I think evidence has been gathered by various human rights organizations. I refer you to the reports by Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch that suggest that in principle you're absolutely right, that the level of repression has mounted inside the country following the 2009 elections.
Certainly the level of freedom within Iran had already deteriorated considerably after the accession to the presidency by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005. Hundreds of publications have been shut down since 2005, even before the fraudulent presidential elections. You see an intensification of repression against ethnic minorities inside Iran. The rounding up and execution of Kurdish dissidents is one example.
We saw the government use significant violence to repress peaceful protests in Iranian Azerbaijan late last year, which were related to nothing eminently political, if you wish. Rather it was political, but it had nothing to do with the nature of the regime. It had to do with an environmental crisis affecting a UNESCO world heritage site in Iranian Azerbaijan caused mainly by the mismanagement of the environment by a combination of factors. The peaceful protesters who saved this heritage site were met with brutal repression.
If you put that together with the increased rounding up of dissidents, bloggers, journalists, and the active harassment of reformists, who have been barred from participating in elections to all intents and purposes, the fact that the Green Movement's leaders have been under house arrest for over a year, that their families have been harassed, that a number of prominent figures even within the inner sanctum of the regime are no longer invulnerable—I think here in particular of the case of former president Rafsanjani, who is no saint when it comes to human rights, but who certainly has been more supportive of the reformists than the regime in recent years—all of this tells you that the grip of the regime is becoming tighter and tighter. It may also be a reflection of the concern the regime has that its own population is not supportive of this kind of approach. Here there may be a difference with Saudi Arabia.
One should not forget that society tends to be very conservative in Saudi Arabia. Perhaps they share if not a fear at least a concern over the interaction between their own society and westerners and the western values and culture they bring.
As I mentioned before, the fact that the Iranian regime feels threatened by the import of Barbie dolls or Simpson dolls is very revealing about what their population really wants and the gulf that increasingly exists between them and their own leaders.