She was speaking at an International Atomic Agency summit hosted by France. Just days before the summit, French president Emanuel Macron spoke — a nuclear submarine looming behind him — of the need to increase the country’s stockpile of nuclear warheads for the first time in several decades. “In this dangerous and uncertain world,” Macron said, “you have to be feared if you want to be free.” 

In February, the ‘New START treaty’, a mutual agreement between Russia and the U.S. to reduce and limit their nuclear arsenal, officially expired. The U.S. said China had conducted secret tests and that Beijing had to be part of any future non-proliferation agreement. For its part, the Chinese accused the U.S. government of seeking to mask its own expansionist ambitions. In the wake of the Iran war, started apparently because the Iranian regime was just days away from securing a bomb, other countries have spoken openly of their nuclear ambitions. After the start of the Iran war, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un spoke pointedly about preparing a nuclear-ready navy while inspecting a new destroyer and observing the testing of nuclear-capable cruise missiles. Even Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said Poland “will not want to be passive when it comes to nuclear security in a military context.”

On X, Tusk posted that Poland is in talks with France about joining its nuclear deterrence program. “We are arming together with our friends,” he wrote, “so that our enemies will never dare to attack us.” France is the only nuclear-capable European country, its systems (unlike the UK’s) completely independent of the U.S. and its new deterrence framework will include collaborations with Germany, Poland, Greece, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium. Macron is calling France’s new strategy “advance deterrence,” a willingness to spread French nuclear armaments across the continent. A senior Pentagon official said the U.S. would “obviously at a minimum strenuously oppose” European countries seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. The U.S., as part of a NATO agreement, already deploys over 100 nuclear weapons in Europe — in Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey. 

Europe’s anti-nuclear tradition grew out of grassroots movements in the 1970s. In West Germany, protests against a planned nuclear plant in the small wine-growing town of Wyhl began when local farmers feared pollution would destroy their land and crops. By the 1980s, millions of Europeans were protesting nuclear weapons and the deployment of NATO missiles across the continent, bringing nuclear security debates into the public arena and pushing governments toward disarmament efforts. The political impact of those protests were long-lasting. Across Europe, nuclear energy programs were curtailed or abandoned entirely. Denmark banned nuclear power plants in 1985, Germany shut down its last nuclear reactors in 2023, and several countries imposed strict limits on nuclear development. Nuclear technology, whether for energy or weapons, remained politically toxic in much of Europe. But, as Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen said European deterrence “is necessary because the military threat from Russia is expected to increase,” and its reliance on U.S. military support can arguably no longer be taken for granted.

At the Paris summit, China, Brazil, Belgium and Italy all signed up to a pledge to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050. South Africa signed the pledge earlier this month. The war in Iran has once again made clear that the world must wean itself off fossil fuels. The U.S. — which imposed additional tariffs on India for buying Russian oil and thus helping to finance the continuation of the war in Ukraine — has, since the start of the attack on Iran, told India it can continue to buy Russian oil. Delhi promptly bought 30 million barrels of Russian crude oil. But this month India also signed a deal with Canada to receive uranium to expand its nuclear energy program. But in 1974, Canada provided India with nuclear technology for peaceful uses that were promptly put towards the building of nuclear weapons. Nuclear collaborations between the two countries were suspended for decades. It’s not a coincidence that those ties are once again being revived in the current geopolitical context. A growing clamor for nuclear energy has clear proliferation risks.

While France has been talking about greater nuclear deterrence, most European states are speaking about a revival of nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels and as a means to achieve climate goals. The vast energy requirements of AI and data centres is also prompting nations to adopt an “atoms for algorithms” strategy, to be, as Macron said, “at the ​heart ​of ⁠the artificial intelligence challenge.” But to talk about energy alone is to ignore the appeal nuclear deterrence has for nation states trying to navigate dangerous geopolitical straits. Iran was attacked ostensibly because it was on the verge of having a bomb. Favored nations such as Saudi Arabia are able to sign nuclear pacts that remove non-proliferation guardrails, but the actions of the U.S. and Israel in Iran will make the bomb attractive to many more as a national security strategy.

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For even the largest militaries, it is an almost impossible task to identify, select and then precisely locate such a high volume of targets. But the U.S. military had some help. Claude, the “next generation AI assistant” built by Anthropic, was used in the planning of ‘Operation Epic Fury’. This, even though the Department of War recently labeled Anthropic a “supply chain risk”.

Anthropic is one of the world’s leading AI companies. Together with Palantir, another Big Tech company, it has been working since 2024 with the Pentagon to embed its systems in military decision-making – creating what is arguably the operating platform of present-day U.S. warfare and intelligence. Even though secretary of defense Pete Hegseth said the company “delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal” and that the government would “cease all use of Anthropic's technology,” the company is too integrated into modern U.S. warfare for it not to be essential to the U.S. attack on Iran. The question might be not whether companies like Anthropic can ringfence their tech but whether the Pentagon might just commandeer it. 

Craig Jones, an academic who studies automated kill chains at the University of Newcastle, has told reporters that “the AI machine is making recommendations for what to target, which is actually much quicker in some ways than the speed of thought.” Similar AI systems have been used by Israel to coordinate its bombing campaign in Gaza, which is among the most destructive in human history. 

Among the first hits in the United States and Israel’s aerial bombardment of Iran was the Shajarah Tayyebeh primary school for girls, in the southern town of Minab. It was a Saturday morning, and school was in session. According to Iranian state media, at least 165 people were killed, mostly young girls between the ages of seven and 12. Another 96 were severely injured. Eyewitness and open source intelligence reports corroborate the claims of mass civilian casualties. Both Iran and Israel have denied responsibility. The United States has said it is “looking into” allegations that the school was destroyed by one of its missiles. Maybe, given the volume of the bombardment, they’ve lost track. 

It is too soon to know why the school was targeted – or whether it was an error. Either way, the U.S. military’s reliance on AI raises difficult questions.

AIs get things wrong all the time. Maybe it’s an extra finger in an AI-generated image, or a ‘hallucinated’ reference in a research report. Or, maybe, an algorithm sends a missile to the wrong address. That’s why Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that weapons “that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets” are simply not reliable enough. That position — along with Anthropic’s refusal to allow Claude to be used for mass domestic surveillance (although they are just fine with foreign surveillance) — led to the Pentagon cancelling a $200-million contract with the company on Friday, the day before the attacks on Iran began. The Department of War immediately signed a new deal, minus any ethical guardrails, with OpenAI.

Anthropic’s confrontation with the Pentagon has burnished its reputation as an “ethical” AI company. But it may have found its ethical backbone too late. Critics argue that even within Anthropic’s “red lines”, there is enormous potential for abuse, while a “human in the loop” does not necessarily prevent mistakes — raising questions about who, exactly, is responsible when these mistakes result in fatalities. Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for Palestine, accused Amazon, Google and Microsoft in a 2025 of being “complicit in genocide” for providing cloud storage systems to the Israeli military. Anthropic’s integration into the U.S. military has been much deeper.

While Israel and the U.S. are waging an AI-powered war, Iran is responding with a technological revolution of its own. The Islamic Republic has pioneered the production of low-cost one-way attack drones, most notably the Shahed-136, which costs just $34,000 to produce and as much as $4 million to shoot down. These are battle-tested: Russia has launched an estimated 57,000 Shahed-type drones in its war against Ukraine. Despite U.S. reliance on its own high-tech AI-powered systems, an American version of the Shahed also made its debut, alongside Claude, in the attack on Iran. 

In response, Iran has aimed more than 1000 drones at neighboring Gulf states since the war broke out on Saturday. Hundreds have been shot down, but even the most sophisticated air defences struggle with this sheer volume, and dozens have struck their targets, threatening to prolong this war and cause more damage to U.S. allies than anticipated. It is significant that these targets included at least three Amazon data centers in Dubai and Bahrain. Just last month, Amazon announced that it was making Anthropic’s Claude available to its Middle Eastern customers. Claude experienced two global outages this week — it is not clear if these were related to the data center attacks. 

Tech evangelists promise that artificial intelligence will, one day, cure cancer, end poverty and greatly increase our quality of life. But the new technology’s most obvious impact has been on warfare. For those with access to them, AI systems like Claude make it dramatically easier to bomb hundreds of targets at the same time — and much harder to figure out who is accountable when something goes wrong. On Truth Social, Donald Trump — who has promised to stop wars, not start them — posted approvingly that technology and munitions now mean Wars “can be fought ‘forever,’ and very successfully.” 

As the bombing of Iran continues, we are not far from a time when AI not only parses data to select targets, it actually chooses when to pull the trigger. And advanced AI models have far fewer qualms, for instance, about deploying nuclear weapons than humans faced with similar scenarios. One day, when — if — war crimes investigators are able to pin down exactly who is responsible for killing dozens of young girls in Minab, tech bosses may find themselves implicated alongside military and political leaders. “The AI did it” can’t be their defense.

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Throughout my nearly five years in Tehran at the turn of this century, speculation about his health and longevity was a near-constant background hum. He was reported, or rumoured, to be mortally stricken by prostate cancer, his constitution already weakened by an assassination attempt in 1981 that left his right arm largely useless. Who would succeed him was far from clear, and the object of further speculation. 

As he lived on into more recent times, reaching the same age of 86 attained by his predecessor – the Islamic Republic's founding father Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – the prospect of his demise became a more immediate issue, though the question of succession remained equally shrouded in uncertainty. As Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei was the commanding voice behind the ruthless crackdown that took the lives of tens of thousands of citizens early this year in the latest and greatest of many escalating protests, at which the slogan "Marg Bar Diktator!" — Death to the Dictator! — became an increasingly prominent slogan. 

Their wish was confirmed to be true at 5 a.m. local time on Sunday morning by Iranian broadcasters. The previous morning, Khamenei’s compound in Tehran was demolished as the Israeli-American onslaught got under way while the Ayatollah was heading a meeting of the Defence Council. That ensured that top military figures were also killed, including the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Mohammad Pakpour, the Army Chief of Staff Abdolrahim Musavi, and Khamenei's top military adviser, Ali Shamkhani, who had been wounded but survived the attack in June last year. 

The Iranian leadership appears to have been caught by surprise, as it was last year when the opening Israeli strike, which culled many top military leaders as well as nuclear scientists, was launched between two rounds of indirect negotiations between Iran and the U.S. Oman, which was mediating the talks, was furious then, denouncing Israel as the real destabilising factor in the region. 

Perhaps the Iranian leaders — and the Omani mediators — thought that such a dirty trick could only be pulled once. But it has happened again, with no evidence that the talks in Geneva had broken down. The chief Omani negotiator, Badr Albusaidi, was livid. Only hours before the strike, he was in Washington for meetings “to explain that a peace agreement between the U.S. and Iran is now within reach. No nuclear weapons. Not ever. Zero stockpiling. Comprehensive verification. Peacefully and permanently. Let’s support the negotiators in closing the deal.”

After learning of the attack, he expressed his outrage in another tweet: “I am dismayed. Active and serious negotiations have yet again been undermined. Neither the interests of the United States nor the cause of global peace are well served by this. And I pray for the innocents who will suffer. I urge the United States not to get sucked in further. This is not your war.”

But Donald Trump and the U.S. were already thoroughly sucked in, and it was indeed their war, or at least his. According to the Israelis, the date had been decided jointly weeks before, after months of planning. Which meant that the Geneva negotiations, focused on the nuclear issue, were simply deceptive camouflage designed to give time for the U.S. to complete the marshalling of its biggest naval and air buildup in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 

Trump and the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu soon made it clear that the campaign now had little to do with the niceties of Iran's nuclear programme: the agenda was regime change in Tehran, and a surprise attack to decapitate the regime was an essential element. 

With Iran's air defences largely taken out in last year's 12 days of war, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Hundreds of air, missile and drone strikes were carried out on missile launchers, military bases and other targets around the country, with inevitable "collateral damage", including a girl's primary school in the southern town of Minab where scores of children were reported killed.

The Iranians did their best to live up to their dire warnings of deadly reprisals against Israel, and against American bases and allies on the Arab side of the Gulf and elsewhere. Missiles hailed down on airports and other installations in Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and even Oman, despite its active mediation. While some U.S. bases may have been hit, so too were many civilian sites such as Dubai's iconic Burj al Arab hotel. Explosions too are being heard in Beirut, after Hezbollah fired rockets and drones at northern Israel to "avenge" Khamenei's death and the Israel Defense Forces struck back.

Air traffic was halted throughout a region rich in international hubs, sowing chaos worldwide. Iran's declaration that the strategic Strait of Hormuz was closed to shipping forced cargo shippers to suspend the voyages that transport some 20% of the world's oil and a lot of liquid gas, causing tremors through international markets. Once again, a decision taken by a tiny circle of men in Washington, Jerusalem and Tehran instantly rewired daily life, reminding us who actually gets to pull the global emergency brake.

What all this would do to Iran's relations with the Arab side of the Gulf was one of many open questions. While Oman was actively mediating, the other Arab oil states had been pressing the Americans not to allow a campaign that would predictably destabilise the region, and declaring their airspace not available for any hostilities. But any sympathy for Tehran quickly evaporated when the missiles started flying in: the Gulf Arab states closed ranks.

Trump and the Israelis made it clear that this was not one quick spectacular strike, but an ongoing campaign that would last days, perhaps even weeks. Presumably at the end, Iran would find its missile capabilities "obliterated," in Trump's favourite term, along with any nuclear activities. 

Once the bombs stop falling, Trump and Netanyahu urged, the Iranians should come out of their basements and take over a government that would be theirs for the taking. A historic opportunity that would likely not recur for generations, Iranians were told. 

But it is hard to imagine such regime change being wrought remotely from the skies. The regime lost little time in filling the leadership vacuum, setting up a three-man ruling council in line with the constitution, composed of the President, Masood Pezeshkian, the head of the Judiciary, Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, and Ayatollah Alireza Arafi from the Council of Guardians. All regime loyalists, and the latter two noted hard-liners. So business as usual as far as they are concerned. But the fact is that the assassination of the Supreme Leader and the attendant bludgeoning of the regime's capabilities will inevitably usher in a new and unpredictable phase in Iran's turbulent history.

On the streets, reactions were fractured: jubilation in areas that had long chanted “Death to the dictator”, state-promote mourning in others, but also fear and a grim resignation, an understanding that power vacuums are often filled with fresh repression or civil war.

A smooth transition to a peaceful democracy is about the least likely scenario among the many possibilities. So too is an imminent return of the monarchy, with a comeback by Israeli-backed Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah ousted by the 1979 revolution. So far there has been no sign visible to the outside world of a split in the ranks of the defenses built up by the Islamic Republic, which still has regular military forces numbering around 400,000, Revolutionary Guards of up to 190,000, and its auxiliary militia enforcers, the Basij, who may be able to mobilise around a million at street level. 

There must be much anger among regime loyalists, which may fall on the heads of any opposition protestors who imagine they can move in and take over the reins of government from the bombed-out wreckage of the Islamic Republic. The U.S. military is not likely to be able to remain engaged in the detail of defanging the regime once the main thrust of the campaign is done. But Israel likely will. Its equivalent of the CIA, the Mossad, has spent years building up formidable intelligence at street level, and will be doing its utmost to continue hamstringing the regime from within and fomenting opposition.Among the many unanswerable questions is whether all this will lead simply to chaos and fragmentation, which is probably Israel's preferred outcome, or to a more compliant regime willing to compromise with the U.S. in order to get crippling economic sanctions lifted. As Trump concedes the war might last weeks, who knows what Iran will eventually emerge from the smoke and the rubble?

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If anybody hoped that the man on whose word it all hangs, President Donald Trump, might clarify his intentions in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, they were disappointed. 

Speaking 36 hours before a third round of indirect and ultimately inconclusive talks with the Iranians in Geneva on Thursday, he said, "My preference is to stop this problem through diplomacy but one thing is for certain, I will never allow the world's number one sponsor of terror, which they are by far, to have a nuclear weapon...they want to make a deal, but we haven't heard those secret (sic) words, 'We will never have a nuclear weapon.’”

In the run-up to the Geneva talks, led on the U.S. side by real estate moguls Steve Witkoff and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, Iranian officials voiced optimism that a deal could be struck and insisted they would be flexible on the nuclear issue. Various formulas were being bandied around, such as Iran sending abroad half of its estimated 300kg of highly enriched uranium and diluting the rest under supervision, participating in a regional consortium for peaceful enrichment and so on. 

In theory, for Iran to say "We will never have a nuclear weapon" should not be an issue — it has said all along that it is not pursuing that goal, which is banned by a fatwa. Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi posted on X this week that Tehran “will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon.” Which begs the question as to why it has enriched uranium to 60% — short of weapons grade but well beyond the levels needed for peaceful civilian purposes.  

Witkoff and Kushner will be vigilant for signs of Iranian duplicity and foot-dragging. But with another set of talks ending with no deal apart from promises of more talks, both sides might simply be playing for time, Iran to delay the feared blow, and the U.S. to finish assembling the assault force, its biggest mobilization of naval and air power in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

There is strong apprehension in the region that the huge and costly U.S. buildup must mean business. American bombs and missiles would hit Iran. The Iranians would make good on their threat to make it a regional war, not a symbolic retaliation as happened in the 12-day war in June last year after American bunker-buster bombs hit Iran's nuclear facilities in Isfahan, Natanz and Fordow. This time Iranian missiles would target U.S. military assets, bases on the Arab side of the Gulf and elsewhere, and perhaps oil installations. And Israel. The Israelis would hit back hard. Hezbollah in Lebanon would do its best to join in, prompting a further massive Israeli response. 

There were ominous straws in the wind. The U.S. withdrew non-essential personnel from bases in the Gulf, and from its embassy in Beirut. The Israelis reportedly warned Lebanon that if Hezbollah joined in, they would hit back at government targets, including Beirut airport, which were unscathed throughout the earlier hostilities. They stepped up their daily attacks on suspected Hezbollah targets, including a big missile attack on February  20 on the eastern Beqaa valley which left 12 dead, including eight Hezbollahis. Since the November 2024 ceasefire, Hezbollah has not fired so much as a peashooter at Israel while well over 400 of their people have been killed in Israeli attacks on Lebanon.

Does all this mean the doomsday scenario is inexorable? Are the Americans set on a clear game plan, with identified objectives and the means to attain them?

Apparently not. Trump is reportedly receiving divided counsel from his advisers, military and political, some more hawkish and others more cautious than others. Above all, he has an eye on the looming mid-term elections in November. He was elected on a platform of ending the "forever" wars in the Middle East, yet could be on the brink of starting another one, which would not go down well with part of his MAGA base or the public in general. 

The signs are that he was hoping the swashbuckling display of power would intimidate the Iranians into buckling. Witkoff admitted Trump was puzzled that Iran had not capitulated. “Why, under this pressure, with the amount of sea power and naval power over there, why haven’t they come to us and said, ‘We profess we don’t want a weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do?’ And, yet, it’s sort of hard to get them to that place,” he told Fox News. Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi explained: "It's because we're Iranian."

Trump's adrenalin was clearly set pumping by the adventure in Venezuela, where a similar military buildup culminated in the operation to abduct President Nicolas Maduro. But Iran is not Venezuela. It is a highly militarized regime which has spent 47 years preparing its internal and external defences, and which has different power bases that make it hard simply to decapitate. There is no magic bullet that might not set the region on fire. 

Taking out the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i (who is also a religious leader, and this is Ramadan) would not be likely to bring about a change in regime behavior as in Venezuela. Bringing the regime down altogether would require a prolonged and detailed campaign that the U.S. military machine might not be able to sustain. 

That's where Israel comes in. Some White House advisers reportedly believe it would play better politically for Israel to strike first rather than the U.S., and thus force Iran to retaliate. Like Trump, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a man with an eye on impending elections (October at the latest) is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who makes no secret of his ambition to see the Iranian regime brought down. Netanyahu — backed by almost the entire Israeli political spectrum — is clearly champing at the bit, but aware of the danger of being seen to drag the U.S. into a potentially messy embroilment. One reason perhaps for the unusually discreet nature of Netanyahu's sixth visit to the White House on  February 11 — in through the back door, no lovefest press appearances. 

Which may also actually have been a sign that the two allies might not be on the same strategic page. Plunging Iran into fragmentation and chaos would absolutely fit Israel's playbook, but not necessarily America's. The two are working at cross-purposes in Syria, where the Israelis are pushing against a strong central government which the U.S. is supporting, even against its erstwhile Kurdish allies in the north-east. 

If there are two constants in the current equation, they are that the Iranian people’s disillusionment and rage against the regime will not go away, and neither will Israel's desire to overthrow it. But if Trump does not share that goal, he will have to find a face-saving way to wriggle off the hook he has created with his ostentatious military buildup. 

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But does it mean the regime is at its last gasp? Or will these events be added to a long list of inconclusive revolts that started well before the "Green Revolution" that followed the 2009 election, through to the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement in 2022?

The latest signs are that the protests may be waning. But there are at least three new elements that make this latest uprising different and which may rise again later even if the regime survives. 

The protests were kicked off by the Bazaar in Tehran, the conservative mercantile class, normally the last to want to rock the boat. Like a bushfire, it spread with lightning speed to towns and cities across the country, fuelled by grievances that had surfaced in previous protests. So, the initial impulse came from the country's disastrous economic situation. With the national currency, the Rial, losing 84% of its value over the past year alone, inflation had brought crushing hardship to many despite the regime's efforts to apply bandaids to the gaping wounds. The involvement of the Bazaar gave the protests a new depth. The second novel element was the sudden emergence, around ten days into the uprising, of Reza Pahlavi, son of the ousted Shah, as a figurehead for the protests. "Javid Shah, Long live the Shah!" became one of the main battle cries of the protesters. The dissident movement lacked unity, leadership and a shared platform. The hope was that Reza Pahlavi could act as a unifying figure who might oversee a transition to a democratic future. 

Adopting him may have been a sign of desperation, but it was also a red rag to the regime, a provocation impossible to ignore. A third new feature was the unprecedented level of outside interference, whose direction and intentions were far from clear at the outset. Fresh from abducting Nicolás Maduro and vowing to "run" Venezuela, Donald Trump seemed in the mood for further adventures, urging Iranian "patriots" to keep protesting, and telling them that help was on the way. Much would clearly depend on what form that "help" would take. But by tying it so clearly to Iran's internal situation rather than the nuclear or missile issues that underlay the 12-day Israeli-U.S. war on Iran in June last year, Trump's intervention was giving the uprising a dimension it lacked before.

All this amounted to what the regime clearly saw as a potentially mortal threat, and it reacted with unprecedented ferocity. Though the full picture has yet to emerge because of the communications blackout, there are horror stories of overflowing morgues, many gunshot wounds to eyes and genitals, machine guns mowing down crowds, and many other brutalities that seemed to succeed in tamping down the flames. Opposition human rights groups believe the death toll is closer to 12,000 than the 2,000 initially announced by the regime, which was already a good deal higher than for previous uprisings.

Left in a purely Iranian context without the U.S. wild card, the regime, although rattled, seems to have survived another round of challenge, though with consequences that may surface later. As Israeli military analysts had pointed out, the Iranian authorities had many repressive tools they had not yet deployed. There was no sign of a crack in the loyalty of the security forces or of serious splits within the government. Bear in mind that the Revolutionary Guards (the IRGC), in addition to their powerful military machine and auxiliaries (the Basij), also wield huge economic clout on which hundreds of thousands of families depend.

If this round has been crushed internally, there will surely be another round later unless there is a radical change. The decision by activists to adopt Reza Pahlavi did not reflect a widespread longing for the monarchy; it was rather a signal that the opposition had given up hope of changing the regime from within, and that overthrow was the only way forward, with Pahlavi as the only visible symbol of defiance to rally around. But even Donald Trump cast doubt on the level of support inside Iran for the aspiring "Crown Prince."

The regime's only hope of treating the dire economic crisis swiftly and undercutting protest would be to bring about a lifting of ever-tightening sanctions, which means coming to terms with the Americans. And that raises the question of U.S. (or Trump's) intentions. In the 12-day war last June, Israel clearly wanted to continue a campaign of detailed bombing that could have led to regime collapse, while Trump was content with one spectacular strike. His instinct is not to get embroiled in lengthy open-ended hostilities. 

Regime change in Iran would very likely produce chaos, and perhaps fragmentation of the country as a unitary state. It is very hard to imagine a smooth transition to democracy, and very easy to see Kurdish, Arab, Azeri Turkish, Sunni Baluchi, and other minorities splintering away as vying factions struggle for power in Tehran. That may suit Israel's playbook for regional disintegration, but the transactional Trump likes to do deals with unified states; witness Syria, where Israel favours a weak, decentralized state, but the U.S. wants a unified, cooperative one under al-Sharaa; and Venezuela, where Trump has left the regime in place and spurned the opposition despite removing Maduro. 

If it remains committed to some form of action against Iran, the U.S, would have to calibrate its moves with great care. Striking nuclear or missile facilities again would likely have little effect on the regime, but would provoke a reaction against U.S. bases in the Gulf that might not be as cosmetic and choreographed as it was last June. American strikes against political, military or security targets would have to be sustained and detailed or would end up being ineffective or counter-productive, and if effective, could produce collapse and chaos. Might Trump dream of doing a Maduro on the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i, leaving the IRGC and others to do a deal? Anything is possible. But in Iran, nothing is simple. 

While Israel was standing by watchfully and hoping for a tough U.S. response, there were countervailing pressures from America's Gulf Arab allies, deeply unsettled by the crisis. They don't want to be hit by an angry Iranian neighbor, while the possibility of regime collapse and fragmentation opens up all kinds of prospects of regional instability and danger. The signs are that these representations have hit home with Trump.

But Iran remains a mess with no easy resolution. And it's not going to go away.

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The Iranian defense minister’s trip to Qingdao - his first foreign visit since the ceasefire with Israel - was meant to signal solidarity within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a block that includes Russia, India, and Pakistan. But the SCO, despite its ambitions, could only muster a joint statement of “serious concern” over Middle East tensions when Iran was being bombed by Israel - a statement India refused to sign. This exposed the stark limits of alternative alliances and the growing difficulty of presenting a united front against the West. In Qingdao, Andrei Belousov, the Russian defense minister, warned of “worsening geopolitical tensions” and “signs of further deterioration,” a statement that’s hard to argue with.  

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, Trump relished his role as global peacemaker, claiming credit for an uneasy Israel-Iran truce - a truce that Russia welcomed while being careful to credit Qatar for its diplomatic efforts. Russia itself reportedly played a supporting role alongside Oman and Egypt. But the real diplomatic heavy lifting was done by others - and Russia’s own leverage  was exposed as limited. 

Once the region’s indispensable power broker, Moscow found itself on the sidelines. Its influence with Tehran diminished, and its air defense systems in Iran—meant to deter Israeli and later American strikes—were exposed as ineffective. With Bashar al-Assad’s rule in Syria collapsed, the Kremlin is acutely aware it cannot afford to lose another major ally in the region. As long as the Iranian government stands, Russia can still claim to have a role to play, but its ability to project power in the Middle East is now more symbolic than real. The 12-day war put Russia in an awkward position. Iran, a key supplier of drones for Russia’s war in Ukraine, was unimpressed by Moscow’s lack of support during the crisis. Even after signing a 20-year pact in January, Russia offered little more than “grave concern” when the bombs started falling. Similarly to the SCO, BRICS, supposedly the alternative to Western alliances, could only issue a joint statement, revealing just how thin multipolarity is in practice.

Enter the new narrative spin

For years, Vladimir Putin has argued that the West’s “rules-based order” is little more than a tool for maintaining Western dominance and justifying double standards. His vision of multipolarity is not just anti-American rhetoric—it’s a deliberate strategy to appeal to countries disillusioned by Western interventions, broken promises, and the arrogance of those who claimed victory in the Cold War. Russia has worked to turn Western failures—from Iraq to Afghanistan, from Libya to the global financial crisis—into recruitment tools for its own vision of “civilizational diversity.” Multipolarity, in the Kremlin’s telling, is about giving every culture, every nation, a seat at the table, while quietly reserving the right to redraw the map and rewrite the rules when it suits Moscow’s interests.

For a time, this approach was paying off. Russia’s anti-colonial and multipolar rhetoric resonated well beyond its borders, particularly in the Global South and among those frustrated by Western hypocrisy. 

But across the periphery of Russia’s historical empire, from Central Asia to the Baltics, from the Caucasus to Ukraine and Georgia, Russia’s multipolar message is seen not as liberation but as yet another chapter in a centuries-long cycle of conquest, repression and forced assimilation - a reality that continues to define the struggle for self-determination across Russia’s former empire.  Here, Russia’s message of “sameness” has long served as a colonial tool, erasing languages, cultures, and identities in the name of imperial unity. 

The recent conflict in the Middle East has forced Moscow to adapt its “multipolarity” messaging yet again. As its limitations as a regional power became impossible to ignore, Russian state media and officials began to reframe the conversation—no longer just championing multipolarity, but openly embracing the language of empire. In this new narrative, ‘empire’ is recast not as a relic of oppression, but as a stabilizing force uniquely capable of imposing order on an unruly world. The pivot is as much about masking diminished leverage as it is about projecting confidence: if Moscow can no longer dictate outcomes, it can still claim the mantle of indispensable power by rewriting the very terms of global legitimacy.

As we peered into the abyss of World War III, Russian state media pivoted: suddenly, ‘empire’—long a slur—was rebranded as a stabilizing force in a chaotic world.

This rhetorical shift has been swift and striking. Where once the Kremlin denounced imperialism as a Western vice, Russian commentators now argue that empires are not only inevitable but necessary for stability. “Empires could return to world politics not only as dark shadows of the past. Empire may soon become a buzzword for discussing the direction in which the world’s political organization is heading,” wrote one Russian analyst. The message is clear: in an age of chaos and fractured alliances, only a strong imperial center—preferably Moscow—can guarantee order. But beneath the surface, this embrace of empire reveals as much uncertainty as ambition, exposing deep anxieties about Russia’s place in a world it can no longer control as it once did.

Inside Russia, this new imperial rhetoric is both a rallying cry and a reflection of unease. In recent weeks, influential analysts have argued that Iran’s restraint—its so-called “peacefulness”—only invited aggression, a warning that resonates with those who fear Russia could be next. Enter Alexander Dugin, the far-right philosopher often described as “Putin’s brain,” whose apocalyptic worldview has shaped much of the Kremlin’s confrontational posture. Dugin warns that if the U.S. and Israel can strike Tehran with impunity, nothing would stop them from finding a pretext to strike Moscow. This siege mentality, echoed by senior officials, is now being used to justify a strategy of escalation and deterrence at any cost.

Dugin’s views were echoed by Konstantin Kosachev, chair of the Russian parliamentary foreign affairs committee: “If you don’t want to be bombed by the West, arm yourself. Build deterrence. Go all the way—even to the point of developing weapons of mass destruction.”

But for all the talk of “victory,” by all sides post the 12-day war,  the outcomes remain ambiguous. Iran insists its nuclear ambitions are undimmed. While Israel and Trump’s team says Iran is further from a bomb than ever before – still, the facts are murky and the region is no closer to peace. As one Russian analyst remarked, the normalization of “phoney war” logic means that everyone is arming up, alliances are transactional, and the rules are made up as we go along.

If the only lesson of the 12-day war is that everyone must arm themselves to the teeth, we’re not just reliving the Cold War—we’re entering a new era of empire-building, where deterrence is everything and the lines between friend and foe are as blurred as ever.

In a world where old alliances crumble and new narratives emerge, the true battle, it seems, is not just over territory or military might, but over the stories that define power itself. Russia’s pivot to an imperial narrative reveals both its ambitions and its anxieties, highlighting a global order in flux where legitimacy is contested and the rules are rewritten in real time. Understanding this evolving empire game is essential to grasping the future of international relations and the fragile balance that holds the world together.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

Research and additional reporting by Masho Lomashvili.

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STAYING ON THE STORY:

What’s going on in Russia? 

“Died 1943, born 2024. Welcome back to the Battle of Kursk” reads one of the memes flooding the Ukrainian - Russian cyberspace as millions, including (we assume) Vladimir Putin watch in disbelief as the Ukrainian invasion of Russia enters its second week. The reference is to the Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history and a major World War battle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which cleared the way for the Soviet offensive and the eventual Allied victory in 1945. Ukraine’s supporters are holding their breath as they hope that the 2024 Battle of Kursk will also change the course of the war.
Zelensky, who says his troops have captured over 100 Russian soldiers has clarified that he has no intention of annexing the Russian territory but is instead trying to create a “buffer zone” in Russia to keep town in Northern Ukraine safe. 

Russians are scrambling to contain the attack on their own territory, but they are advancing on major towns in Donbas, in Eastern Ukraine, where Kyiv could lose more territory according to Meduza. In the meantime Saint Petersburg’s Fontanka.ru reports that over one hundred internally displaced people have fled the action along the border. 

To make it all more surreal (because, why not?), Ukranian soldiers have been posting reviews for restaurants in the Kursk region on google. “I like everything. Delicious food, good service. Small parking lot. Couldn’t pack my tank,” read one. A full collection if your appetite permits here.

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What was Putin like as a kid? Russian-American journalist Julia Ioffe speaks to RFE/RL at Zeg Storytelling Festival, Coda's annual flagship event in Tbilisi about Putin’s childhood and what goes into creating the image of a Russian “everyman”.

Not all heroes wear capes, this one favors tennis outfits: Naomi Osaka’s heartfelt letter about postpartum and recovering from giving birth is a must-read for tennis fans, mothers and anyone who needs to understand that the secret to resilience lies in acknowledging vulnerability.

Why do clowns and waxy skin terrify people? Why are we fascinated by things that creep us out? Why do inanimate approximations of human beings stir in us feelings of uncanny dread? Read this fascinating essay on fear and Freud.

The post Cold Allies appeared first on Coda Story.

Iran has not seen uprisings of this magnitude since the Iranian Revolution of 1979: They have dwarfed the Green Movement protests of 2009, and they extend far beyond calls for an end to the mandatory hijab. Demonstrators — who range from university students to doctors to labor unions — have demanded economic reforms and the codification of women’s rights and called for “death to the dictator.” They have been met with a sharp, brutal response from Iranian authorities. Tens of thousands have been arrested and jailed, and more than 500 people have been killed in clashes with the security forces. Seven men have been executed by hanging for their involvement with the protests. And while large-scale demonstrations have mostly tapered off, acts of resistance continue.

Technology has played a role at many turns in what has happened over the past year. Social media blackouts and internet shutdowns have become a hallmark of the regime’s response to the protests: Research groups like OONI and NetBlocks have documented the blackouts, while tools like VPNs and Starlink have helped people work around them. The Google Play store, where 90% of Iranians would normally download apps, has been blocked since the protests began, to no avail.

And as with every major protest movement of the past decade, social media has been critical to the strategies of both the protesters and the regime they oppose. In Iran, where all major U.S.-based platforms are now blocked, Telegram became the go-to platform for protesters — and for the regime too. Several months ago, I spoke with Mahsa Alimardani about the power that Telegram held in this situation. Alimardani, who is a PhD candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute and a senior researcher at Article19, impressed upon me that the Iranian authorities were “thriving” on Telegram, using the platform to identify and shame protesters and even broadcast forced confessions. Coordinated disinformation campaigns are also a preferred tactic of the authorities. In a recent piece for the Atlantic Council, Alimardani described how the regime now routinely “floods” online spaces with messages and accounts that are designed to leave the opposition “distracted, disunited, and chaotic.”

And technical surveillance has been on the rise too. A few months after the protests began, it came to light that authorities were finding women who appeared with their heads uncovered in photos or videos posted online and using facial recognition tools to identify and pursue them for violating the law. Just yesterday, legislators approved a bill — dubbed the “hijab and chastity law” — that will jack up penalties for hijab law violations, require businesses to enforce the law and “create and strengthen AI systems to identify perpetrators.”
This week, you can find manyreflections across the web on what the movement means, one year on. The biggest takeaway for me is that while the Iranian regime hasn’t fundamentally changed, Iranian society unquestionably has — and, at least for the current generation, this change may be irreversible. As Iranian journalist Golnaz Esfandiari put it on NPR, “I don't think people can go back to the way they were.”

GLOBAL NEWS

Will a new censorship regime really make British kids safer? On Tuesday, U.K. parliamentarians passed the hotly-debated Online Safety Bill that will require big social media platforms — and lots of other websites — to perform age checks for all users and somehow remove all content that could be harmful to kids before it appears online. It’s easy to agree that material promoting violence, suicide and disinformation is bad for kids, but screening for this kind of stuff will be the challenge of the century. Outside of China, where censorship really does come first, there are no major platforms that do this. That will have to change if the big players want to stick around in the U.K., and it will probably cause the platforms to censor lots of serious and legitimate stuff. 

The law could also leave smaller, alternative sites in a lurch. Wikipedia has said that depending on how the law is enforced, it might have to leave the U.K. altogether. On top of all that, it’s still not clear how the law might affect secure messaging apps. In recent months, both WhatsApp and Signal threatened to pull out of the U.K. should the government force them to screen messages for harmful content. Signal President Meredith Whittaker has already said that this option is still on the table.

Israeli lawmakers may soon be using more surveillance technology in public spaces across the country. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir is promoting a draft law that would allow the police to deploy facial recognition-enabled surveillance cameras in public spaces across Israel to “track the identity and location of suspects in the commission of crimes” and to aid in the “prevention of crimes.” Israeli authorities have used a variety of invasive surveillance tools in their occupation of Palestinian territories for some time. This move would broaden the state’s digital gaze, ensuring that just about everyone living on land controlled by Israel is under some surveillance. The shift gives credence to the notion that when invasive technologies are used to monitor people whose rights are limited or unrecognized in some way — whether they’re Arabs in Israeli-occupied Palestine or Uyghur Muslims in western China — they may soon be deployed and applied to the broader public.

Israel evidently wants to deepen its ties with other parts of the tech industry too. Earlier this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Elon Musk and Open AI co-founder Greg Brockman to discuss “AI safety.” This was quite the eyebrow-raiser, when you think about Musk’s predilection for posting and promoting antisemitic messages on X and his recent threat to sue the Anti-Defamation League for its research on hate speech, which tracks racism, homophobia and antisemitic speech online. None of this stopped Netanyahu from taking the meeting — another eyebrow-raiser — though he did bring up the issue and pressure Musk to do more about it. Don’t hold your breath, Bibi.

The post Tech is still critical for Iran’s protest movement — and its regime appeared first on Coda Story.

China

China continued to be the most dangerous cross-border offender. As part of its highly sophisticated transnational repression campaign, the regime issued hundreds of lnterpol red notices — requests to police around the world to detain and send suspects back to China. In April, the Chinese government tried to force back four members of the Uyghur minority, who have been targeted heavily within and outside China, from Saudi Arabia. Among the four was a 13-year-old girl who, along with her mother, risks being sent to a detention center. Following an outcry from human rights groups, the deportation has been delayed. 

Under the banner of an anti-corruption program called Sky Net, the Chinese state has also ramped up efforts to repatriate Chinese nationals it accuses of corruption. The program has seen thousands targeted in the last few years, including the Chinese businessman Ma Chao, a member of the persecuted Falun Gong movement currently living in Cyprus. At the start of the year, members of his family in China were arrested to increase pressure on him to return. Just one month later, an Interpol notice was issued against his wife. 

Even within the U.S., traditionally seen as the ultimate safe haven for those escaping persecution abroad, China has ramped up its efforts to target dissidents. In October, the FBI charged seven individuals with conducting a campaign to surveil and coerce U.S. residents to return to China. In response to this concerning trend, a group of Democratic congressmen have introduced a bill that seeks to codify transnational repression as a crime under U.S. law.

Turkey

Turkey is one of the biggest transnational repression actors. High-profile attempts to return Kurds back to Turkey were a regular occurrence in 2022. Turkey has been able to leverage Russia’s war in Ukraine, demanding that Finland and Sweden commit to more proactively returning dissident Kurds to Turkey in exchange for Turkey’s support for their NATO membership bids. Turkey’s government has provided a list of dozens of people it wants repatriated. It continued to tap informal networks to attack and threaten journalists living abroad. Those targeted in Sweden include the Turkish-Kurdish journalist Ahmet Donmez, who, in March of this year, was attacked outside his home.

Iran

Over the years, the Iranian regime has used tactics such as assassinations, renditions and digital intimidation to target Iranian citizens in countries in Europe, the Middle East and North America, according to Freedom House. During the past three months of cascading protests across Iran, there has been renewed global interest in the dangers facing Iranian activists living at home and abroad.

In October, masked men attacked anti-government protestors outside the Iranian embassy in Berlin, leaving several injured. The British police recently warned two British-Iranian journalists and their families that they faced an increased “credible” threat from Iranian state security forces. The head of the U.K.’s domestic spy network, MI5, used his annual threat update to warn of Iran’s ambitions to “kidnap or even kill British or U.K.-based individuals perceived as enemies of the regime.” He said that there had been at least 10 such potential threats since January 2022.

Saudi Arabia

Since U.S.-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in 2018 inside the Saudi embassy in Turkey, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been under a measure of diplomatic pressure. That has not stopped him from expanding the Saudi government’s transnational repression efforts. In August, the same month that President Biden met with the prince, three people were sentenced in Saudi Arabia after being surveilled while abroad. One was a 34-year-old mother who had tweeted about the Kingdom while in the U.K. 

It was also in August that a former employee of Twitter was convicted in the U.S. for using his access to Twitter’s data to spy for the Saudi regime. Last week, a U.S. judge dismissed a lawsuit against bin Salman that sought to hold him accountable for Khashoggi’s murder. The judge said that, while he felt uneasy about it, his hands were tied because the Biden administration had made a recommendation to give the Saudi leader political immunity. Having cemented its position as one of the worst transnational aggressors of 2022, the Biden administration’s policy is likely to provide wiggle room for the Saudi regime in 2023.

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Protests in China have continued since last week. If you want to find reliable information online about what is happening there, it’s tricky, especially if you’re in China. The Cyberspace Administration has issued a few protest-related censorship directives to state media and web platforms. Search engines were instructed to “clean-up search results related to bypassing the Firewall, and limit the spread of keywords such as ‘Firewall circumvention,’ ‘accessing the Internet scientifically,’ etc.” But plenty of Chinese people are getting their protest information elsewhere — through word-of-mouth, graffiti and good old fashioned writing on paper.

HOW TELEGRAM IS AIDING THE IRANIAN REGIME

It has been nearly three months since protesters across Iran began demanding economic reforms, codification of women’s rights and, as they’ve been saying in the streets, “death to the dictator.” Momentum swelled last week, when oil workers, truckers and transportation workers went on strike in support of the movement. 

The battle is also playing out online. With local sites and services under close watch by the authorities, and all the major U.S.-based platforms now blocked, the somewhat-secure chat app and messaging service Telegram has become ground zero for communicating about the protests. But it’s not just protestors who are using the app.

Mahsa Alimardani, a PhD candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute who specializes in technical censorship in Iran, told me that the Iranian authorities are “thriving” on Telegram. 

Security forces use the platform to identify protesters and call for their arrest and detention, she explained. Videos of protesters subjected to humiliation and even torture are also regularly shared on major Telegram channels run by officials. Since the start of the protests, Alimardani, who also works with the free speech group Article19, has joined a handful of Persian-speaking experts who are pressuring the company to remove posts like these. 

“I think maybe once or twice we had positive responses where they did take down the channels, but mostly they haven’t been responding,” she told me. What’s more, these videos often land on Twitter, where they get even broader distribution. Twitter historically has had a better track record of removing such material than Telegram, until Elon Musk’s decision to dismiss most staff who handled such tasks. 

Alimardani pointed to the October arrest of the popular rapper Toomaj Salehi. Soon after Salehi was taken by security forces, a video appeared on Telegram of a blindfolded young man, said to be Salehi, sitting on the side of the road, bloodied and crying. “I’m ashamed,” he says to the camera. “I take back everything I said against the regime.” 

Once the video was on Twitter, Alimardani’s group implored Twitter to take it down, offering a full translation and identifying the ways in which it displayed “a clear form of forced confession and torture,” a violation of Twitter’s rules. 

“Their answer was basically ‘no, this adheres to our terms of service, it’s fine,’” she told me. “This was two days after the human rights team had gone.”

The labor of pushing foreign tech platforms to do better and uphold human rights commitments where they’ve made them is daunting, but Alimardani is hopeful. “It does really appear that there’s a massive, diverse, intersectional united front that wants the regime gone,” she said.

WHAT WE’RE READING

• An intriguing essay in New Lines traces the development and debate surrounding the idea of a "v-hajj," or virtual pilgrimage to Mecca. It also begs (but doesn’t answer) the question of how online participation in a Muslim metaverse could be subject to manipulation, just like so many other parts of online life.
• Speaking of manipulation, Reuters has a terrific deep dive on the social media troll armies backing storied Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, who has sky-high approval ratings at home, despite his administration’s proven disregard for human rights and evidence of collusion with the powerful MS-13 gang. 
• A new investigation from Lighthouse Reports spotlights Intellexa, a spyware enterprise with roots in Israel, Cyprus, Greece and the British Virgin Islands, and its dealings with Sudan’s Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, the owner of a private army that is the heir to the Janjaweed militia, notorious for the genocide in Darfur. Don’t miss it.
• Celebrated computer scientist and AI expert Timnit Gebru is sounding the alarm about the “effective altruism” movement, which stumbled into the mainstream amid the scandal surrounding cryptocurrency exchange FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried. Writing for WIRED, Gebru offers a critical inside perspective on how effective altruism is “driving the research agenda in the field of artificial intelligence, creating a race to proliferate harmful systems, ironically in the name of ‘AI safety.’”

CORRECTION (12/08/22 at 10:42AM EST): This story was updated to reflect that the Mariupol building that disappeared from Yandex maps has reappeared since it was first reported missing.

The post Russian tech giant Yandex erases damaged Ukrainian buildings from maps; Iranian regime thrives on Telegram appeared first on Coda Story.

It’s September 23, four days after the Iranian government shut down the internet in the northern Kurdish city of Sanandaj. Not long after Mahmoudi and I spoke, the Iranian government blocked access to Instagram and WhatsApp (estimated to be used by 70% of Iranian adults) and shut down the internet for hours each day so that even basic communication, let alone work, became almost impossible.

The internet disruptions followed several days of nationwide, anti-government protests in response to the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while she was in the custody of Iran’s vicious and widely reviled morality police. 

At least 76 people have been killed during the protests, human rights groups say, and over 700 arrested. The police said Amini died of a heart attack. But her father insisted she was healthy. Photos that emerged after her death were gut-wrenching: her eyes were purple and swollen. She appeared to have been tortured.

Mahmoudi is the executive director of United For Iran, a non-profit focused on human rights advocacy within the country that has built an application called Gershad, which first came to prominence in 2016, enabling Iranian women to warn each other about morality police in the vicinity. 

At the time, United For Iran kept their involvement in building Gershad quiet, but they have been open about the value of cell phone apps and web resources in helping to drive progressive change. One example is Nahoft, an app that enables Android users to encrypt their messages before sending them. (Over 90% of mobile phone users in Iran use the Android operating system.) Gershad has been a pivotal tool in this recent round of protests. Its Twitter account — where the group reposts some of the app’s reports on the Morality Police — has exploded, weekly impressions growing from 1,900 to nearly 1.5 million.

The shutting down of Iran’s mobile internet, though, has made the app largely unusable. Limited internet access has drastically narrowed who can use the application, leaving many still-active protesters vulnerable, echoing a similar shutdown in 2019 when an order from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei demanded “Do whatever it takes to stop them.” In the two weeks that followed, close to 1,500 people were killed.

For protesters, a popular app like Gershad serves as a rallying cry, a way to keep spirits up and motivate people to come out onto the streets. This sudden freeze in activity has jeopardized that aspect of the app. “The silence leads to people thinking there's nothing else happening. So it kind of takes the wind out of the sails,” Mahmoudi says. “So people don't go out on the street as much and it kind of fizzles out. And then they kill us.”

When Gershad made its debut in 2016, it spread rapidly. “Within 12 hours, we had to get a new server,” Mahmoudi told me. The group had released the app with no advertising, yet it had a user base of 10,000 people within the first 48 hours. That kind of popularity quickly attracted the attention of the Iranian government, which banned Gershad and its APIs (application programming interface, the software that allows apps to talk to each other) within 24 hours of its release. 

The ban, intended to render the app useless to those who had downloaded it, was quickly circumvented by the development team — building functions into the interface that worked around the censorship. Even in the app’s infancy, its adversarial relationship with Iranian authorities seemed clear. The app was designed to help Iranian citizens retain some control, while the Iranian authorities appear determined to violently repress even the most minor displays of individual agency.

“I wouldn’t necessarily say the government is at the forefront of our minds,” Fereidoon Bashar, Executive Director of ASL19, a Canadian technology company focused on civil society and who heads Gershad’s software development, told me. “For us, it's mostly about how we can make the app more secure, more private, but that means the government is certainly an adversary.” 

Iran has a history of using technology to limit the freedom of its citizens. Early this month, Iranian officials announced that facial recognition technology would now be used to identify and fine women who weren’t adhering to the country’s rigid dress code.

Despite the adaptability and flexibility of the Gershad developers, the question for many Iranian developers is whether technology that is largely used to oppress Iranians can also be used to liberate them?

In 2018, for example, in response to Telegram’s growing popularity within the country, Iran banned the application and introduced Telegram Gold, which advertised new features and, most importantly, was actually available. The app became a user-data farm for the Iranian government, which quickly collected close to 14 million users’ private information. 

“If you don't have people familiar with the geopolitical situation on your team, then definitely your tools might be like a weapon in their hands,” said Amir Rashidi, director of digital rights at the Texas-based Miaan Group, which provides technical, legal, and research expertise to human rights organizations in Iran and the region.

Bashar, for much of our conversation, seemed barely able to bring himself to speak. Like Mahmoudi, he appeared exhausted and sad. “I’ve seen better days,” he admitted, as soon our call began. For him, his work on Gershad, despite its success and its value to the protests, was no substitute for not being there, for not being out on the streets and actively present.

“Maybe I don't think of it as guilt or maybe I should,” he sighed. “It's definitely a feeling that you're on the outside and there are people that are, you know, being violently brutalized and oppressed. It’s been hard to watch.”

“I don’t necessarily see the internet shutdown as something that concerns the app’s success,” he told me. “The consequences that follow internet shutdowns are faced by actual protesters and people.” 

Despite the shutting down of mobile internet services and the effect on daily life, Iranians have kept coming out onto the streets to make their anger heard. Reports emerging from Iran have suggested that the vans of the morality police — large white-and-green patrol vehicles from which officers kept their eyes on Iranian citizens, particularly women — have disappeared entirely.

Rashidi, who told me that the shutting down of the internet in Iran was his ”biggest fear,” acknowledged that the crowds of people willing to brave police brutality and prison had inspired hope in all those who imagine a less repressive future for Iran. “I mean, we had witnessed police brutality for a long time,” he said, “but this one was different. She was so innocent. There was nothing wrong with her dress and that basically fanned the flames of frustration. That’s why we're seeing all these protests around the country.”

Though experts continue to doubt that these protests will result in the overthrow of the Khamenei regime, the protesters have managed to change the debate. Previous protests had centered around the economy and electoral corruption; now culture and repression are the catalysts.

Mahmoudi told me she has a comment left for Gershad’s team saved on her computer. The message helps remind her that technology can still be a force for good: “Gershad is a successful example of channeling hatred and anger to underground tunnels without the need for leadership or the media. Every minute we are recreating the map of our city…together.” 

The message speaks to Gershad’s ultimate philosophy: it’s about the user base, it’s about collaboration and the lack of hierarchy or singular control, and it’s about access and agency.

“I really like that,” Mahmoudi said, smiling.

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One curious tidbit that caught my attention was this IranWire story. Apparently, Revolutionary Guard commanders have moved their families to a “safe place” in Tehran and have been promised safe passage to Georgia “if nationwide protests intensify,” or “if the government is overthrown.” 

Georgia does have relatively friendly relations with Tehran, but my sources say that there are for now no plans to shelter the families of the Revolutionary Guard. 

The country is already overwhelmed trying to deal with a massive influx of Russian men seeking to escape Putin’s draft. So long is the queue at the border, that these men are waiting over 24 hours to get into Georgia.

Already, the backlash is significant. When Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, occupying nearly 20 percent of the country’s territory, one of the excuses that Moscow used was that it was “protecting Russians citizens.” Now there are a lot more Russians in Georgia for Putin to protect. “It’s time to Russify the country. More than 10% of [the] Georgian population is already Russian,” tweeted Fyodor Grudin, a member of the local assembly in Saint Petersburg, as he encouraged Russia to “repeat the 2008 [invasion].”

The fact that many of the new arrivals have not exactly been opposed to the war, even as they now seek to escape it, adds to the tensions. Writing on Telegram, one man trying to cross the border, complained that Georgian guards didn’t let him in because they spotted a “Z,” the symbol of Putin’s war, on his car. “We need to denazify these Georgians,” he posted. 

Georgia’s current government  has been widely criticized for being too soft on Russia in the past, but officials have now begun stopping Russian men from entering the country. And Russian authorities have set up a pop-up military HQ at the border and are issuing would-be draft dodgers notices on the border itself.

Anxious and resentful, many Georgians are drawing comparisons between the Russian men and the Iranian women. “Look at the Iranian women, their regime is just as brutal, but they are not running,” a friend messaged from Tbilisi where every cafe, every restaurant, he said, was packed with Russians. 

Both Russia and Iran have occupied tiny Georgia in the past. Today, once again, the country finds itself in the geopolitical crosshairs, as its neighbors threaten to implode. 

IN OTHER NEWS

Putin’s “partial mobilization” drive is a spectacular propaganda failure. More than a quarter of a million Russians have fled the country since he ordered Russian reserve troops to join the war effort, effectively sending tens of thousands of undertrained, underequipped men to near certain death on the front lines. Across Russia, fires have erupted in dozens of local military headquarters – arson is suspected. Protests are small but it’s significant that people are coming out on streets across Russia to register their anger, with tensions especially apparent in far-flung provinces like Buryatia and Dagestan where people have good reason to believe they are being disproportionately affected and targeted by mobilization and conscription.  Patriarch Kirill, an influential leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, announced that all those who die fighting in Ukraine will be absolved of their sins. But this promise of an unblemished record in the afterlife, didn’t seem to bring much solace to this recruit on his way to Kherson. “We have had no preparation, no training,” he says in this video, his voice trembling. 

She is Russia’s Tucker Carlson and the biggest cheerleader for Putin’s war in Ukraine. But something was off about Margarita Simonyan’s busy social media feeds this week. Russia’s propaganda queen, who heads the country’s international RT (formerly Russia Today) network, switched tack from threatening the West with nuclear war to campaigning against military draft violations. Simonyan has been diligently tweeting about individual cases of men being sent to war despite chronic illnesses, or against draft rules.  She is keeping a public record of draft violations and is demanding that Russian authorities take action and stop rules being broken and ignored. RT has conducted various social justice campaigns in the past, so do not interpret this as a change of heart from either Simonyan or the network about the war in Ukraine. But it is a sure sign of how discomfited even supporters of the war are by the utter chaos since his order. 

Kazakhstan, traditionally a close ally of Russia, is proving to be annoyingly independent-minded. This week, the Kazakh government declared that it wouldn’t recognize the results of the referendums that Russia is conducting in “liberated” regions of Ukraine. This follows last week’s decision to detain Russian trucks to enforce EU sanctions and to suspend the use of Russia’s card payment system, “Mir.” And “Beeline,” Kazakhstan’s cable TV and Internet provider, is now notifying its customers that it will be suspending the broadcasting of a number of Russian govt-controlled channels  starting from October 5, though they mostly appear to be entertainment channels rather than those broadcasting news propaganda. 

Vladimir Putin may be losing friends in his backyard, but it looks like he has found new ones in South Africa. Members of South Africa’s ANC Youth League monitored Russia’s sham referendums this week, in which people have been directed to the voting booth by the barrel of an automatic rifle. The presence of these international observers from South Africa, though, lends the referendums their much needed veneer of legitimacy. “Eighty percent of people in South Africa support the desire of the people of Donbas, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia to be united with Russia,” one South African monitor told the Russian state news agency Tass. “We believe that in the struggle for freedom it is impossible to stand aside, it is necessary to really fight,” said another, calling the referendum a project of “historic proportions.” 

Covering sham events with a straight face has long posed a dilemma for mainstream Western outlets. The transparently fake plebiscites in occupied Ukraine are an example.  “Votes counted in first referendum in Donetsk,” read a poker-faced Associated Press headline. “Over 96% said to favor joining Russia in first vote results from occupied Ukraine regions,” reported Reuters. The actual stories contained more context, of course, including the fact that many people were forced to vote at gunpoint. But it’s the headlines that flash across screens, tickers, and on social media that are scanned by us all that create first impressions and lend a kind of legitimacy and seriousness to what is an exercise in Russian state propaganda, critics argue. As Oleksandra Matveiichuk, head of the Ukraine-based Center for Civil Liberties, points out: “Fake referendums are not legal procedure, but informational special operation.” And hamstrung by convention, Western news outlets sometimes find themselves playing the role of Putin’s patsies.  

WHAT WE'RE READING

While I have been pretty obsessed with the situation in Russia and Ukraine (and now Iran), here are a few other stories our team recommends: 

• Giorgia Meloni is the first female Prime Minister of Italy and the first far-right leader of a Western democracy in the postwar era. Here’s a great op-ed by Roberto Saviano, author of “Gomorrah,” in which he warns that “where Italy goes, the rest of Europe will follow.”  
• This story explains why faith in Hong Kong's press freedom has reached a record low, with 97% of the city's journalists saying that the city's reporting environment has gotten much worse.
• This new study debunks pernicious myths that immigrants in South Africa are to blame for the country’s socio-economic problems.
• This big report from Meta that outlines how the company took down what was the first targeted Chinese campaign to interfere in U.S. politics (spoiler: the effort was limited.) 

Frankie Vetch, Rebekah Robinson, Ivan Makridin and Katia Patin contributed to this edition

The post As Russia and Iran threaten to implode, Georgia finds itself in the crosshairs appeared first on Coda Story.

On August 15, a law was signed which toughened rules on women appearing in public without hijabs or posting pictures on social media with their heads uncovered. Government employees with profile pictures that don’t conform with Iran’s hardline interpretations of Islamic law will be fired. A month prior to the signing of the law, the national “Hijab and Chastity Day” caused widespread protests in which women posted videos on social media with their heads uncovered in public places such as on buses and trains. 

The authorities initiated a crackdown in response, with so-called morality police arresting, detaining, and even beating women before forcing them to “confess” to their supposed crimes on TV. In June we covered how Iran has been using trolls to target female activists online. The country has also frequently used mobile shutdowns.

About seven years ago, Iran began using biometric national identity cards. This required all new applicants for a national identity card as well as those renewing their existing cards, to scan their irises, fingerprints and faces. Without the card people are unable to access a host of services such as pensions and driving licenses. 

Amir Rashidi, Director of Digital Rights and Security at Miaan Group, is concerned that Iran’s poor data privacy regulation, and high levels of cyber crime, means people’s data will be very vulnerable to non-state actors. “The risk is from two sides. One from the security services who want to go after women for not wearing the proper hijab. And the second, from normal hackers who want to access that information,” says Rashidi.

An Iran researcher at Human Rights Watch, Tara Sepehri Far, says it is unclear at this stage whether the country actually has the capacity to use facial recognition technology. “It’s just fascinating to me how it is possible to bureaucratize repression in a way that makes it less visible,” she told me, “even though it is still the same repressive, discriminatory plan.”

How would this look? Instead of morality police monitoring women manually, cameras would identify them and then they would receive a fine. Not wearing a hijab becomes more like getting caught speeding. This bureaucratized system of surveillance and repression is a model exported from China, where a vast network of facial recognition cameras are being deployed to monitor citizens. China has been providing “smart city” technology to a number of authoritarian states, including Myanmar, as we reported a month ago.

A 2020 draft of an agreement between China and Iran indicated the two countries were gearing up for a 25-year partnership, in which they would collaborate on the development of several key technologies. This included smart technologies and artificial intelligence, which is used for facial recognition technology.

The Chinese state has been developing a lot of its facial recognition technology in Xinjiang, where it is conducting a brutal crackdown on Uyghurs and other Muslim populations. Which raises the question: Could Iran be buying technology that was initially designed by China to suppress Islamic practices, in order to enforce these same Islamic practices?

IN GLOBAL NEWS

A Saudi government application that lets citizens “play the role of a police officer” may have helped put a women’s rights activist behind bars. The government app, Kollona Amn, is an authoritarian dream. It allows Saudis to flag and report “suspicious” behavior, including other peoples’ social media activity, directly to authorities. Human rights activists say the app helps the government identify dissidents and activists, and fear it may have facilitated the arrest of activist Salma al-Shehab, who was recently sentenced to 34 years in prison over tweets she posted supporting women’s rights. "They really want civil society to be invisible, they don't want people to exist, not even online," said Lina al-Hathloul, a human rights activist. 

Al-Shehab’s arrest is part of a troubling global trend. We’ve previously reported on how authorities from El Salvador to India are weaponizing Twitter to crack down on independent speech. Now, in Turkey, a Syrian journalist’s government-related tweets led to his detention and possible deportation. On September 8, Samer Daboul, a Syrian freelance photojournalist working in Turkey, was detained in Gaziantep and taken to prison in Oğuzeli after supposedly tweeting about “racist speech” by the Turkish government, according to a Syrian journalist. Though it remains unclear what Daboul tweeted that annoyed the government, his arrest comes on the heels of Turkish President Recep Erdogan’s summer plan to send one million Syrian refugees back to Syria. Hours before his release, Daboul was allegedly forced to tweet a statement denying that he was in any kind of danger. He also distanced himself from any previous tweets, claiming they did not reflect his personal beliefs. Following that tweet and a small public push for his release, the Turkish government freed Daboul on September 10. Currently, he remains in Gaziantep. We’ll continue to follow this story, so stay tuned for more.

Twitter censored a controversial tweet from a Carnegie Mellon University professor on the grounds that it was “abusive” towards Queen Elizabeth. The Nigerian-born professor, Uju Anya, weighed in on the Queen’s death a few hours before her passing. “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying,” she wrote. “May her pain be excruciating.”

The post went viral and unleashed a flood of criticism and vitriol before Twitter took it down. Upon removing it, the company claimed the post violated its rules on “abusive behavior,” which it defines as “an attempt to harass, intimidate, or silence someone else’s voice.” Critics pointed out that Twitter’s explanation stretched the limits of credulity. As Stanford's Evelyn Douek noted, Twitter’s decision underscores platforms’ routinely deferential approach to powerful figures who come under fire online: “Often people in power get allowances because it’s in the public interest but people don’t for criticizing them, even though that’s often clearly in the public interest too.” 

Albania has severed diplomatic relations with Iran after accusing the country of carrying out a major cyberattack. It’s the first time a country has cut diplomatic ties over an alleged digital attack, and is a geopolitical harbinger of what may be to come as nations build up their cyber arsenals. Albanian officials claim the attack, which sought to cripple the government’s digital infrastructure, was carried out by the Iranian government as an “act of state aggression.” The incident also prompted a response from the U.S. government, which vowed to “hold Iran accountable for actions that threaten the security of a US ally and set a troubling precedent for cyberspace.” We’ve covered the rise of ransomware attacks as a geopolitical weapon—for more, check out pieces here and here.

This week’s newsletter is curated by Coda’s staff reporter Erica Hellerstein. Rebekah Robinson and Rayan El Amine contributed to this edition.

The post Women are the primary targets of Iran’s surveillance state appeared first on Coda Story.

At first, Savadi, who regularly publishes feminist and gender-related content on her account, was pleased. But then, she took a closer look at the recently added accounts. Many of them looked like bots: they had pseudonyms, newly created Instagram pages, no posts. Soon, the requests started overwhelming her page — up to 100 a minute. 

“It was never-ending,” Savadi recalled. She briefly switched her page to private, but she didn’t want this deluge of suspicious new followers to keep her from speaking out. Soon, she made her page public again and was quickly inundated with harassing messages and new followers.

It wasn’t just Savadi’s page that saw strange activity. Other Iranian feminist-focused accounts soon started reporting the same pattern of events — a surge in follow requests and messages – beginning at roughly the same time in mid-May. 

Bots appeared to target not just the most prominent feminist accounts, but also users with smaller followings who had engaged with Iranian feminists’ content by liking, posting, or sharing it. “It seemed they are trying to ruin our network,” said Shaghayegh Norouzi, an Iranian actress and feminist living abroad, who is a prominent figure in Iran’s #MeToo movement on social media. “That was so scary.”

Savadi and Norouzi — popular feminists who live abroad but have hundreds of thousands of followers on their Instagram accounts. Both say the vast majority of their users live in Iran. The app is Iran’s most popular social media platform, with an estimated 48 million annual users, and the only foreign social media network that is not banned by the government. Iranians commonly use virtual private networks, or VPNs, to access other popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

The attacks come at a time of tremendous social unrest in Iran. Since late 2021, tens of thousands of people have joined protests in response to soaring food prices and the collapse of a building that killed nearly 40 people. Protest slogans have now turned political, calling for regime leaders to step down. The country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has blamed the unrest on “enemies” attempting to sow discord in Iran “through the internet.” Mobile internet shutdowns have become commonplace, as have technical measures like throttling, that significantly slow down internet access.

The women targeted in these attacks see a clear link between the regime and what’s happening to them on Instagram.

“Who has the money for this attack?” asked Norouzi. “More than 30 pages, and we are still receiving fake followers, each hour more than 100 followers. Who is paying for this?” While it’s hard to know the breadth of government-affiliated cyber campaigns, a January 2022 report by the Atlantic Council notes that the Iranian government’s intelligence and security services have used “state-sponsored troll armies to silence dissidents” in recent years.

The deluge of messages and follows prompted nearly thirty Iranian feminists, including Savadi and Norouzi, to publish an open letter to Meta this month calling on the company to adopt stricter measures to protect activists’ online security and crack down on bot campaigns, and alleging that the cyber attacks “are often managed and sponsored by companies affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.” Savadi and Norouzi say Meta has not yet responded to the letter.

And they are not the only ones pushing for Instagram to protect the speech of Iranians who are using the platform to speak out. As protests have ramped up, Iranians both inside and outside the country have seen a spike in the number of posts they’ve seen removed from Instagram, including messages related to protests and posts commemorating victims of Ukrainian flight 752 that was shot down by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in January 2020. The Persian diaspora media outlet Iran International reported that Instagram removed some of its videos of protesters being tear gassed by security forces. 

Last week, ARTICLE19, Access Now, and the Center for Human Rights in Iran issued a set of recommendations for Meta, Instagram’s parent company, urging the company to “better understand the complexities of Persian-language content” and to uphold the speech rights of all Instagram users.

For both groups, while the actions of the Iranian regime lie at the root of their struggles, Meta’s failures to address grievances about what kinds of speech can and cannot stay on the platform effectively leave their voices in limbo.

In an insightful essay for Slate that delves into Instagram’s myriad Persian content moderation missteps, Iranian-Canadian scholar Mahsa Alimardani writes: “While misapplications of policies and a refusal of contextual analysis prevails, users are currently self-censoring to get by on a platform that holds monopoly over the majority of public online expression in Iran. One of the recent protest posts by the 1500Tasvir [a prominent protest group] is captioned as follows: “Please listen to the chant, if we write it out we will get censored.”

IN GLOBAL NEWS:

Myanmar’s military is attempting to establish a “digital dictatorship,” according to a June 7 statement by UN human rights experts. The military is imposing internet shutdowns and doubling down on digital censorship and surveillance. “Internet restrictions are being used by the junta as a cloak to hide its ongoing atrocities,” the statement said, referring to the violence that the military has perpetrated around the country since it launched a coup against the civilian-led government in February 2021. In tandem with these more official measures, Mandalay’s new, pro-junta militia — called Thway Thouk, or Blood Comrades — has turned to Telegram and Facebook to garner support for its campaign to murder people who act or speak out against the military. Both social media companies have done little to remove the dangerous actors from their respective platforms, according to news site Frontier Myanmar.

The digital front line in Russia’s war on Ukraine: Last week, hackers attacked the website of the Russian Ministry of Construction and Housing and Communal Services. Attackers asked for a 0.5 bitcoin ransom, and threatened to publish ministry employees’ personal data if they did not receive payment. Since the start of the war, hundreds of Russian state websites have suffered attacks, including state-run media sites, and the websites of the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media and the Ministry of Culture. On Telegram, Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation issues a weekly report on attacks by Ukraine’s IT Army, a group of international and Ukrainian volunteer hackers working in collaboration with officials from Ukraine's defense ministry. Just last week, it reported carrying out attacks on 450 Kremlin-related online services.

WHAT WE’RE READING: 

• Federal privacy legislation may finally be on the horizon in the U.S. A bipartisan group in Congress recently introduced a data privacy bill that would require tech companies to allow people to opt out of targeted advertising, but the proposal has some big hurdles to clear before it can become law. Read more here.
• The Chinese Communist Party is targeting outspoken Asian women — journalists in particular — with large public platforms, according to an analysis by The Australian Strategic Policy Institute. “This latest campaign, in both English and Mandarin, includes a spectrum of psychological abuse, harassment, mass trolling and threats,” write Albert Zhang and Danielle Cave.
• Sudanese journalist Mohamed Suliman offers a thought-provoking look at how social media platforms serve people their online memories through murky algorithms — and what can be done to give them back to users.
• VICE reported on the exploits of an AI bot, trained on a notoriously toxic 4Chan board, that quickly learned to replicate posters’ vile hate speech.
• Meanwhile, AI experts and enthusiasts are debating the likelihood that an AI chatbot developed at Google is “sentient” — an engineer at the company has been placed on administrative leave for saying so. But as one AI ethicist asked, when we think about all the harms AI has wrought so far, should a truly intelligent one really be our biggest fear?

This article was updated on June 15, 2022, after Coda received a response from a Meta spokesperson regarding the Iranian feminist group's open letter. "Our teams are looking into the claims made in this letter and will take action on any accounts that break our rules."

The post Facing a deluge of bot attacks and takedowns, Iranian feminists and political protesters say Instagram is silencing them appeared first on Coda Story.

Until recently. 

In 2021, several incidents featured attackers demanding ransom, but their behavior ran counter to typical ransomware heists and suggested that lurking beneath the surface, they had different goals. They made their demands with extroverted gusto, like they intended their crime to be a public act. The targets were mainly mid-sized companies such as dating apps and insurance companies, large enough to cause public concern but not large enough to spark action from the Israeli state. Most telling, the groups behind the attacks have been linked to Iran to varying degrees. 

“I call this a hybrid threat. There are attacks that are considered political-cyber-offensive, which are by states or by non-state actors but with a political agenda,” said Gabi Siboni, the head of the cyber security program at The Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security. “And there are cyber criminals. But what you can see is that it's getting mixed.”

This new generation of ransomware attacks underscores how a new front in the conflict between Iran and Israel is developing. Ostensibly financial crimes, ransomware has become a tool of statecraft with the geopolitical aim to damage the social bonds of Israeli society and public trust in the country’s institutions, rather than to damage infrastructure or extract a financial bounty.

While the Israeli Cyber Directorate has issued multiple recommendations and warnings about this new “wave of attacks,” the responsibility to protect private computer systems still rests with companies. The advent of geopolitical ransomware exploits a structural vulnerability: a route to damage the social cohesion of a country via geopolitical attacks that bypass state defenses.

Last October, in what is called the “Atraf” hack, Black Shadow, a group with links to Iran, hacked into the servers of CyberServe, an Israeli hosting company, accessing websites and applications of the company’s customers.

Among its customers was the LGBTQ dating app, Atraf. The application’s databases were not encrypted, making it easier for hackers to get their hands on very sensitive personal information. Before asking for the ransom, the group dumped tens of thousands of records from the various sites it had penetrated. The leak included a thousand user profiles in Atraf’s customer database that disclosed information such as names, sexual orientations, unencrypted passwords, locations and HIV status.

The attackers demanded $1 million in exchange for the encryption key and threatened to leak more information.

Ransomware’s parallels with disinformation are striking. While most high-profile ransomware attacks are in the U.S., U.K., and Europe, the vast majority of attacks are in countries facing political instability, like in Latin America and Africa.

Many digital hostage-taking organizations originate from the same hotbeds where disinformation campaigns are generated, like Russia, Ukraine, North Korea, and the Philippines. Ransomware travels the same political divisions as disinformation campaigns, trafficking in the exploitation of economic inequality, fear of immigrants, and racial resentments to undermine public trust in institutions and belief in social stability.

Where disinformation uses noise and incoherence to sow doubt and spread division, ransomware does something similar: it, too, is an agent of chaos. It may look like just a way to make a crypto-buck, but its effects, very often intentional, are much more profound.

The CyberServe hack had little resemblance to a classic ransom attack. Everything was very public. The group used Telegram and RaidForum for their announcements instead of directly establishing communication with the company. Typically, financially motivated actors seek private negotiations, but the Telegram groups run by Black Shadows look like a public campaign — complete with drop countdowns and cheery messages.

‘The nature of this wave of attacks is actually to seed fear and sense of terror in the Israeli people by attacking high-profile targets or ones that can generate enough media attention.’ said Lotem Finkelsteen from Checkpoint, a cybersecurity company. This explains the public behavior of the attackers. “They put more focus on echoing the attack, embarrassing the victim and developing expectations in the Twitter/Telegram followers than getting a financial payment.”

Iran and Israel are bitter foes. After the state of Israel came into existence in 1948, Iran was the second Muslim-majority country to recognize Israel as a sovereign state. Iran retracted recognition after its 1979 revolution and regularly threatens Israel with total annihilation. The cyber realm often reflects real-life tensions so, once high tech entered our lives, the two foes quickly picked up cyber weapons. 

The countries’ long-running cyber conflict has taken many turns but until recently, the tit-for-tat hacks have mainly concentrated on military infrastructure. This is changing. Both parties are increasingly targeting civilian infrastructure and private companies. Recent hacks attributed to Israel include attacks on the University of Tehran and on a system that allows millions of Iranians to use government-issued cards to buy fuel at a subsidized price. Iran has gone after Israel’s water. Last April, six facilities were targeted in an attempt to increase the amount of chlorine in the water supply to dangerously high levels. 

According to Boaz Dolev, the CEO of cybersecurity company ClearSky, Black Shadow’s previous attack on the Israeli insurance company, Shirbit, was also confounding. After stealing the company’s data, the attackers wiped the information off the servers instead of encrypting it. “This is not something a ransomware group does,” he said. After demanding $1 million in bitcoin, Black Shadow refused to give the company a four-hour extension past its deadline to provide a payment in full.

An Israeli cyber negotiator, who requested anonymity to maintain a nonpublic professional profile, also doubts Black Shadow’s motivation. “I'm not a cyber analyst, I'm a negotiator. What I can identify from the beginning is whether the motivation of the person is political, which means to cause havoc, uncertainty and to undermine public confidence in the system. With Shirbit it was very clear that it was a politically motivated attack rather than financially motivated one.”

This cyber negotiator recently had come across similar fishy attacks on Israeli companies. At one company, he started negotiating with the hacking group called “Pay2Key.” At first, it looked to him like a typical ransom attack, but then he noticed red flags. For example, the group was a previously unknown actor yet they used unusually aggressive language. 

Nevertheless, the company decided to pay the ransom. Pay2Key did not provide a data decryptor. To get to the top in the ransom industry, reputation matters. Taking the ransom and in return not providing the decryption key so that a company can retrieve its data is very bad for repeat business.

After several encounters with unusual ransomware actors, the cyber negotiator began looking more closely into the threat they posed. Technical analysis of the Pay2Key attack by Dolev’s cybersecurity company, ClearSky estimated “with medium to high confidence” that Pay2Key is a new operation conducted by an Iranian group called Fox Kitten, an Advanced Persistent Threat, the name for an opaque actor, typically linked to the government, which gains unauthorized access to a computer network and remains undetected. Pay2Key is believed to have begun a wave of attacks against dozens of Israeli companies in July and August, 2020.

The attacks are not limited to Israel. The FBI and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency recently identified a new Advanced Persistent Threat group associated with the Iranian regime involved in “data exfiltration or encryption, ransomware, and extortion” in the U.S. and Australia.

In fact, yet another group linked to Iran has had an unusual modus operandi. In June 2021, a group called Deus claimed that they had obtained 15 terabytes of data from Voicenter, a call center company. The data contained information belonging not only to Voicenter but also 8,000 companies that used their services. The hackers posted samples of the information, security camera and webcam footage, photos, ID cards, WhatsApp messages, emails and phone calls. 

They used public channels, raised their ransom demands every 12 hours, and announced that the data was for sale even before the negotiation period was over. In this way, Iranian advanced persistent threat groups play a ransomware poker game: trying to inflict maximum social and political damage without triggering state retaliation.  

Israeli companies are reluctant to acknowledge cyber attacks from Iranian groups precisely because the publicity could generate nervousness and doubt about the hardness of Israel’s defensive shell against its powerful enemy. This lack of transparency, however, also creates vulnerability, say Israeli cyber security experts. “We still do not have enough information to link these groups to the Iranian government, but even if these direct links exist, the ransom tools used in these attacks are quite conventional and small,” said Einat Myron, a cybersecurity expert in Israel. 

“Medium-sized companies can certainly do a better job at protecting against them,” Myron said. “Maybe avoiding playing into foreign actor’s games could be the new motivation for business owners to start taking data protection seriously.”

Ransomware: The New Disinformation

The rise of the geopolitical hack

Erica Hellerstein

Ransomware could soon be about more than just money

Caitlin Thompson

Ransomware attackers are going after schools

Caitlin Thompson

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The post In Israel, ransomware attacks against private companies pose a new kind of national security threat appeared first on Coda Story.