Remember how Iran had the idea of installing a Great Firewall like the one China has? Too bad it backfired. Reports are saying that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's fatwa against antifiltering tools was almost immediately auto blocked by the governments's own censoring systems. The reason: it included the word "antifiltering".

Iranian Telecommunications Minister Reza Taghipour declared VPNs and antifiltering software illegal last October, but journalists and some others pointed out that they needed access to banned websites for information not found on government accredited sites.

Khameni wrote, "In general, the use of antifiltering software is subject to the laws and regulations of the Islamic republic, and it is not permissible to violate the law."

According to a report by the conservative website Tabnak, the fatwa lasted just 30 hours before being scrubbed from the net. "The filtering of a [religious] order is so ugly for the executive [branch] that it can bring into question the whole philosophy of filtering," wrote the website, which has close ties to the current secretary-general of the Expediency Council, Mohsen Rezai.

Draconian systems don't work anymore. It's the year 2012. Get with the program man.

[Radio Free Europe via Business Insider ]