More censorship, this time from Iran. WTH is it with authoritarians anyway… can’t handle the idea of people having open access to information and thinking for themselves, or what? Only a government or organization insecure of the validity of its own ideology uses oppressive censorship to hide information from its own citizens.

And no, I’m not claiming the U.S. does not censor, I’m sure they do, or at least, I’m aware they’re listening in. And their censorship and surveillance will likely always take the form of “protecting the children from prOn” or “protecting the country from tairy-ists” arguments. But frankly, if parents aren’t keeping an eye on what their kids are doing on the internet, then that’s a failure of parental responsibility, not a good enough excuse to censor information from grown adults.

Censorship by governmental authorities usually only protects the nefarious activities of government, or it’s private contractors. Citizens deserve to know what their government is really doing, that’s the core of transparency, which is the foundation of accountability.

Google has no presence in Iran, so any attempt to block Gmail would be by firewall. Iran is thought to have taken steps to thwart the use of text messaging during last year’s protracted and often bloody post-election protests. During that period, the U.S. State Department even prevailed on Twitter to delay server maintenance so the service would be available to demonstrators. And before the election, which returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power, the spark for weeks of protests, Iran blocked Facebook — presumably because it was a forum for reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Gmail is the only major online e-mail service that uses HTTPS connections by default, which encrypts the data sent between a user’s computer and Google’s servers. That makes it very difficult for the government to spy on Gmail users e-mailing other Gmail users, though Gmail users e-mailing others could be overheard. Users of other online e-mail services are vulnerable to having the contents of their e-mails scanned by government firewalls.

via Iran to Pull the Plug on Gmail? | Epicenter | Wired.com.