Piffey

An article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday showed that the highly-criticized Iranian government is starting to retaliate by threatening American- and European-Iranian citizens that have criticized the government on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media outlets.

His first impulse was to dismiss the ominous email as a prank, says a young Iranian-American named Koosha. It warned the 29-year-old engineering student that his relatives in Tehran would be harmed if he didn’t stop criticizing Iran on Facebook.

Koosha later found out that his father had been arrested in Tehran and threatened because of his son’s online criticism. The government’s counter-campaign has been mostly staged by threatening individuals overseas who have been openly critical online. Family members that live in Iran have either been questioned, harassed, and detained because of their family’s criticism.

Interviews with roughly 90 ordinary Iranians abroad — college students, housewives, doctors, lawyers, businesspeople — in New York, London, Dubai, Sweden, Los Angeles and other places indicate that people who criticize Iran’s regime online or in public demonstrations are facing threats intended to silence them.

A lot of these protesters are also being visited at their homes. One German intelligence report recently showed “Iranian intelligence operatives are monitoring about 900 critics of the Iranian regime within Germany” and that German intelligence has identified these individuals intimidating protesters. The original investigations and allegations stem from the deputy commander of the armed forces in Iran, General Massoud Jazayeri, who wrote that “protesters inside and outside Iran have been identified and will be dealt with at the right time.”

The article continues to give personal anecdotes from one Iranian engineer who, upon returning to Tehran, was blindfolded and physically abused until he handed over his E-mail and Facebook passwords. The engineer was told he could either face charges of threatening national security in Iran or act as an informant in Europe. Since then he has been repeatedly harassed by E-mails and phone calls. Another, even more threatening, is an E-mail to an Iranian-American graduate student that said “We know your home address in Los Angeles. Watch out, we will come after you.” Others have found fake Facebook accounts of themselves that have been friending their colleagues and asking them questions. Many, upon their return to Tehran, have been forced to login to their Facebook accounts before they are able to enter the country — their passports being confiscated until security services were satisfied.

Recently, the Iranian government created a 12-person Internet Crime Unit to track those “spreading lies and insults” and to confront Iran’s “virtual enemies online.” The regime also made it harder for those in Iran to communicate with people outside the country:

To cut communication between Iranians inside and outside the country, Iran slowed Internet speeds so that accessing an online email account could take close to a half-hour. It blocked access to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. For a while, an automated message warned people making international phone calls not to give information to outsiders.

The question that strikes me as most pertinent is how do we fight back against the regime’s attempt to pry at its citizens, ex-patriots, and even non-citizens overseas? While this sort of snooping is in no way limited to just the Iranian government — you might recall our own government’s cyber-forces — this sort of intimidation has to be crossing a border. The regime in Tehran has figured out how quickly information can spread on social networks and the sheer power of social media to organize and unite protesters. Now they’re trying to silence and remove the freedoms of those inside their borders and those outside that have been guaranteed those freedoms elsewhere.

If there is anything we can do it’s to continue to provide support for anonymizer networks and darknets such as Tor to keep people safe and to continue to allow the distribution of information that could lead to the victory of the people’s will.

(All Clips From The Wall Street Journal via /.)