Iran criminalises contact with foreign media
CONTACT, n. In diplomatic usage, an exchange of pleasantries between sovereign states. In Iranian legislative usage, as proposed this month by Iranian lawmakers, an act of espionage requiring only that one party be a citizen and the other a foreign journalist, researcher, or, presumably, a weather forecaster employed by a network the state has decided not to like.
The bill under discussion does not criminalise spying. Spying was already illegal, as it is everywhere, being the one form of international communication every government agrees is unforgivable when practiced against itself and indispensable when practiced against others. What this legislation criminalises is something smaller and therefore more useful to its authors: the phone call, the email, the interview granted to a stringer for a paper printed in a language the interviewee’s neighbors cannot read. Human rights groups tracking the bill note that its language is broad enough to catch a retired professor answering a question about wheat prices. This breadth is not a drafting flaw. Breadth is the product being sold.
Consider the stated purpose, which is national security, set beside the observed mechanism, which is the conversion of the ordinary sociable impulses of Iranian citizens into a filing cabinet of potential crimes, each dated, each waiting. A security law aimed at actual foreign agents would need to be narrow, since agents are rare and identifiable by their tradecraft. A law aimed at the general possibility of conversation must be broad, since conversation is common and identifiable by nothing at all. The lawmakers have therefore built an instrument whose only efficient use is retroactive: it does not prevent espionage, which requires foresight the law does not supply, but it furnishes, for any citizen the state later decides it dislikes, a ready-made offense already committed, sitting in an old WhatsApp thread with a BBC Persian producer.
Here is the parallel column, presented without further comment because none is required. Stated purpose: to protect the Islamic Republic from foreign intelligence penetration. Observed outcome: a research fellow in Isfahan now deletes her sent-mail folder before renewing a academic exchange she began in 2019. Stated purpose: to defend national sovereignty from hostile media narratives. Observed outcome: a stringer in Shiraz stops answering calls from foreign desks not because he fears being wrong, but because he fears being right in a manner someone in Tehran finds inconvenient this month, whatever this month’s inconvenient truths turn out to be.
What has disappeared from this narrative, as reported, is the ordinary citizen who is neither dissident nor journalist nor researcher - the shopkeeper’s son studying abroad, the aunt who forwards a BBC article to a family group chat, the retired engineer with a pen pal in Hamburg. These people vanish from the coverage because they are not dramatic; they will not be martyred or exiled; they will simply go quiet, one household at a time, and Iranian society will grow a little more soundproofed without a single arrest making the news. A totalitarian architecture does not require dungeons if it can arrange for the walls to build themselves, brick by brick, out of fear too diffuse to be called fear and too rational to be called paranoia.
The lawmakers will say, and have said, that friendly nations do not permit their citizens to be recruited by foreign propaganda organs, as though the BBC’s Persian service were a recruiting office and not simply a radio station that reports things the Ministry of Intelligence would rather report itself. This is the oldest trick in the lexicon: rename the listener a collaborator, and the act of listening becomes the crime, sparing everyone the trouble of proving anything else.
Read through the operational definition rather than the official one, the bill is not a security measure. It is a tariff on curiosity, payable in silence, collected by the simple expedient of making every foreign voice radioactive to touch. The wall it builds has no bricklayers, no visible mortar, and no ribbon to cut - only, eventually, a nation of people who have learned, out of ordinary caution, to stop asking each other what they’ve heard.