An illustration used by arrested Iranian blogger Babak Khoramdin on his blog

Government forces in Iran appear to be cracking down on bloggers. A report by Hamid Tehrani at Global Voices online says,

The Iranian state-run news website, Irna [fa] and ultra conservative newspaper Keyhan [fa] announced this month that members of Iran Proxy, a group fighting against censorship and filtering, had been arrested. The news sites also claimed in an announcement that the Iranian government had disrupted several “U.S. backed cyber war networks” and arrested 30 people. Iranian news sites did not mention how many of the arrested people belong to Iran Proxy group.

Iran Proxy has used twitter and their website in the fight against web filtering. In an interview with Radio Farda, a representative of the group said they have been working for six years in an ‘underground’ fight against censorship.

Three months ago, the group announced on its website [fa] that due to financial pressures they were stopping their activities.

Keyhan reported that the leader of the group is a blogger named “Seyed Hussein Ronaghi Melki” whose pennames are Babak Khoramdin or Babak blogger. The newspaper claims the blogger was based in Tabriz and was involved in human rights activities. According to Keyhan he has been arrested by security forces.

Also arrested: Mehdi Aboutorabi, “founder of Persian Blog, a leading blog provider in country …. Aboutorabi was a supporter of the presidential campaign of one of Iran’s main opposition leaders, Mir Hussein Mousavi. Since the presidential election on 12 June, the Iranian authorities have arrested hundreds of journalists and political activists, and also many bloggers.”

Another report, by Sumner Lemon at PC World, says, details other hacked opposition sites and arrested webmasters:

Some of the hacked domain names listed by Fars pointed to a single Web site, hra-iran.org, which displayed a short statement on its main page: “This website is temporarily unavailable, please try again later.” Other domain names led to sites that were also unavailable.

Recently cached versions of the hra-iran.org Web site on Google show the site was operated by a group calling itself Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRAI). Information previously available on the site included a report on 400 Iranian opposition protesters that were arrested on Nov. 4, 2009, an Iranian holiday that marks the anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, according to a cached version of the site.

It was not clear whether HRAI had ties to U.S. intelligence organizations or whether the Fars report labeled them as such due to their apparent sympathy for opposition protestors. The Fars report did not tie any of the Web sites to a specific U.S. government entity.

The Fars report came one day after the Islamic Republic News Agency, Iran’s official news agency, reported that the Iranian government had disrupted several “U.S. backed cyber war networks” and arrested 30 people.

The networks were funded as part of US$400 million allocated to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to destabilize Iran, drawing on opposition groups including groups loyal to the deposed Shah of Iran, it said.