
Death sentence for Iranian web programmer - waitwhat
http://thenextweb.com/me/2012/01/19/death-sentence-for-iranian-programmer-accused-of-developing-software-used-by-porn-sites/
======
shadowfiend
It's always said that one of the huge advantages of programming compared to
other disciplines is the extremely low barrier of entry and the extremely low
cost of taking a risk. You can develop something and all it costs you is time,
so scrapping it is far easier than in any physical design situation.

I don't think it's possible to discount how critical to this point of view our
freedoms are. When you have a certain faith in the justice system (one
generally corroborated by experience) and in the law, you have one less thing
to worry about. We innovate because we not only don't fear wasting $N in
materials in addition to our time, we also don't fear being dragged off to
prison. Indeed, even if we _did_ fear being dragged off to prison, I can't
think of any situation where you could _unintentionally_ get the death
sentence for programming. Programming!

Yes, SOPA and PIPA are bad, and yes, we should oppose them. But sometimes it's
good to take a step back and look at what “bad” really looks like. And take a
minute to think “Wow. We are fighting such minor battles in comparison.” Just
a minute. Then it's time to get back in the fight. Because the minor losses
slowly, imperceptibly, take you to the major battles.

~~~
CWuestefeld
_We innovate because we not only don't fear wasting $N in materials in
addition to our time, we also don't fear being dragged off to prison._

That's generally true, but not in all cases.

Because I have Crohn's Disease, I've toyed with the idea of creating an app
that would let a patient track their symptoms and diet, etc., to figure out
what are the factors that cause a flare-up for them; and later upload the
history to their doctor. But knowing (a) the regulations in the USA
surrounding medical devices (does this count as one? who knows without a
lawyer) and (b) the potential for liability for even the stupidest things,
I've decided that the potential danger for me is nowhere near worth it.

~~~
mseebach
Speak to a doctor. It's possible that there is a simple "shibboleth" you can
use like "I am not your lawyer and this is not legal advise" for lawyers.

~~~
marshray
Pretty sure the doctor would refer him to a specialist. In this case, a
lawyer.

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relix
He was living in Canada for several years and apparently made some free open
source software that was subsequently used in a porn site (without his further
involvement or knowledge), as is oft the case and the reason FOSS exists.

He then was arrested on a visit to Iran.

Disregarding the ridiculousness of this specific case, it sets a dangerous
precedent: anyone who has written open source code that is used by sites, and
possible porn sites, could be just as guilty as this guy according to Iranian
law.

I think I'll skip Iran on my next vacation for now.

~~~
zalew
> I think I'll skip Iran on my next vacation for now.

They don't give a crap what an average tourist does in his homeland.
Repressions are addressed toward their own citizens and foreign
journalists/activists because they are a threat to the regime.

~~~
corin_
You think they looked at someone who coded a piece of free software for image
uploads, that was used by porn sites, and thought "he's a threat to our
regime"?

~~~
zalew
Any citizen of an opressive country who doesn't support the govt is looked at
as a threat, that's how regimes treat their citizens.

The accusations are a tool, not a reason.

~~~
eternalban
And the more randomly the tool is applied the more effective it is in
terrorizing people. IRI is basically broadcasting to Iranian expat community
that: don't even think about technically contributing to software that can be
used to topple us.

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AUmrysh
I think the real thing to take from this story is never travel to Iran (until
the people of that nation replace their totalitarian government with something
respectable).

~~~
gcp
Avoiding Iran isn't a problem, but there are several countries with similarly
non-democratic governments and strictly islamic environments. I've done FOSS
consulting in the Arab Emirates. That suddenly looks riskier now.

~~~
tomjen3
That depends -- if had had been a Citizen of Canada, rather than a mere
resident -- Canada would have been up in arms.

~~~
gcp
The government of those countries sometimes cares about that, but they also
feel the need to set an example to appease the strict islamic side every now
and then.

Your government being up in arms about you may not prevent a bad outcome.

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robterrell
That's deplorable. So basically, anyone who has code on GitHub that a
pornographer (or other Islam-insulter) could use should never visit Iran.

Seems like a clear case of a coerced confession -- he confessed to something
that isn't even possible. Why isn't the Canadian government going bananas for
him? They've got their own damn oil, right?

~~~
pavel_lishin
> Seems like a clear case of a coerced confession -- he confessed to something
> that isn't even possible.

As I understand it, that's kind of the way things work in Iran. (Note that as
a privileged white male, my knowledge of this comes from various podcasts, so
my opinion written on a post-it is worth a post-it.)

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rbanffy
Does anyone have data on _how_ he was arrested? Was there some investigation
of Iranian names in porn web sites or was he arrested because he was a
Canadian resident visiting Iran and the porn accusations were pinned on him
after arrest? The article says authorities spent a year assembling a case
before any accusations were made.

Is this a risk any Iranian citizen returning from the West faces? To be
arrested and have charges fabricated after the arrest? Are there any other
cases of this?

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rglover
So wait a minute, the Canadian government is doing something about this,
_right_?

 _“Canada condemns Iran’s reported decision to execute Mr. Malekpour. Sadly,
his case is far from the only example of Iran’s utter disregard for human
life. The regime in Tehran frequently ignores principles like due process for
its citizens domestically, and international human rights obligations
generally.”_

From that I gather that this is being looked at as "out of our hands" by the
Canadian government. Is that right? I know that relations with Iran are murky
for many nations, but this is kind of ridiculous.

~~~
nodemaker
I think you misread it as "Canadian Citizen" instead of "Canadian Resident".

~~~
Volpe
Sad, that we've made country distinctions such that one word can mean the
difference between caring about whether this man lives or dies and/or whether
my country should do something about it.

~~~
rglover
Agreed. Despite my misunderstanding, my original statement stands: this guy
obviously did nothing wrong and someone should be working to get him out of
Iran and back to Canada.

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cies
In reply to all the Iran hostility...

Iran is not such a bad country. I can know because I've been traveling it for
5 weeks. It's a weird place, with a govt that is not much supported by the
educated-youth. But not all that bad as the media try to make us believe.

US has not closed Guatanamo, where they do their own share of trial-less,
unfair-trail and/or unreasonable-trial sentence execution (including death
penalty). Should we all now boycott the US?

"Porn" is quite clearly just the flag under which this guy is punished for
leaving (deserting) his country. Prisoners in Guatanamo similarly have an
"official reason" for being there.

Believe me, here in the Netherlands I know some folks with strong sentiments
agains the US, and I tell them the same: "The US is not such a bad country".
So maybe it is just me :)

~~~
paulhauggis
"Iran is not such a bad country. I can know because I've been traveling it for
5 weeks. It's a weird place, with a govt that is not much supported by the
educated-youth. But not all that bad as the media try to make us believe."

I'm sorry, but if the government of a country is going execute someone for
"violating the sanctity of Islam", they are a bad country.

By accepting this behavior, you are just allowing it to continue. I don't
accept it and I will always be against a country that treats its citizens this
way. More people need to stand up to this bullshit.

"Believe me, here in the Netherlands I know some folks with strong sentiments
agains the US, and I tell them the same: "The US is not such a bad country".
So maybe it is just me :)"

The US has some problems, but it's still better than 99% of the world in terms
of freedom.

Unlike the US, Most of the world has state-controlled media and an Internet
Firewall. Hopefully, it never happens here in the US.

~~~
mattmanser
99%'s incredibly naive, more like 50%.

Just to remind you America has:

    
    
      By far the highest incarceration rate of a 'free' country
      An abnormally high murder rate
      A recent history of torture and incarceration of foreigners without trial
    

Not particularly free in my book, especially the propensity to lock up
relatively high proportion of its own citizens.

~~~
nate_meurer
Quite right. Plus, I'd like to add, highly corrupt legislative bodies. Perhaps
not nearly as corrupt as in many other places, but the stench of money and
cronyism is pervasive in American politics.

------
dazbradbury
Iran's recent history is fraught with human rights violations. Each time
stories like this are raised (on an almost daily basis), we need to support
those who are actively campaigning to improve situations for Iranians, and do
our part by informing our leaders of these concerns.

People can learn more about Iran's denial of education and send messages to UN
members here:

<http://can-you-solve-this.org/>

Or help support campaigns such as "The International Campaign for Human Rights
in Iran":

<http://www.iranhumanrights.org/>

If anyone has any other information on campaigns/activists tackling human
rights violations, I would love to hear about them.

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viraptor
> "Canada condemns Iran’s reported decision to execute Mr. Malekpour"

Is that really all Canada and other countries can do? Send a very, very angry
letter using politically correct wording?

~~~
sp332
He's a resident, not a citizen of Canada. They don't have any explicit
obligation to this guy.

~~~
viraptor
Ok, I actually thought he was not Iranian either, but that makes more sense
now...

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guard-of-terra
I find that the article lacks the details about the software in question. In
the age of hypertext no links are to be found. The problem with it is we can't
for sure show how ridiculous the accusations are without having access to that
information.

Or is it unknown?

~~~
JL2010
Agreed, does anyone have more specifics on what exactly he developed?

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ianshward
More than on any other thread I've read on Hacker News, I'm driven to say on
this in particular: what can we do? Iran's government site runs IIS. Pressure
Microsoft to revoke their license (if it's even legit). I'm ready for war. I
donated to TOR (I'll never travel to Iran) a couple years ago around the
Iranian elections. This scumbag government must tumble.

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nazar
This is just a screwed up verson of Islam they are having in Iran. If thats
what Islam stands for, I don't want to be a muslim anymore. I am sick of these
stupid gready people representing any religion( in this case Islam) from wrong
perspective. There is no such a thing as killing a person if he/she disgraced
Islam.

~~~
azth
Do you happen to speak Arabic by any chance? :)

~~~
mahmud
What does that have to do with anything? Most Iranians DON'T speak Arabic. The
ones who do are in the tiny Ahwaz region and many of them refuse to call
themselves Iranis.

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justindocanto
Wow. Poor guy. You try to make something useful, it gets into the hands of
somebody that a country like IRAN hates... and you're to be killed. Never
would have guessed this stuff happened/was possible when i was younger. blows
me away.

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zobzu
Well, as usual, fuck religion

~~~
viraptor
Is it the religion itself though, or is it about tying the law execution and
religion?

~~~
guard-of-terra
It's easy to check, remove religion and see if it helps or not.

It's of no use anyway. In most recent cases where one side was religious and
other one wasn't, religious ones were usually bad guys. Stance on abortions,
ID, this abomination. I can't remember them ever backing something good
against secular people trying to do something bad.

~~~
greyboy
In the spirit of fairness - really?

Communist Germany, USSR, Communist China/Mao, North Korea, Mussolini's Italy,
etc.? All of those were or are "religious" governments?

~~~
guard-of-terra
I don't remember catholic church standing loudly against Mussolini or Hitler,
neither russian orthodox church standing against Stalin. They were too busy
fearing for their lives.

------
Stormbringer
Stupid question time: Why isn't the title "Death sentence for Canadian web
programmer"?

My naive reading of the article indicates that the man in question is a
canadian citizen who was arrested when he visited Iran.

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sliverstorm
What I want to know- of what country is this man a citizen? It is no less
awful of Iran if he is an Iranian citizen, but it might help explain Canada's
seemingly lax reaction.

(The article says he was a resident of Canada. Residency doesn't usually mean
citizenship, right?)

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dev_Gabriel
Until when people are going to die in the name of religion?

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caycep
can he be extradited to canada to avoid this sentence?

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its_so_on
what's an Iranian engineer to do. If you develop porn software, your
government kills you. But if you work in nuclear engineering for your
government, Israel kills you. I think the best policy would be for Israel to
have a secret extraction program for Iranian engineers who are ideologically
motivated and want to get into Internet porn engineering. Win-win-win-win (the
last one is me.)

~~~
rbanffy
> Israel to have a secret extraction program for Iranian engineers

That's one very interesting idea. Offering citizenship and facilitating
immigration will slowly brain-drain Iran which will, eventually, cause
economic collapse a couple decades from now.

The only downside is that Iran's political environment already shows strong
signs of brain drainage.

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zeroboy
Iran's death by stoning is particularly brutal, as you can see by this
infographic (warning: if you are easily upset, don't read this):
[http://www.nationalpost.com/m/wp/news/blog.html?b=news.natio...](http://www.nationalpost.com/m/wp/news/blog.html?b=news.nationalpost.com/2010/11/20/graphic-
anatomy-of-a-stoning)

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jk5sj7
Is there a chance he was a spy? I ask because there are other Iranians who
have been arrested (and sentenced to death) for espionage when visiting Iran
from overseas.

~~~
Jach
Are you one of the speculated pro-Iran bots sent to communities like ours who
try to subvert public opinion on that backwards country?

~~~
pavel_lishin
Surely a user created only three hours ago, with only one comment and a random
username wouldn't have nefarious purposes!

Better double-check. Offer him some bacon.

