Iranian Regime Sifts Photos of Protesters Here

FREE PRESS — The Orange County Register has discovered a troubling consequence of publishing what appears in its pages on the Internet: the visiting Iranian students it photographs protesting on local campuses against the regime back home are identified by the regime, which holds their families in its power.

As reported by Sean Emerry,

In July, a UC Irvine
student was photographed watching a campus rally about the opposition
to the Iranian government. Five months later, she says her relatives in
Iran were visited and questioned by government officials who had
apparently seen the photo on the Orange County Register's Web site.

Expert and local organizers describe the visit as part of an Iranian
government effort to use the Internet to identify protestors and harass
family members.

A worldwide movement that has relied heavily on Web sites such as Twitter and Facebook to
express opposition to Iranian authorities has found they aren't the
only ones taking advantage of social networking and media coverage;
Iranian government forces are apparently using those same tools to hold
citizens accountable for their relatives' actions outside the country.

The now-former UCI student, whose photo and name ran along with the
July article, recently contacted the Register and successfully asked
that the picture be removed from the publication's Web site. The woman
– who said she was an observer at the rally, but not a participant, and
is not being named due to her safety concerns – said she was frightened
by news of the visit and worried for her relatives' safety.

Experts and protestors said they have heard similar stories from other Iranian expatriates.

"The expectation was that the crackdown would stop people from
protesting. They obviously have been concerned about social networking,
Facebook and all of that," said Nasrin Rahimieh, Director of the Samuel
Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture at UC Irvine. "The link they are making between the protestors themselves and the family has been there since the beginning."

As a result, local protest organizers say they have taken pains to
remind people that their photos will be taken if they attend public
rallies and advise them to cover their faces if they wish to remain
anonymous.

"People know that if they come and there are photos taken at a
protest, in Iran they are identifying us," said Arezo Rashivian, who
helps organize weekly protests at Jamboree Road and Barranca Parkway in
Irvine. "I know for a fact that I can never go to Iran unless it
becomes a free country."

Demonstrations began with the disputed Iranian elections in June, when protestors alleged that incumbent Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had
stolen the election from opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. The
UCI rally in July came after the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, who became
a symbol for the country's turmoil when she was fatally shot in the
chest during a protest in Iran.

In a country where imprisonment and beatings of opposition members
has been well documented, questions about the activities of family
members, even those living in other countries, can be particularly
chilling for Iranian residents.

"The only leverage they have is within Iran, so they obviously
intend to mortify people, to show they will be identified and known,"
Rahimieh said of the Iranian government. "I wouldn't say they would
necessarily have to go as far as imprisonment. Intimidation would work."

Citing concerns for her safety, Register Editor Ken Brusic agreed to
remove the photo of the former UCI student after editors conferred with
her and an Iranian expert, despite the paper's normal bias toward
"leaving content be."

With the ubiquity of online search engines making months- or
years-old news stories only a click away on computers worldwide, the
number of requests for editors to "unpublish" past stories has
increased dramatically, Brusic said. Terry Francke, a First Amendment
expert and general counsel of Californians Aware, said he understood
the Register's decision to remove the photo.

"If a news organization is satisfied that the threat is authentic,
then I would certainly find no problem, ethically, morally or
professionally, with at least taking a photograph down, where the
photograph itself is not essential to the news that was conveyed,"
Terry Francke said. "The thorny problem becomes, do you just stop
photographing Iranian student protestors now that you are aware someone
is combing through them?"