The council falls under the ultimate supervision of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and one of its main tasks is to ensure that the Internet would not be used by Iranians inside the country in any way that would violate Islamic ethics or pose a threat to state security.
Hojjatoleslam Hamid Shahryari has taken over from a layman, Nasrollah Jahangard. He and his colleagues constantly update the list of Internet websites that should be filtered.
Shahryari has run an Islamist website (hawzah.net) for several years and established a reputation for himself as a fiery theological student while studying in the seminaries of the holy city of Qom in the 1980s.
Reporters Without Borders calls Iran the biggest prison for journalists in the Middle East.
