Iran ready to fight cyberwar against its own people

Yesterday the New York Times ran with the ghoulish news that Basij vigilantes were stalking protesters to their homes and assaulting them, using extrajudicial means to police the regime’s challengers.

Today, my former New York Sun colleague Eli Lake reports that they might not just be following people home from the streets. Apparently Iran has stocked up in recent months on advanced technology that could help it track protesters’ digital trails:

The government recently bought sophisticated computer servers and monitoring devices from a German-Finnish joint venture that can catalog cell-phone calls and text messages. The regime also controls Web traffic through a single bank of computers, which makes it easier to filter sites such as Facebook and Twitter and to monitor Iranians who use these sites to communicate with the outside world.

“Iran’s pervasive surveillance of their digital networks and the use of unencrypted connections by dissidents could be a recipe for reprisals later down the line,” Danny O’Brien, the international outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Washington Times on Thursday.

“The fact that Iran runs all of its Web traffic through a single bank of computers, which is how they block Web sites, is also a perfect way to monitor for key words. If you are not using strong encryption, then all those communications could be stored by the government,” he said.

via Washington Times – Iran prepared to track dissent on social networks.

This follows on our own Marc Herman’s report on Wednesday that an academic consortium characterized Iran’s platform for censoring Internet traffic as “one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated in the world.”

Hopefully the regime in Iran doesn’t have designs so well-planned that it’s letting cyber-activists in the country do their thing on Twitter and elsewhere so it can track them down later for indefinie detentions and extra-judicial killings. But I hope the good people of Iran with their Twitter feeds, blogs, Flickr accounts, and other means to give us a window on their world will do all they can to stay safe and anonymous to their government’s monitoring systems.