In recent weeks, Iranian officials have been involved in a high-profile struggle to crack down on televised images leaving their country. At the same time, behind the scenes, they have apparently been working clandestinely to stifle something else: televised images coming into their country.
In early June, a couple of weeks before the recent presidential elections in Iran, executives at an Israel-based communications company called SatLink realized that somebody was jamming one of their transponders. The transponder in question was housed on a satellite named Hot Bird, which beamed a variety of TV channels into countries across the Middle East, including Iran.
Among the various offerings on the disrupted transponder (music channels, movies channels, Nickelodeon!) were a handful of Persian-language channels owned by Iranian expatriates and operated out of California—including National Iranian Television (NITV), a 24-hour channel based in Woodland Hills, Calif., that is deemed illegal by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government.
David Hochner, the CEO of SatLink, recently told The Observer via phone from Israel that he immediately suspected that the problems stemmed from efforts by the Iranian regime to jam the U.S.-based Iranian stations, which, in general, were sympathetic to the supporters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi. “We thought immediately it was related to the election,” said Mr. Hochner. “We started investigating.”
Sure enough, according to Mr. Hochner, the satellite owner, Eutelsat, eventually pinpointed the jamming of the transponder to a source inside Iran.
At the same time, according to The New York Times, Iranian officials were also attempting to block out satellite transmissions of BBC Persian.
“Like other foreign broadcasters, the BBC beams its programs to rooftop satellite dishes atop thousands of buildings across Iran,” reported The Times. “In itself, this is a defiance of the ruling ayatollahs, who long ago banned the dishes as un-Islamic. But they have abandoned enforcement as impractical and politically risky, given the wide popularity of foreign television.”
According to Mr. Hochner, two days after the June 12 presidential election, SatLink reached an agreement to shift the U.S.-based Iranian channels to a satellite called W2, which could only be uplinked from Europe, making it nearly impossible to jam from Iran.
So far the arrangement is working out, said Mr. Hochner. The Iranian expatriate channels are back on the air, beaming news and views from the outside world into satellite dishes throughout Iran.
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