“My country should have control over Google, Skype, Yahoo, etc.,” he said by e-mail. “I’m breaking all encryption algorithms and giving power to my country to control all of them.” Is an independent Iranian hacker trying to help his government spy on its people?
posted by beisny on Sep 12, 2011 - 24 comments

Two days ago a user asked Google about a strange warning he was getting when trying to access Gmail from Iran. Turns out he was getting a fraudulent SSL certificate that was issued incorrectly for *.google.com by DigiNotar, a Dutch certificate authority. It seems likely this was a deliberate man-in-the-middle attack to snoop email in Iran. This attack is the second SSL certificate compromise in a year (previously), pointing to a fundamental design flaw in Internet security. [more inside]
posted by Nelson on Aug 30, 2011 - 45 comments

The Haystack application aims to use steganography to hide samizdat-type data within a larger stream of innocuous network traffic. Thus, civilians in Iran, for example, could more easily evade Iranian censors and provide the world with an unfiltered report on events within the country. Haystack earned its creator Austin Heap a great deal of positive coverage from the media during the 2009 Iranian election protests. The BBC described Heap as "on the front lines" of the protesters' "Twitter revolution", while The Guardian called him an Innovator of the Year. Despite the laudatory coverage, however, the media were never given a copy of the software to examine. Indeed, not much is known about the software or its inner workings. Specialists in network encryption security were not allowed to perform an independent evaluation of Haystack, despite its distribution to and use by a small number of Iranians, possibly at some risk. As interest in the project widens and criticisms of the media coverage and software continue to mount, Heap has currently asked users to cease using Haystack until a security review can be performed.
posted by Blazecock Pileon on Sep 13, 2010 - 31 comments

Is now captured Robert A. Levinson a spy? a government agent?
Perhaps someone on non-official cover (NOC)? or just a guy doing some research for a book in Iran. The WaPo cuts through the mumbo jumbo here.
posted by specialk420 on Apr 3, 2007 - 11 comments

The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has called for a purge of liberal and secular teachers from the country's universities. Now that this former rogue nation has fallen in line, we can turn out attention to the real terrorist threat: Britain.
posted by thirteenkiller on Sep 5, 2006 - 30 comments

The overthrow of Premier Mossadeq Last week the NYT posted PDF files of a CIA report detailing the overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran in 1953. Names of Iranian participants who assisted in the operation were digitally "removed" because of fears that there families would face retribution when their status as foreign agents was revealed. John Young of cryptome discovered that the redacted text was not really gone -- by cancelling the PDF rendering at a certain point, the hidden names were revealed. He contacted the NYT and after some discussion told them he would not post the full files; the Times removed their copies of the files until they could edit out the names more securely. Young has since heard that other people also noticed the flawed redaction and has concluded that the information is therefore public. He is now posting the full text of the files (first installment up now) with the names restored. Is Young playing fast and loose with people's lives? Or does belief in a free press obligate this sort of thing?
posted by tingley on Jun 22, 2000 - 14 comments