The United States is ramping up efforts to help anti-government activists in Iran skirt the government's mobile telephone and Internet surveillance and censorship, a top US official said Wednesday. "We're going to do that quickly, and it's in part to counter Iran's increasingly active Internet surveillance and censorship," said Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Michael Posner.
"We're supporting grants that will counter censorship technologies, increase circumvention tools in Farsi, secure mobile communications and protect online activists against cyber attacks," he told a key Senate panel. Posner said the United States had spent $22 million in the last 18 months and planned to spend another $28 million in the coming months on "Internet freedom programming" and to help activists duck the authorities online.
"We've now trained 5,000 activists world-wide, including Iranians, in cyber self-defence," he told senators at a hearing on democratic reforms and human rights in Iran. "And we plan to expand all of these efforts to teach democratic activists, journalists, bloggers, human rights defenders and others how to protect their online privacy and their data, so that they in turn can train others," he said.
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