US Seizes Domains Used by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps
justice.gov
justice.gov
The other 88 were because the Government of Iran violated our sanctions by not getting a proper license. The US had the ability to seize because the domains were owned and operated within the US and subsequently broke the laws.
So, it boils down to Iran breaking our rules by not improperly disclosing intent or failing to have the appropriate license. The DOJ and FBI did a good job. The Government of Iran could have registered those news outlets under FARA, but they didn't. Same for the obtaining the licenses, though I'm not versed in that approval process.
If you're looking for some riveting reading, check out FARA: https://www.justice.gov/nsd-fara/fara-index-and-act
I think what Iran did here is wrong, no doubt. But don't fool me that the USA does no such similar tactics as well, perhaps a tad bit more convoluted, through side companies for example But it's nothing weird to conceive the USA meddling in other countries their news feeds, right?
You are misunderstanding the situation. The US does not govern the entirety of the domain space. Nations have full control over their own ccTLDs, and many (e.g. China and India) absolutely do fully exert that control by censoring outright domains they don't agree with. And there are plenty of other gTLDs that are not run out of the US either, e.g. Radix is a Dubai-based company that runs .site, .online, .store, .space, .fun, .website, .tech, and more, Minds + Machines is a British VI-based company that runs .vip, .work, .fit, .london, and more, etc.
All of these enforcement actions against Iran were able to happen because the registries and/or registrars in question are US-based companies. Of course governments are able to enforce their laws on companies based on their own soil, but that's also all the US is able to do without the cooperation of other countries.
If some outfit claims to be based in the Virgin Islands, you should take that with a large dose of salt unless it's a hotel or something. The BVI is a tax haven.
In practice so far as I was able to tell this is a Californian company which for tax reasons is notionally owned by a company in the BVI.
>Sure this might be headed by the USA as per usual, but the current situation is not one I think we should desire as a global populace.
Okay, right now, remove the USA from their global role. Who do you want to fill the void? Remember that sudden power vacuums allow bad actors to fill in (ISIS being the most modern example of such).
As controversial as it may sound, the USA still allows for the greatest expressions of liberty of any country, period. It ain't perfect, but no representative system is.
>But don't fool me that the USA does no such similar tactics as well, perhaps a tad bit more convoluted, through side companies for example
Of course we do.
Unless a treaty is signed explicitly condemning such behavior, every country possessing or seeking power meddles with domestic politics of other countries. Political power derives its strength from perception. If a domestic populace views their leaders as capable, political power increases, and vice versa. This reality is used by militaries and intelligence services to influence domestic and foreign nations.
For example, if you're China, you attempt to convince the USA population to perceive their government as weak, ineffective, and non-representative, and you simultaneously tell the USA population that China is a worthy successor to the USA and is totally not a threat. If the population is unaware of these efforts (often spanning years if not decades), you have a fairly high success rate, as you are fabricating an alternate reality which is deemed plausible enough to pass as truth. Raise a whole generation on this reality, and you've laid a new foundation for that society. (For more information on the topic, look up "psychological operations".)
He already said/implied, an international committee or coalition, representative of the world, while possibly still headed by the US. Unless you're seriously arguing ISIS would be a potential alternative to US control of domain names, why even mention them?
> As controversial as it may sound, the USA still allows for the greatest expressions of liberty of any country, period.
Even within the US, authorities regularly and routinely confiscate the property of American citizens, without charging them with anything. So the idea that the US is the greatest protector of liberty for people outside the US is not credible.
I mention ISIS simply to demonstrate that power vacuums can lead to unintended consequences. ICANN has issues, but will pushing the power of domain management to an international coalition be good for the health and openness of the Internet? Hard to say.
>Even within the US, authorities regularly and routinely confiscate the property of American citizens, without charging them with anything. So the idea that the US is the greatest protector of liberty for people outside the US is not credible.
You do know civil asset forfeiture doesn't happen for no reason at all, right? That said, you're right that many local law enforcement agencies started stretching the law to excessively seize assets and thereby fund their departments. You may be interested to know the Supreme Court, two years ago, held state and local law enforcement are also subject to the Excessive Fines Clause, just like federal law enforcement [1]. While there's plenty of work to do to enact limits for each state [2], the foundation for future efforts to restrict civil asset forfeiture is now established.
Look, I get that hating on the USA is in vogue these days. All the cool kids talk about how much the USA sucks, and anyone expressing otherwise is not worth the cool kids' time. But consider that the US Consitution is the oldest governing document currently in force. It works damn well, and perhaps so because it protects liberty extraordinarily well, even though the costs of liberty are high.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbs_v._Indiana
[2] https://www.splcenter.org/news/2019/04/16/what-supreme-court...
The US Constitution means as much to people in other countries as the constitution of Russia or China or anywhere else means to Americans. It doesn't apply, regardless of how old it is.
The point about civil asset forfeiture is that if the US Constitution can't protect Americans against the US government or law enforcement, what hope does the rest of the world have?
What hope does the world have? Give it a few months yet.
Citation needed. ( And don't forget, there aren't that many federal Western nations, so the entire argument is close to nonsensical)
All confederations are federations, but not all federations are confederations. The difference comes from the federal government's power.
Both constitute a union of regions under a federal government. However, the confederation is distinguished by a union of sovereign regions under a federal government. Independence of the state was so important at the founding of the USA that the first governing document of the country is names the "Articles of Confederation". However, the Articles of Confederation were too weak and did not allow the federal government to levy taxes, so they were scrapped for the present-day Constitution to grant the federal government a bit more power.
The USA isn't an ideal confederation, but the confederal elements pop up from time to time (e.g. any person talking about "state's rights")
Canada is also close to being a confederation, but the executive power is still vested in the British monarchy.
I don't believe any European nation can be considered a confederation.
So, to your point: the most free nations in the world are those espousing confederal values. Even among Western nations, only a handful qualify, and the USA is one of those.
Had they used Active.Domains in Russia, DotMedia in Hong Kong, KuwaitNET in Kuwait, or any of the other non-US registrars, they would have been fine.
.com, .net, .org, .edu, and .gov are very much US-based and US-centric TLDs, which lots of people tend to forget. Whereas other countries use their own ccTLDs, we have .us but barely use it, for historical reasons.
.com, .net and .org weren't created as US-centric and it's a tragedy they are ( and it's an even bigger tragedy that .edu is US only). .org is widely used around the world though.
.com/.net were originally administered by the US Department of Defense, then in 1993 it went to the US National Science Foundation. They've always been US-centric, and most other countries have always generally tended to use their ccTLDs. .org too has always been run out of the US.
If you don't want to be under the US's power, the correct course of action is and always has been to not use the gTLDs like .com, .net, .org that are operated in the US (and that for the first decade plus of existence were operated by the US). These TLDs were simply never country-agnostic; they have always had a much greater association with the US than with any other country. At some point, whatever the intent might have been 30+ years ago doesn't really matter practically speaking today. They are what they are and everyone knows, or should know, what they're getting with them.
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/09/23/syria-leaks-uk-contractor...
From the original submission: "In addition, the remaining 88 domains targeted audiences in Western Europe, the Middle East, and South East Asia and masqueraded as genuine news outlets while actually being operated by the IRGC to spread pro-Iranian disinformation around the globe to the benefit of the Government of Iran."
"four of the domains purported to be genuine news outlets but were actually controlled by the IRGC and targeted the United States for the spread of Iranian propaganda to influence United States domestic and foreign policy in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA)"
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200308072511/http://newsstand7...
Do they get to seize the Voice of America domain too?
There’s an important distinction between an independent media outlet with a US perspective, and US government propaganda. The former holds some principles that the nation will better prosper if corruption in the government is exposed. The latter just wants to increase the standing of the nation, and/or keep the present leaders in power.
"Correspondence and collusion between the New York Times and the CIA" - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/29/corres...
Did you have an actual point with this question or was it some kind of rhetoric that I don't understand?
Hopefully China is soon in a position to counter US hegemony on the world wide web.
Perhaps the original question should have been, "Why isn't there a law like FARA that prevents the US government from publishing propaganda?".
Propaganda is simply influential speech that someone takes steps to distribute. Not all propaganda is bad, or even disagreeable. Typically it is not literally the state of being propaganda that makes propaganda concerning, but instead, it’s the the agenda that the propaganda is espousing that is of concern.
For example, some propaganda is good and had an agenda that is widely agreeable — e.g. many things produced by the Ad Council.
Few would think it is reasonable for the US to prohibit its government from doing things that it believes is in its own interest.
Tl;dr: it’s because countries don’t prohibit themselves from doing things they think is a good idea.
I think many would say that the US government shouldn't try to spread any "good ideas" that differ from what its citizens already believe are good ideas. That would still allow the US government to publish those ideas to other countries, though.
Can you explain where the surprise is exactly?
It's equivalent to proclaiming surprise that the US will leverage its natural resources to its own advantage, or physically seek to control its borders in relation to its economy for trade purposes, or use & abuse the USD global reserve currency to its advantage. The .com TLD is just another resource under control of the US.
The US, as with every country on the planet, seeks to leverage all manner of things to its advantage, politically and economically. The only difference between nations is how many points of leverage they have to utilize. The US, or China as another example, have many points of leverage to use; smaller or weaker countries do not.
Kind of like OPEC successfully leveraging its oil dominance in the 1970s. It's what countries tend to do, when they can.
And hopefully, Iran doesn't decide to shoot down a commercial airliner half-filled with their own nationals, that took off from their own airport, as retribution for these domain name seizures.
Didn't the escalation begin when US removed a democratically elected Iranian leader?
And what kind of imperialistic argument is that? A sovereign country managed to get rid of foreign control, nationalised foreign assets that were exploiting their natural resources and shipping off the the profits offshore ( the original concessions being given while Iran was under UK control), and they're the bad guys and deserve a bloody coup? Again, check the Suez crisis, that's not how the world works anymore ( most of the time).
Sure. Iran is the uncivil one in the region.
Trying to read between the lines here, but having a hard time without statements of appreciative voluntary collaboration from the companies themselves. Is the FBI saying that collaboration has been valuable, or forced cooperation? Unless any of those companies similarly boasts, I have to assume the latter.
The US removes them from the Internet to ensure nobody in the world can read them. A great display of American exceptionalism.
Presumably this entitlement to outright remove content on the web should be extended and available for other nations as well.
A form of immediate global censorship.
I hope over time the Internet infrastructure and operations will either make these types of operations impossible or available for any country.
People used to make complaints like yours when the US had DNS control, but Obama handed that off to ICANN in a somewhat controversial move years ago.
One of these sites was called "usjournal.us". Would you be surprised if Russia seized an allegedly CIA-controlled domain called "russiatoday.ru"?
It's HTTPS cert is from RT[1]. Which is 100% russian propaganda. How came you think it's CIA controlled?
Sure, within the tlds under each nations control. Iranian government can seize as many .ir domains it wants to. It's historical happenstance that legacy tlds like .com are US controlled, but nobody forces you to use those. While the press release did not list the seized domains here, I bet none of them were .ir.
They have taken the most effective way of blocking the site instead of using ineffective blocks like DNS, firewalls, etc.
The most effective way of blocking a site is IP/DPI blocking, something countries like Russia or China do, but US doesn't.
Also, when IP blocking is usually deployed, all you need to do is change your DNS provider to get the website's IP and connect to it.
China are Russia control .cn and .ru domains and regulate them.
If a ship has a French flag, the French state actually takes some responsibility for it, even if you saw it in port in Brazil, that's still a French flag, France cares about that ship 'cos it has their flag on it and they don't let that flag fly just anywhere. On the other hand, if the ship has the Comoros flag, well, don't expect too much from a poor island nation that was mostly glad of the cheque paid. If you're lucky Comoros can give you the phone number for the people who actually own it, but they want nothing to do with that ship.
What matters here is that these were gTLDs operated by American registries, so it's up to the Americans if they want.
Iran has their own TLD, no?
The phrase used to be "The Internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it." Now it seems any censorship is fine as long as it's nationalist enough. And if by a quirk of history the US happens to control the domains with the widest reach - well, so it goes, never mind, and let's wave a flag.
The inevitable outcome will be a Balkanised Internet, with each sphere of influence monitoring and controlling its local content.
This has happened formally in China and Russia (and elsewhere) and has been happening informally in the US and EU.
Perhaps the requirements of realpolitik justify this - and perhaps they don't. It's not a simple question with a simple answer.
So it's a debate worth having - not on the basis of TLD ownership, but on the basis of international civics and the ever-decreasing free movement of information which is not corporate or government-controlled, online and elsewhere, in all spheres of interest.
Gosh, it's genuinely shocking I haven't heard that phrase in a long time.
Would probably be a healthy thing for the Internet to expand capability and capacity to other parts of the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Ac...
Unfortunately for the government, I suspect abusing control of domains like this will just make a decentralized DNS that they cannot control more of a reality.
It would still be weird even if it were the .us TLD though. State censorship is state censorship.
But to be honest, with all the new TLDs, there's no longer anything really special about the .com/net/org domains anymore.
ICANN is based in the US so they can theoretically turn off any domain they want.
Also are you suggesting it's OK for the US to shutdown any website engaging in whatever the US government defines as "anti-US activities?"
> Have we already forgotten Iran and their calls for death to America?
I'd love to see the proof you have that these websites were bannering "death to America" across their websites.
Unless you have some special knowledge about the situation I don't, I think we can safely say we don't know if any of the accusations the US is making about these websites are even true.
Just read the article and scan some of the websites in a cache.
Reading your comment, after reading the US's claim in the article, and looking at the websites, leads me to believe your comment is straight disinformation.
US claim, "Today, we successfully seized 92 domains involved in a disinformation campaign conducted by Iran-based actors to promote pro-Iranian propaganda."
Looking at a cross-section of the domains in archive.org, shows them to contain one-sided and incomplete information.
Please tell us more about this. Which ir and ru domains have been seized by the US lately?
The internet being administered by US corporations makes them easily compellable and any property they steward can be seized despite being for the benefit of foreign citizens and non-residents.
Citation required.
(EDIT: to be clear, it seems that we require a citation to the official Iranian policy, not some clear agitprop around a popular slogan ...)
I wonder if McCain meant his death chant literally:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7s5pT3Rris
Its probably a good thing he didn't get a chance to set official US policy on Iran.
EDIT: /s
And he was a United States senator for 30 years, including a Chair of the Armed Services Committee. How much more involved in setting America's international policy could one be?
> Death to America (Persian: مرگ بر آمریکا Marg bar Āmrikā) is an anti-American political slogan and chant which has been in use in Iran since the inception of the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
Official Government Policy > populist slogans.
> Ayatollah Khomeini, the first leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, popularized the term.
Freedom of speech is not simply being able to wear a Pepsi shirt in downtown Atlanta, but about viewpoints that necessarily make us uncomfortable. "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". That so many are willing to discard our hard-earned freedoms for the lure of simplistic neo-fascism [0] is harrowing. Our society has been whipped into a stupor by the specter of foreign strawmen, while the real threats to the US are the domestic powers doing the whipping. If you can't see how this action is utterly anti-American, you are contributing to our destruction.
[0] One telltale indicator of neo-fascism is the analogizing of state activity to business activity.
The original submission mentions that the issue was the IRGC was pretending to be a genuine new outlet, which is exactly what the FARA describes.
Link from one of the provided domains: https://web.archive.org/web/20200308072511/http://newsstand7...
I provided a link in my original comment to demonstrate there's accusations that this exact thing has been done historically in the case of FARA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Ac...
The flip side is that anyone being punished can argue they are being selectively targeted, regardless of the validity of it.
None of the examples there show the punishment of speech the US government disagrees with. Furthermore, none of them are analogous to the original post, where a foreign government was pretending to be legitimate news organizations.
On the other hand, if the US accuses IRGC of controlling all these websites but does nothing about the multi-billion dollar lobbying organization in the US that's had multiple high ranking officials demanding it register with NARA (and then later mysteriously dropping their demands), does that not strike you as a bit odd?
The IRGC was pretending to be American news organizations, which is entirely different in kind from AIPAC.