19. Iranian authorities have had great difficulty locating anti-government blogs to shut them down. The Guardian reported that the government took the step, perhaps unprecedented when compared to the rest of the world, of ordering telecommunications companies to restrict the speed at which material could be accessed to 128 kbps—in effect, banning high speed internet—specifically to make it next to impossible for Iranians to download the kinds of materials (songs, video clips, television shows) the authorities view as carriers of negative cultural influences from the West. See Robert Tait, "Iran Bans Fast Internet to Cut West's Influence," The Guardian, October 18, 2006, available from technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,1924637,00.html.
20. "A World Wide Web of Terror," The Economist, July 12, 2007, available from www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9472498.
21. Deborah L. Wheeler, "Empowering Publics: Information Technology and Democratization in the Arab World—Lessons From Internet Cafes and Beyond," Research Report No. 11, Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford Internet Institute, July 2006, pp. 6–7.
22. Ibid., p. 7.
23. Alan Cowell, "Britain Arrests 9 Suspects in Terrorist Kidnapping Plot," New York Times, January 31, 2007, available from nytimes.com, www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/world/europe/01britainhtml?ex=1170997200&en=50c3676a80e47899&ei=5070&emc=eta1. Interestingly, the group apparently planned to behead the soldier. What none of the press coverage of the arrests mentioned was that after a series of hostage beheadings were filmed and that footage uploaded to the Internet in Iraq, beginning with that of the American Nicholas Berg (whose example was mentioned in the coverage), the practice of filming beheadings stopped—although decapitated bodies continued to turn up regularly in Baghdad. An intercepted letter from Zawahiri to Zarqawi, although its authenticity has never been definitively proven, requested the practice stop because it was so brutal and gruesome that it was hurting the movement's image, not helping.
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