Iran looks set to create its own Internet, just for the Iranian people. In a report by the Wall Street Journal the country sees the project as a way to end the fight for control of the Internet and, possibly, a way to defend the regime against the pro-democracy protests that have spread like wildfire across the middle-east this year.

On that score it would make sense in some ways as social networks including Facebook and especially Twitter were used to help mobilise pro-democracy activists and get people massing on the streets. This move would essentially cut the whole of Iran off from the wider Internet and indeed the wider-world.

Now I said that the way curtailing of Internet freedoms happens usually mirrors the political conventions of the country involved. This is probably going to be seen as an unexpected twist.

China, the world’s largest communist state has broadly allowed access to the general Internet. It took some years to get this far and many websites are still curtailed or blocked completely. The Chinese government are part of the wider world community however and while questions still remain about the country’s Human rights record, it does at least recognise that opening up to the wider world can only be a good thing.

It’s China that has been apparently encouraging the secretive leader of North Korea, Kim Yong Il, to open up his own economy, an idea that has so far failed to gain acceptance.

North Korea is far more closed and secretive than China, and is the most closed society on Earth. It’s widely accepted that only supporters of the regime are permitted to live in the country’s capital city, and footage has been seen of entire villages being forced to watch the public floggings and sometimes executions of those to question the regime.

North Korea has not embraced the Internet. Instead they have their own internal network, a country-wide intranet if you will. This system is available on the only computer operating system available in the country, a modified version of Linux. It is extremely limited and delivers only propaganda about the state. To this day, most people in North Korea live their lives completely oblivious to what’s really happening in the world around them.

Iran however by contrast is a democracy. Its leaders are elected officials. There have been questions raised about just how democratic the country’s political system truly is but you might expect them to adopt a stance more in keeping with China, not the secretive North Koreans.

The answer probably lies in the recent uprisings in the countries around them and the fact that only around 10% of the Iranian people currently have access to the Internet. This move is clearly all about control.

This does raise some interesting questions about what the Internet currently is and what is might be set to become. I’ll talk more about this tomorrow in Part 2 when I’ll look at the challenges faced by western countries.

In the first example of malware of this type the worm was programmed to attack power stations, water plants and industrial units.

A report by the BBC has said that the sheer complexity of the worm means it could only have been written by another “nation state” and so would make it the first real-world example of what most people would expect cyber-terrorism to look like.

Liam O’Murchu from security firm Symantec told the BBC “The fact that we see so many more infections in Iran than anywhere else in the world makes us think this threat was targeted at Iran and that there was something in Iran that was of very, very high value to whomever wrote it.”

Some people have speculated the worm could have been written to specifically target Iran’s nuclear facilities, though there is not enough evidence to draw any conclusions about what its intended target was or who wrote it.

Stuxnet was first detected in June by a security firm in Belarus who discovered it was trying to infect systems that, for security reasons, are not normally connected to the Internet.  It was coded to seek out a specific configuration of industrial control software made by European electronics giant Siemens.

Once the systems were hijacked, the worm would give the systems new instructions that could have seen them overheat as monitoring was shut down, or that could have seen the systems shut down altogether.

Either way this is clearly a very specific type of attack and no party has come forward to claim responsibility for it.

The Opennet website offers a form where users can enter a url and check if it is banned in a country. Not every filtered url is know and not every country of the world can be selected, I guess it would be an impossible task to keep up with every countries filtering efforts. Just take a look at Turkey and Youtube if you know what I mean, feels like they ban and unban the video portal every other day.

The main emphasize lies on countries that are known to filter the Internet heavily which amounts to a list of roughly 20 countries currently. The website offers a global Internet filtering map that displays the level of political, social, conflict / security and Internet Tools filtering for each country in the world.

The website offers additional research which is more valuable than the two tools that I described before. Extensive country profiles are available for selected countries which give a in depths analysis of the current filtering situation in that country with lots of sources at the end of each report. It is furthermore possible to read regional overviews, articles about the subject, book recommendations and general news.