Iran cyber police cite U.S. threat

The Washington Post — An Iranian police unit that was formed recently to counter alleged Internet crimes is playing a key role in an escalating online conflict between the United States and the Islamic Republic.

The “cyber police” force is part of a broad and largely successful government effort to block foreign Web sites and social networks deemed a threat to national security.

Iranian officials say they must control which sites Iranians are able to visit in order to prevent spying and protect the public from “immoral” material. The United States, they charge, is waging a “soft war” against Iran by reaching out to Iranians online and inciting them to overthrow their leaders.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday played into such accusations, saying U.S. officials had asked Twitter, the social networking site, to postpone online maintenance in 2009 so that it would be available for Iranian anti-government protesters organizing demonstrations against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed election victory.

Iran’s state radio responded Thursday, citing Clinton’s comments as proof that Washington is using U.S. Internet companies to influence events inside Iran. Tensions between the two countries are high following allegations that a 56-year-old Iranian American citizen had plotted to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington at the behest of the Quds Force, an elite branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps. Iran has denied the accusations, but the United States has called for tougher sanctions against Tehran.

In interviews this week with the Farsi-language channels of the Voice of America and the BBC, Clinton announced a U.S. plan to open a “virtual embassy” for Iran that would provide online information about visas and student programs.

But the initiative is likely to be thwarted by Iranian authorities, who are increasingly using filtering software to block access to sites such as CNN or to open pages containing sensitive key words, such as “sex” and “velvet revolution.” At times, even the Google search engine is blocked. Attempts to open such sites from Iran are met with a page operated by the Telecommunications Ministry that reads, “Dear user, according to the law you are not allowed to visit to this bad Web site.”

The page is now the seventh-most-visited in the country, according to Iranian online statistics monitors.

Iranians are also allowed access only to locally hosted social media sites, such as Cloob.com, which are limited in scope compared with Facebook.

A considerable number of Iran’s roughly 35 million Internet users do manage to enter the forbidden sites through widely available but illegal “virtual private networks” — software that allows users to surf the Web through portals in other countries. But those users are also subject to scrutiny by Iran’s cyber police, who use alternative identities to roam social media networks.

In addition, bloggers and other online activists here have increasingly faced arrest in the past year, with some sentenced to long prison terms.

This week, cyber police officers visited Facebook members in the central Iranian city of Natanz, urging them to avoid the site.

Authorities have also launched a savvy campaign to convince young Iranians that using sites such as Facebook could endanger themselves and their country and that the cyber police unit, created in January as a separate entity within the national police force, is their friend.

Earlier this month at the Digital Media Fair in Tehran, a showcase for locally made computer games and government-supported Web sites, portraits of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and late Apple co-founder Jobs hung next to posters showing the Google logo replacing the rectangle of stars on the American flag.

Moshen Emami, a tall man in a black suit with a lapel pin bearing the cyber police logo, welcomed groups of schoolgirls who had been bused in to see the exhibition.

In his flashy booth, flat-screen TVs displayed the words “soft war,” and assistants walked around explaining the dangers of the Internet. Zuckerberg, Jobs and other Internet entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley have assisted the U.S. government in attacking Iran in an “online proxy war,” Emami told a reporter.

“Facebook itself is not bad,” Emami said, acknowledging that he has four Facebook pages that he accesses using illegal software. “But our people are using it wrong.”

Emami, who insisted that he was a private individual and not a member of the cyber police, said that educating Iranians how to use the Internet properly was better than blocking Web sites. He referred a visitor to a huge booth at the center of the exhibition that was operated by the unit.

There, dozens of people were listening to a police workshop on how to prevent hacking, while officers with brand-new iPad2 tablets under their arms talked to boys with spiked hair.

“We are here to create a cyber police force inside the people’s mind,” said Hesamedin Mojtahed, the officer in charge of the booth. “People want to be informed of the dangers on the Internet,” he said. “We are here for them.”

The Internet also undermines religious values, Emami said, adding that young women do not realize that images posted online showing them without a head scarf could be used against them. “Lives are being ruined every day,” he said.

Four young women wearing the traditional black chador, all computer engineering students, said the exhibition had been an eye-opener.

“We always thought that the government is blocking all those Web sites to make our lives boring,” said Mahyar, 22, who did not give her family name. “But today we were told that it is the United States that is purposely blocking some information for Iranian users. Clearly, they are our real enemies.”

“We need to be protected,” she added, admitting that she had seen some pictures online that she shouldn’t have. “There are many dangers out there.”