In skies over Iran, a battle for control of satellite TV

(WSJ)

Shohreh, a 37-year-old Iranian nurse, sat down with her husband and parents one night in September to watch a documentary about Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, scheduled to be shown on the British Broadcasting Corp.'s BBC Persian channel.

But when the Tehran family settled on the couch with a bowl of pistachios and switched on the television, all they saw was scrambled imagery. The satellite signal was being jammed.

"We were very disappointed that we couldn't see the film," said Shohreh, who declined to let her last name be used.

As uprisings rolled across the Middle East this year, Iran stepped up its jamming of the BBC, Voice of America and other Western networks with Persian-language news channels. The move "is intended to prevent Iranian audiences from seeing foreign broadcasts the Iranian government finds objectionable," five networks protested in a joint statement this month.

While the use of Western technology for Internet censorship by Middle Eastern and North African regimes has gained attention this year, satellite television has also become a potent force in the region and, in Iran, a target of censorship.

Some 45% to 60% of Iranians watch satellite TV, according to estimates from the state media company and an Iranian research center, exceeding the number believed to use the Internet. Iran so far seems to be winning a struggle to filter out unwanted TV content and broadcast its own propaganda: The country jams channels like the BBC on Western satellites even as Iran's state media company broadcasts pro-government news on some of the same satellites, and at times has aired forced confessions of political detainees.

"Iran is having it both ways," said a U.S. State Department official. "While they benefit from the international community's respect for 'freedom of expression' and 'freedom of the airwaves,' they deny that same right to their own citizens, aggressively jamming Persian-language broadcasts from other countries."

The head of Iran's state media company last year admitted using such tactics, according to Iranian state media reports. "We send jams" to the satellites, the reports quoted the executive as saying in a spring 2010 speech. Requests for comment sent to Iran's United Nations mission went unanswered, as did questions emailed to the public-relations office of the state media company, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, or IRIB.

Some non-Iranian news broadcasters find themselves in a cat-and-mouse game with the regime. The BBC, for example, launched its Persian-language channel in 2009 and beamed it from the "Hotbird" satellite of Paris-based Eutelsat Communications SA, which is a satellite that large numbers of rooftop dishes in Iran are pointed at to receive free Persian channels.

After Iran jammed the signal, the BBC reluctantly switched to a different satellite that reached far fewer Iranian homes. Since September, Iran has periodically jammed that signal, too.

Viewers, like broadcasters, often try workarounds. On Sept. 18, the day after the scheduled documentary on the ayatollah was blocked, a surgeon at the hospital where Shohreh works downloaded the show from YouTube and circulated DVD copies, Shohreh said.

Iran's jamming and use of its broadcast company as a tool of censorship raise a question that divides activists, politicians and business people: Should the country be denied access to Western satellites?

Some human-rights activists say yes. Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize winner, calls for refusing access "until the Iranian government learns to respect freedom of expression and freedom of free information," or at least until it stops sabotaging foreign news channels' satellite signals, a practice barred under international conventions Iran has signed. Ms. Ebadi, who now lives in the U.K., contends satellite companies should drop IRIB as a customer.

Others say barring Iranian state channels from European and U.S. satellites would itself amount to censorship. "If the Iranian speech is not advocating terrorism, as a free-speech advocate, I'm reluctant to block it," said Rep. Brad Sherman (D., Calif.), who has helped craft U.S. sanctions on Iran.

Iranian state broadcasters beam channels to 45 countries using at least eight international satellite companies, according to the State Department. IRIB broadcasts not only in Persian but in Arabic—on its Al Alam channel—and in English on its Press TV. Besides Eutelsat, companies it uses include Intelsat SA, Telesat Holdings Inc. and AsiaSat, a Hong Kong-based operator in which General Electric Co. has a stake.

Iran has little reason to jam Intelsat and AsiaSat, which don't carry BBC Persian or other typically targeted channels, and those companies said they weren't aware of their satellites being jammed. Telesat, which also says it isn't aware of being jammed, does carry BBC Persian but the satellite that carries the channel isn't widely watched in Iran. Eutelsat, meanwhile, says it has been targeted repeatedly.

Intelsat, based in Luxembourg but with main offices in Washington, is able to do business with Iran despite the U.S. embargo because of a license from the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control. Intelsat was once an intergovernmental organization and was obliged to provide service to the group's former members, including Iran, when it changed to a private company a decade ago.

"Satellite operators like Intelsat do not censor the content that is broadcast over their satellites," said Dianne Van Beber, a vice president and spokeswoman. "If a customer is in good standing and in compliance with the terms of our agreement, then they have the right to broadcast their content."

The chief executive of Eutelsat, Michel de Rosen, said, "I get pressure from many governments about many channels. Our permanent answer is: We will not do anything about a channel if we do not get a clear order backed by law."

Eutelsat says it did pull Libyan government channels in April after the European Union barred any technical aid to the Gadhafi regime. Later, North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces bombed the Libyan state satellite-television facility, which NATO said was being used to incite attacks on civilians.

Some activists say a case can be made that Iran is using state-media satellite transmissions to trample dissent. They point to distorted or false IRIB news reports, such as those portraying this year's "Arab Spring" uprisings as Islamic revolutions, and to incidents like one involving Newsweek journalist Maziar Bahari, who was forced to give a false confession in front of state media outlets while jailed in 2009.

The director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, Hadi Ghaemi, called IRIB "an arm of repression." Mr. Bahari, now free, said, "I think the argument of freedom of speech would be valid if the Iranian government was just broadcasting information, but they broadcast forced confessions [and] fabricated propaganda."

A confidential 14-page report from IRIB's research and policy center, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, documents IRIB's efforts to skew the news. "You are forbidden to broadcast any programs that would cast a doubt in the public's mind about the government," the report said. It encouraged programs to "insist that Iran's nuclear program is for peaceful energy purposes."

Numerous outside broadcasters have sought to tap Iran's TV audience. Besides BBC Persian, satellite channels include MBC Persia and Farsi1, which airs local-language versions of entertainment shows like "Malcolm in the Middle" and which is half-owned by News Corp., publisher of The Wall Street Journal. There are also dozens of Persian-language channels based outside Iran, many run by expatriates.

Iran's response has been to tolerate the more innocuous entertainment channels but sometimes jam foreign networks broadcasting local-language news. The head of the joint venture that oversees Farsi1 said it had experienced interference when its signal was located near BBC Persian or near other news channels, but this subsided after it moved to a different transponder. BBC Persian has been a top target, as has Voice of America.

Iran uses two jamming techniques, according to satellite specialists and broadcasters. "Vertical jamming" sends powerful noise signals directly to the satellite to override a channel's entire feed. "Territorial jamming" involves noise stations set up locally to interfere with reception in specific neighborhoods.

The Iranian parliament's communications committee looked into satellite jamming about eight years ago after citizen complaints of poor reception, said Ali Akbar Mousavi Khoeini, once deputy head of the committee. He said it found a network of jamming systems scattered around big cities operated by the Revolutionary Guard, Iran's elite military unit.

When BBC Persian launched in early 2009, the BBC was already a popular way for Iranians to get news. For 70 years it has had a Persian-language radio station, which is hard to block because it is short-wave; the BBC also has a Persian website, which is blocked in Iran but accessible via circumvention tools. For its TV channel, the BBC rented a frequency on Eutelsat's Hotbird, the most popular satellite in Iran for TV watchers.

For six months, the channel flourished without interference, with varied programming in addition to news, including a popular talk show, "Your Turn," that gives Iranians a chance to share their opinions.

But on the day in June 2009 when Iran held its presidential election, BBC Persian suddenly went off the air.

The BBC set up frequencies on other satellites, but the channel's reach fell dramatically. To receive content from a satellite, viewers must have their dish pointed at the angle of its orbit. To change to signals from a different satellite, they must physically shift their dish or append an extra fixture called an arm, typically requiring a climb to the roof. (Satellite dishes are technically illegal in Iran and occasionally confiscated, but remain widespread.)

The jamming on Hotbird eventually stopped. But in December 2009, when BBC Persian aired a documentary about the death of a cleric who had become a regime critic, it started again.

Because the jamming was causing collateral damage to neighboring channels on Hotbird, the BBC reluctantly agreed to a request from a satellite-space middleman to move to another Eutelsat satellite, called W3A. It is less-watched, and the move initially cut BBC Persian's reach by at least half, the channel's director, Sadeq Saba, estimates.

The BBC persuaded many Iranians to shift their dishes or add an arm to receive W3A. It circulated how-to videos on YouTube. Some people did follow the channel to the other satellite.

Then during this spring's protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square, Iran started targeting the W3A satellite, too.

Mr. Saba tells of being called to a technical meeting in the imposing limestone building on London's Strand that houses the BBC satellite monitoring center. "It was really like those science-fiction movies," he said. On control-room screens, "you could see the Iranians sending spikes of light to jam the waves." Ultimately, the BBC team undertook technical countermeasures that kept the feed on the less-watched W3A satellite on the air.

There are indications Iran is acquiring more-sophisticated jamming equipment. Russia sold Iran some, according to an official of Russia's Federal Service for Military and Technical Cooperation, who told a Russian state news agency that such a sale wasn't prohibited under United Nations sanctions.

During the documentary about Ayatollah Khamenei on Sept. 17, Iran managed for the first time to jam BBC Persian on the W3A satellite. Today, BBC Persian still wants to restore service on the more popular Hotbird but is continually thwarted by jamming. It has its signal on two other satellites in addition to W3A, but their reach in Iran is even more limited.

In October, the EU called on Tehran "to lift restrictions on communications, including Internet censorship, and put an immediate end to jamming of satellitebroadcasting."

Eutelsat says it has filed numerous complaints with a U.N. agency that manages outer-space frequencies, the International Telecommunication Union, an arm of which stated in March that the interference "appeared to be emanating from Iran." Iran said it couldn't find the source of the jamming, according to the chief of the U.N. agency's space-services department, Yvon Henri. The agency urged Iran to keep trying to find it and to "eliminate it as a matter of highest priority."

Mr. Henri says the U.N. agency is limited in what it can do. "It's part of the regulation that we don't have any power other than to try to get everyone together and find a solution that is mutually agreeable," he said. "We certainly do not have any army or anybody to descend anywhere."

Write to Paul Sonne at [email protected] and Farnaz Fassihi at [email protected]