Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran has spread widely in its fight against cyber crime by following up individuals with social media pages for alleged cultural misdeeds. But in the Islamic Republics war against what it sees as anti Iranian Islamic activities, the regime could be losing the fight.
On Saturday 30
January 2015 Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)
Center for Investigation of Organized Cyber Crimes made
statement in the media about a recent
operation on social networks in particular Facebook.
According to the
statement IRGC was able to «identify and arrest some of the most
important elements and active social networks on the Internet that
have a mission to spread corruption and diminish the Iranian-Islamic
way of life and targeting the holy institution of the family. »
The statement said
that « this network by abusing the domain of the Internet and hidden
and indirect support of Western governments » was able to create 350
Facebook pages in two years. Their activities allegedly
included:
«Proliferation of
the culture of a hedonistic lifestyle, weaken the foundations and
negating the institution of the family, mock religious beliefs and
values, spread relations outside of moral codes, spread personal
images of young girls – which creates conflicts in families and
possibly of their disintegration, abusing youths and adolescents,
including girls and boys and production and distribution of immoral
and anti-religious material in the form of tabloid and popular
content on social network Facebook. » Some of those people affected
by IRGC centres operation alleged earned «illegitimate income»
through their activities.
Cyber crime
can take variety of forms and is not unique to Iran and it affects
nearly every society with Internet access. But IRGCs Center for
Investigation of Organised Cyber Crimes seems to have spread widely
in this operation by arresting individuals for activities which in
many contexts are not be considered as crimes. This is in part
because the IRGC and more broadly Iranian hardliners see such
activities as being part of soft war carried out by hostile
foreign governments and their Iranian facilitators.
Soft war is not just
regime rhetoric but is seen by some people as national security
concern and has received massive funding. Cyber space which is a key
domain for the spread of ideas is seen as key domain for the broad
cast of content which can advanced the perceived soft war against
Iran. This is why Iran has not only one but several organizations for
oversight of cyber space including FATA police unit which
appears to perform the same function as the IRGC Center for
Investigation of Organised Cyber Crimes even in relatively more open
and transparent fashion. Yet as said in the past when it comes to
fighting the soft war the regime only seems to be capable of
successfully employment of hard tools such as cyber filtering
regime and arrests and interrogations. What the regime appears to be
incapable of successfully employing is soft tools to attract Iranians
back toward the Islamic Republics vision of Iranian Islamic culture
instead of only trying to deter consumption of Western culture.
