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Comment by malekpour | Hacker News Reader

Government has no control over receivers since those are already banned and people buy them from underground market. Selling, buying or installing receivers are all illegal and punishable. Having said that, majority of Iranians are watching satellite TVs.

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You can't really hide a satellite dish, seems to me it would be easy to find houses with illegal equipment?

We are talking about millions of dishes. This is where law ridicules itself and impossible to enforce. There are some police raids once a while, but not effective.

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-27920659

That's good news then :-)

Selectively enforced laws are more useful to the government than laws that are consistently enforced.

But not useful for their original purpose (in this case, suppressing satellite TV usage). Just useful as general leverage against targeted people, which the Iranian government is not short of anyway.

The actual purpose is not to supress satellite TV usage but to keep the population in sufficient fear of powers-that-be. You can do many things, just don't stick your head out.

Did you read the article?

The article says "Satellite TV, however, has become common in even small villages, with as many as 70 percent of Iranian households owning a satellite dish."

Satellite dishes are not illegal because satellite TV is not illegal. (Edit1: I am wrong.)

Edit1: Satellite dishes have apparently been illegal since 1994; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_in_Iran

Satellite dishes are illegal in Iran or at least were up until 1996. I lived in Iran during the 90s and I recall my uncle's dish was confiscated and he had to pay a hefty fine. But you don't have to take my word for it. There is all kinds of evidence to support that: http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-iranian-police...

Ah... my mistake for assuming that. (I edited my post.)

Regardless, my focus was not on the legality of dishes, but the amount of people who have them.

With 40-70 percent of households owning a satellite dish, even after being illegal for over 20 years, it seems unlikely that Toosheh is more "dangerous" than the limited internet that Iran already has.

I vaguely recall that you hide dishes on top of roofs in places that are not easily observable, for instance a big water tank on top of a building with an open top can have a dish mounted on the inside.

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