Iran’s Security Crackdown Runs Into Resistance From Within
White House Weighs Defense Production Act as U.S.
Refineries Maxed Out RFE/RL journalists report the news in 21 countries where a free press is banned by the government or not fully established.
We provide what many… Iran's parliament is trying to turn fears of foreign infiltration into law.
But as lawmakers work through the legislation, the debate is exposing an increasingly awkward question for the Islamic Republic: How far should the state go in policing Iranians' contact with the outside world? At the center of that debate is Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, who, at least publicly, is doing a balancing act.
He has defended the need for tougher measures against foreign infiltration while warning that the current draft of the legislation goes too far.
"No patriot opposes countering foreign infiltration," Qalibaf said during a recent parliamentary session.
But, he added, lawmakers needed to ensure that people's "rights, their lives, and their trade" were not affected.
He said security agencies may need to be able to vet Iranians' contacts with foreigners but that they cannot demand permission at every stage.
"They say they want to be certain, to have permission sought from them at every stage," the conservative speaker said.
"That's not possible, because then we'd have to lock the country down." That balancing act gets to the heart of a bill that was conceived as a wartime response to genuine security failures.
The two recent wars exposed how deeply Israeli intelligence had penetrated Iran and prompted calls for tougher measures to identify and prevent foreign influence.
But what began as a security response has evolved into a much broader fight over the boundaries of the Islamic republic's security state.
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