“Cyber cyber cyber cyber cyber cyber cyber cyber cyber cyber cyber cyber cyber cyber cyber cyber cyber cyber cyber…”
That’s my best summary of the intended jist of this NYT story (I’ll return to the real news in it in a big), reporting that Iran is trying to acquire influence with what it variously calls “cyberattacks” and “cyberespionage,” having now been dissuaded from acquiring influence with a nuclear weapons program. It quite literally uses the word “cyber” 19 times.
But what it really means is that Iran is spying, like all other nations do.
But last year, private security researchers say, Iranians began using cyberattacks for espionage, rather than for destruction and disruption.
Interestingly, it says this WSJ story reported bits of it first; that story clearly insinuates Iran used contacts found on the computer of an Iranian-American businessman they arrested to find other contacts, which is not something NYT mentions at all.
Friends and business associates of Mr. Namazi said the intelligence arm of the IRGC confiscated his computer after ransacking his family’s home in Tehran.
In any case, NYT has put two reporters in charge of wielding that scary word “cyber” over and over to make Iran’s actions, acting like any other country, more scary.
That story appeared yesterday.
Today, the AP has this story.
Iran’s top leader says the United States is using “money and sex” to try to infiltrate the Islamic Republic and warns Iranians not to fall into the “enemy’s trap.”
In remarks to commanders of the elite Revolutionary Guard Wednesday, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says authorities should take concerns about “infiltration” seriously and that political factions should not use the issue against each other.
Khamenei’s warning is just as ridiculous as the NYT’s. Breaking: The US is using the kinds of carrots and sticks used for millennia to recruit spies!
I just find it funny that each sees their scary monster — cyber, in the case of the US, and sex, in the case of Iran — as the means to fear-monger about everyday spying.