle East analyst Meir Javedanfar, the blogger, Hossein Derakhshan, returned to Iran about three weeks ago, having previously been based in Canada. "Prior to his return," Javedanfar writes on his middleeastanalyst.com Web site, Derakhshan had "started attacking [former Iranian president] Ayatollah [Hashemi] Rafsanjani in his blog. It is possible that he fell foul of a power struggle within Iran."

They're also not above disappearing the friends of dissidents. Maybe this is something Obama can talk to them about.

Although probably not, right? (h/t: MR reader KO)

References and previously after the jump...