National Police Chief Esmail Ahmadi-Moqaddam inaugurated the new police unit Sunday. He had announced the plan for a cyber police unit in November 2009. It wasn’t clear why it took 14 months to bring it to fruition; the long time did not give an impression of organizational efficiency, however.
Moqaddam said the Internet provides opportunities for “others” to spy and to broadcast lies and slander.
Last March, the Judiciary said part of what Iran was calling cyber warfare against Iran was the supply of anti-filtering devices. The United States has a major effort to provide anti-filtering technology to Iranians, Chinese and residents of any other countries that try to restrict citizen access to the Internet by blocking entry to websites.
The Judiciary said then that in the first 10 months after the June 2009 election, the United States had provided 70 million copies of US-made anti-filtering software as part of its psychological warfare against the Iranian government and the Iranian people. Seventy million would represent almost one copy for every Iranian—man, woman, child and newborn.
In an apparent effort to frighten Iranian citizens, the Judiciary statement said one goal of the Americans was to gather “personal and family information” about those who used the software. That information would then be passed on to US spy agencies, it said.
The statement said it had just broken up some American-sponsored networks that also had a goal of provoking anti-government protests by circulating false stories about the election results. Yet another goal was to identify the country’s nuclear scientists, it said.
The March statement said the American psy-war program was called “Iran Proxy.” That is, however, simply the term used by those who set up proxy websites outside Iran that Iranians can go to and then type in the addresses of websites they are barred from reaching by Iranian government filters. But Iran treated Iran Proxy as if it were a formal organization, saying, “Members of Iran Proxy in Iran were in receipt of significant salaries.”
The Judiciary statement also said the US cyber war program was to recruit people and dispatch them to the Mojahedin-e Khalq base in Iraq, Camp Ashraf. The people who wrote the statement apparently forgot that Camp Ashraf was turned over to Iraqi government control by the US Army on January 1, 2009.