Iran criminalises contact with foreign media

Consider the chemistry teacher in Isfahan who has, for several years now, taken the occasional call from a foreign correspondent - patient about the price of bread, the mood of his students, nothing he would call politics. This month Iranian lawmakers took the first step toward making that ordinary courtesy a matter for the security services. Here is the only question worth putting to this fact: if the law passes and is enforced, what does the teacher do differently the next time his phone rings? And if it passes but is never enforced - if it sits on the books the way so many Iranian statutes sit on the books, invoked rarely, selectively, mostly for show - what changes then? The second answer is the one everyone gets wrong, and getting it wrong is exactly how such laws do their work.

The strongest objection to my alarm is a familiar and not foolish one. Human rights groups who track this legislation know, better than I do, that Iran has passed measures like it before - vague statutes against “propaganda,” against “collaboration with hostile media” - and that enforcement has always been spotty, theatrical, aimed at the occasional dissident journalist rather than at the teacher, the researcher, the engineer with a cousin at Voice of America. If the law is mostly symbolic, the pragmatist ought to say its cash value is thin: nothing much changes for the ordinary citizen, so the outrage is disproportionate to the fact.

But this misreads what the fact actually does to a mind, which is the only place cash value gets spent. A law does not have to be enforced against you to change your behavior. It only has to make you unable to calculate your odds. The teacher does not need to know that ninety-nine calls in a hundred go unpunished; he needs to not know which call is the hundredth. That uncertainty is cheaper than enforcement and more effective than it, because it recruits the citizen’s own imagination to do the security service’s work for free. What was, last year, a live option - pick up, answer honestly, hang up, go back to grading papers - becomes this year a dead one, not because the state reached into his house, but because he reached the conclusion for it.

That is the mechanism, and it is worth naming plainly, without metaphor doing the arguing for me: the law’s practical effect is achieved through the aggregate of small refusals it produces in people who will never be prosecuted, rather than through the prosecutions themselves. Multiply the teacher by the researcher who no longer answers a query from a European university, by the retired engineer who stops texting his niece in London who happens to work in media, by the student who deletes an interview request unread, and you have, within a season, something that looks from the outside exactly like the isolation the law’s authors wanted - achieved almost entirely by people talking themselves out of contact rather than by any officer knocking on any door. The stakes described here - civic engagement recast as security crime, Iranian society cut loose from conversation with the outside world - are not achieved by a wall. They are achieved by a switchboard where, one line at a time, people quietly stop picking up.

So the dispute between the alarmed and the skeptical is not, on inspection, a real dispute at all - it is verbal, and the cash-value question dissolves it. Both sides can agree the law may never be heavily enforced. What they disagree about is whether enforcement is the mechanism, and it is not. The mechanism is doubt, manufactured wholesale and distributed to every telephone in the country, and doubt does not need a single prosecution to be effective; it only needs to be plausible.

I think of the teacher once more, phone in hand, a foreign number lighting the screen, and the small arithmetic he now performs that he never had to perform before. He may still answer. But the fact that he now has to decide - that a two-second reflex has become a two-second calculation - is the whole of what this month’s legislation has purchased, and it did not need a single conviction to close on the sale.