John Kelly and Bruce Etling, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Society at Harvard University Iranian Blogosphere
It’s easy enough to forget the days when telecommunications were synonymous with a single phone company in the United States or elsewhere. Many countries have followed the model of bringing competition to the telecom sector or privatizing state-owned firms in the decades since the 1984 divestiture of the Bell Telephone System, with one of the latest being Iran. Interesting, then, is last week’s acquisition of a majority stake in the formerly state-run Telecommunications Company of Iran by the Etemid-e-Mobin consortium, a corporate holding company for the Army of the Revolutionary Guardians of the Islamic Revolution. Why? Principally because after most of the foreign journalists in the country covered the disputed election results last June, Internet-based communication channels continued to pump information in and more importantly, out of the country.
As the AP stated (in a story that appeared in the Washington Post):
The purchase gives the Revolutionary Guard, whose forces led the violent crackdown on the massive street protests after the disputed June presidential election allowed [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad a second term in office, control over the country’s telecommunications network.
This is a clear move by the Revolutionary Guard to better manage the communication channels of the country. Iranians, both at home and abroad, engage in a vibrant blogosphere which serves, among other things, as a medium for internal political discussion. Ahmadinejad, a former member of the Guard, has since 2006 capitalized on the phenomenon by setting up his own blog, originally in English, Arabic and French as well as Farsi (although he has published only in his native tongue for the past year or so). The Guard’s purchase of Iran’s telecommunications company will make it easier for the country’s leadership to promote its own information and block the sites they don’t want found.
It’s very easy to focus on the potential capacity of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to squelch political debate or round up dissenters. This, however, may only be half the story. Like the United States, Iran has an information grid to protect from cyber-attacks designed to shut down networks or vacuum up closely held information.
Regarding this vulnerability, we need look no further than a January 2009 piece by The New York Times’ David Sanger. In explaining why the Bush administration rebuffed Israeli inquiries regarding strikes on Iran’s distributed network of nuclear sites, the article mentioned the means of collection for making the assessment that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program.
Israel’s effort to obtain the weapons, refueling capacity and permission to fly over Iraq for an attack on Iran grew out of its disbelief and anger at an American intelligence assessment completed in late 2007 that concluded that Iran had effectively suspended its development of nuclear weapons four years earlier … The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate, was based on a trove of Iranian reports obtained by penetrating Iran’s computer networks.
As Rep. Michael McCaul, a recent speaker at the Baker Institute, implied, the United States indeed holds powerful cyber-espionage and cyber-warfare capabilities. The sale of the Iranian national telecom concern to the Revolutionary Guards should be viewed as at least a tacit acknowledgement of the vulnerability of Iran’s networks to outside penetration or attack.
Christopher Bronk is the Baker Institute fellow in technology, society and public policy. He previously served as a career diplomat with the United States Department of State on assignments both overseas and in Washington, D.C.