Exposing Canada's Role in US "Black-Ops" in Iran

June 22, 2009

Exposing Canada's Role in US "Black-Ops" in Iran

I'm probably not the only Dominion reader who has spent the past couple of days wondering how Canada is involved in US-led "Black Ops" in Iran.

Today I found a clue when I happened across Psiphon Inc., which was recently spun off from Citizen Lab, itself a branch of the Munk Centre for International Studies at the U of T.

"Canada's Psiphon Inc. on the Frontlines of Iranian Netwar," reads a June 19 press release by Ontario based Psiphon Inc.

"The company is employing dedicated 'psi-operators' - staff whose job it is to propagate Psiphon nodes and engage with the Iranian community both inside and outside Iran - working 24 hours a day, seven days a week."

"The psi-operators are using social networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook, as well as emails [sic] lists and forums, to propagate connection information to Psiphon's 'Right2know' nodes, which contain customized content sourced from BBC BBC Persian, Radio Farda, YouTube and other websites and services banned by Iranian authorities," continues the release (which I transcribed here).

According to the Globe and Mail, which picked up on Psiphon's news release:

...Psiphon's founders are walking a tightrope in their attempts to empower Iranians, as they try to simultaneously offer activists unfettered access to the Internet and dissuade those same activists from launching cyberattacks on the government institutions that took that access away in the first place.

CBC ran a story about Psiphon on June 16th, moving "Netwar" from the press release to the mainpage.

The term "Netwar" was coined by the RAND corporation and defined as: "lower intensity conflict at the societal end of the spectrum. In our view, netwar is likely to be the more prevalent and challenging form of conflict in the emerging information age and merits careful and sustained study."