Blogger's Death in Iran Window Onto Cyber Patrols

AP

In his last blog entry, activist Sattar Beheshti wrote that Iranian authorities had given him an ultimatum: Either stop posting his "big mouth" attacks against the ruling system or tell his mother that she will soon be in mourning.

"We will tear down your cruel cage," Beheshti typed on Oct. 29 before signing off.

A day later he was arrested. Within a week, his family had collected his body. They began calls for an investigation that have been echoed by Washington, European allies and rights groups.

Arrests of activists and claims of abuse in detention are commonplace in Iran, but deaths behind bars are much rarer. Iran's judiciary responded to the growing pressure and authorized an investigation. It claims three of Beheshti's interrogators have been arrested while post-mortem reports are studied.

But while the specific circumstances of Beheshti's death may be given a public reckoning, the more far-reaching aspect of the case — Iran's rapidly growing corps of Web watchers — may remain in the shadows, as well as their motives in targeting an obscure blogger whose site was actively followed by more than a few dozen viewers.

The 35-year-old Beheshti apparently fell under the custody of Iran's cyber police, created last year with a wide mandate to crush Web dissent. The powers displayed in the case — including questioning Beheshti outside the regular justice system — suggests a level of autonomy and authority that could bring far more aggressive measures against Web activists.

"There's no question that the Internet is seen by Iran's rulers as a threat and something that needs to be tightly controlled," said Theodore Karasik, a regional security expert at the Dubai-based Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis. "Iran is investing serious resources on this front."

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei often refers to the need for stronger measures in the "soft war" playing out in cyberspace with the West and opposition groups. Iran also claims its technicians are working on a self-contained Internet that would somehow give authorities the ability to filter content.

The Islamic Republic already tries to block dissident websites and has jailed several well-known bloggers, including Hossein Derakhshan, who helped ignite the Iranian blog boom in 2001 by posting simple instructions to create sites in Farsi. In March 2009, a 29-year-old blogger, Omidreza Mirsayafi, died while being held at Tehran's Evin Prison.

At the time — months before the major crackdowns following the disputed June 2009 presidential elections — Iran's vibrant blogger community was baffled by Mirsayafi's arrest because he was well outside the clique of prominent Web activists. Now, similar questions are being asked about Beheshti and whether Iran's bolstered cyber-police units could be stepping up their surveillance and sweeps.

"With the recent declarations about Internet crackdowns in Iran, anyone who puts anything critical on the Web has to be thinking that there is a risk," said Mehrzad Boroujerdi, a Syracuse University professor who follows Iranian affairs.

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