percent false and couldn’t be further from the truth.” Iran’s Intelligence Ministry has publicly admitted to something opposition activists have long suspected—hacking into opposition emails during last year’s post-election protests.
“The Intelligence Ministry was able to control many dimensions of last year’s sedition by closely monitoring email addresses,” Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi told a December 25 conference in Tehran.
Emails, in addition to mobile texts and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, were heavily used forms of communication among the protestors after the June 2009 presidential elections.
National Police Chief Esmail Ahmadi-Moqaddam said last summer that those promoting “riots through emails and text messages” would be reprimanded, implying that the message traffic was being watched. Several activists were reportedly charged in court based on emails and text messages. Many of those released from jail said their email passwords were demanded by their interrogators.
Moslehi told the conference Saturday, “One official, in a speech, out of carelessness, announced that we have access to emails. Within 24 hours, they coded and password-protected their emails. Of course, we in the Intelligence Ministry broke those passwords within 48 hours.”
It was not known if that was the truth or if Moslehi was just trying to impress his audience with the outstanding efficiency of his agency as well as scare opposition members out of relying on the Internet,
Moslehi also said emails were exchanged between Iranians and foreigners, but that Iranian intelligence was too advanced to be overcome. “One of the interesting points that we saw during the sedition was that [President] Obama himself announced to the [American] Senate, ‘We have designed a virtual network to counter the Islamic Republic, but because the resistance of Iran’s intelligence services, we could not confront them and we suffered defeat!’” Moslehi added.
But Obama has not said anything like that. Moslehi’s resort to a fictional quote left open the option that the rest of what he said was also fictional.
