TEHRAN Jan 31 (Reuters) - Iranians have found their access to major news websites even more restricted than usual as more foreign sites were blocked by a government filter, Reuters witnesses observed on Monday. Yahoo News and Reuters.com, both usually accessible in Iran, were unavailable, joining other long-blocked news sites such as the BBC and social networks Facebook and Twitter as beyond the reach of Iranians using a standard Internet connection. There was no official confirmation of new Internet restrictions. One Iranian government official contacted by Reuters said authorities were "looking into the source of the problem" to remove it.

It was on Christmas Day that Facebook's Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan first noticed strange things going on in Tunisia. Reports started to trickle in that political-protest pages were being hacked. "We were getting anecdotal reports saying, 'It looks like someone logged into my account and deleted it,'" Sullivan said. For Tunisians, it was another run-in with Ammar, the nickname they've given to the authorities that censor the country's Internet. They'd come to expect it. In the days after the holiday, Sullivan's security team started to take a closer look at the data, but it wasn't entirely clear what was happening. In the US, they could look to see if different IP addresses, which identify particular nodes on the network, were accessing the same account. But in Tunisia, the addresses are commonly reassigned. The evidence that accounts were being hacked remained anecdotal. Facebook's security team couldn't prove something was wrong in the data. It wasn't until after the new year that the shocking truth emerged: Ammar was in the process of stealing an entire country's worth of passwords.

JAKARTA—BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. said Thursday it has started Internet filtering on its smartphones in Indonesia just ahead of a pending deadline, the first such move in any country. The Indonesian government since last year has been telling Internet service providers in the country to block customers from viewing websites with pornographic material. The move put pressure on RIM, as the company is known, to install filters by a Friday deadline.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski should be applauded for his announcement Wednesday that he would proceed on open Internet rules and for recognizing that "no central authority, public or private" should be a gatekeeper to the Internet. Unfortunately, his earlier plan more strongly protected Internet access. While describing problems with Internet censorship overseas during my recent Senate Finance Committee testimony, I found it strikingly similar to our domestic struggle for Internet openness, known as net neutrality. Domestically or internationally, the principle of openness is the same -- and what we do here affects our credibility in fighting for Internet freedom abroad. If the United States can't preserve open, neutral Internet access, our diplomats and trade representatives will be hard-pressed to object to Internet gate-keeping -- such as censorship and filtering -- by foreign countries. Whether a corporation wants to prioritize favored Internet traffic for commercial reasons, or a government wants to censor unfavorable traffic for political reasons, the same network tools, like deep packet inspection (DPI), are at work to control what gets through to end users, and when.