Iran Feature: The Week in Civil Society --- From #SaveMaleki to the "Shoot the Apostate" Video Games (Arseh Sevom)

Hossein Ronaghi MalekiArseh Sevom, the NGO promoting civil society in Iran, posts its latest review of events inside the country:

In a week dominated by reports of cyber-warfare waged against Iran, families of prisoners of conscience managed to celebrate the birthdays of loved ones stuck behind bars. Rapper Shahin Najafi remains in the spotlight, as he becomes the target of virtual assassination in on-line games. A Twitter campaign highlights the plight of detained blogger Hossein Ronaghi Maleki. Seventeen NGOs call on the Islamic Republic to recognise and uphold academic freedom, and the sisters Mahsa and Marjan Vahdat provide a twinkling of hope.

#SaveMaleki

Concerns over the health of Hossein Ronaghi Maleki, a blogger and human rights activist imprisoned in Tehran, were expressed in a Tweet storm, as #SaveMaleki became a trending topic on Twitter.

Maleki suffers from kidney failure and has been denied proper care in prison. Amnesty International has asking people to write to Iranian officials to call for his release:

His father, Ahmad Ronaghi Maleki, has said that the government Medical Examiner and the physicians have ordered special post-operation medical care for Hossein Ronaghi Maleki, including medical leave – provided for under the Prison Regulations – though the prison authorities have not approved this request. His parents have told journalists that their son has told them he is under pressure to "confess” in order for his request for medical leave to be approved.

On the basis of the evidence available to Amnesty International, Hossein Ronaghi Maleki appears to be a prisoner of conscience, held solely on account of his peaceful exercise of his right to freedom of expression and the organization is calling for his immediate and unconditional release.

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Iran Feature: Obama Ordered Cyber-Attacks on Tehran (Sanger)

From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

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