Iran will be cutting itself off from the internet by August. They already have government servers set up to replace such services as email and search, and they’ve already begun rolling out the user accounts for Iran Mail, a process which requires verifying the full name and address of each user. Earlier attempts to censor the web has included temporary lock downs of the national firewall and blocking SSL connections.

The SSL blocking makes sense considering that it would be virtually impossible for them to decrypt the data to spy on their citizens. The part about the verified email is especially troubling, they own the server so they could look in user’s inboxes any time they want and they have verification of who the user is and by shutting down access to the World Wide Web people can’t hop through proxies and utilize services in the US or Europe. Until someone creates a shadow internet (something the US government is developing), their only safe way of communicating things they don’t want to the government to find out (atheist, gay, political dissident) would be face to face. Sounds a lot like 1984.