Iran says is building copy of captured US spy drone, releases what it says is recovered data

- LIMITED DISSEMINATION

US/1; ATTN: RedDragonRISING.com

---

I

By Associated Press, Updated: Sunday, April 22, 6:41 AM

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran claimed Sunday that it had reverse-engineered an American spy drone captured by its armed forces last year and has begun building a copy.

Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, chief of the aerospace division of the powerful Revolutionary Guards, related what he said were details of the aircraft’s operational history to prove his claim that Tehran’s military experts had extracted data from the U.S. RQ-170 Sentinel captured in December in eastern Iran, state television reported.

Among the drone’s past missions, he said, was surveillance of the compound in northwest Pakistan in which Osama Bin Laden lived and was killed.

Tehran has flaunted the capture of the Sentinel, a top-secret surveillance drone with stealth technology, as a victory for Iran and a defeat for the United States in a complicated intelligence and technological battle.

U.S. officials have acknowledged losing the drone. They have said Iran will find it hard to exploit any data and technology aboard it because of measures taken to limit the intelligence value of drones operating over hostile territory.

Hajizadeh told state television that the captured surveillance drone is a “national asset” for Iran and that he could not reveal full technical details. But he did provide some samples of the data that he claimed Iranian experts had recovered.

“There is almost no part hidden to us in this aircraft. We recovered part of the data that had been erased. There were many codes and characters. But we deciphered them by the grace of God,” Hajizadeh said.

He said all operations carried out by the drone had been recorded in the memory of the aircraft, including maintenance and testing.

Hajizadeh claimed that the drone flew over Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan two weeks before the al-Qaida leader was killed there in May 2011 by U.S. Navy SEALs. He did not say how the Iranian experts knew this.

Before that, he said, “this drone was in California on Oct. 16, 2010, for some technical work and was taken to Kandahar in Afghanistan on Nov. 18, 2010. It conducted flights there but apparently faced problems and (U.S. experts) were unable to fix it,” he said.

Hajizadeh said the drone was taken to Los Angeles in December 2010 where sensors of the aircraft underwent testing at an aerospace factory.

“If we had not achieved access to software and hardware of this aircraft, we would be unable to get these details. Our experts are fully dominant over sections and programs of this plane,” he said. “It’s not that we can bring down a drone but cannot recover the data.”

There are concerns in the U.S. that Iran or other states may be able to reverse-engineer the chemical composition of the drone’s radar-deflecting paint or the aircraft’s sophisticated optics technology that allows operators to positively identify terror suspects from tens of thousands of feet in the air.

There are also worries that adversaries may be able to hack into the drone’s database, as Iran claimed to have done. Some surveillance technologies allow video to stream through to operators on the ground but do not store much collected data. If they do, it is encrypted.

Media reports claimed this week that Russia and China have asked Tehran to provide them with information on the drone but Iran’s Defense Ministry denied this.

CONTINUE READING Full Story Here...

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
© The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/report-iran-says-it-is-building-copy-of-captured-us-spy-drone/2012/04/22/gIQAj7YCZT_print.html

[Information contained in BKNT E-mail is considered Attorney-Client and Attorney Work Product privileged, copyrighted and confidential. Views that may be expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of any government, agency, or news organization.]

Tehran Bureau - In Iran, 'couch rebels' prefer Facebook

- LIMITED DISSEMINATION

US/1

Don't ask...

Don't tell... -- 'Anonymous'

        

In Iran, ‘couch rebels’ prefer Facebook

By Thomas Erdbrink, Published: June 13, 2011

TEHRAN — Two years ago, Iranian activists used social media sites as engines to organize massive anti-government demonstrations. But now, activists say, the limitless freedoms available online are proving to be a distraction from real-world dissent.

Instead of marching in the streets, the same doctors, artists and students who led the demonstrations in 2009 are playing Internet games such as FarmVille, peeking at remarkably candid photographs posted online by friends and confining their political debates to social media sites such as Facebook, where dissent has proved less risky.

“We have become couch rebels, avoiding the dangers that real changes bring,” said a 39-old Iranian artist who spends most days juggling between two laptops and 1,300 online friends. “Our world online is like an endless party with no rules, and that keeps us very busy.”

The artist insisted that she be identified only by her first name, Jinoos, to avoid government retaliation. She said she had attended a demonstration in February but, on returning home, found that all of her friends had remained online, posting news about the protest from the safety of their homes.

More than anything else, the relative quiet on the streets of Tehran can be explained by the ferocity of the government crackdown that followed the protests of 2009. Dozens of protesters were killed, hundreds were arrested, and many were sentenced to long prison terms; since then, critics of the government have preferred to vent their anger in private.

But many Iranians also acknowledge that they increasingly have been drawn into virtual worlds, which serve as outlets for self-expression in forms otherwise unimaginable in a country where a boy and a girl walking hand in hand along a boulevard could be arrested on charges of improper relations.

Iran’s government has sought to block access to Facebook since the protests that followed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s contested victory in the 2009 election. Organizers had used the power and speed of social media to quickly mobilize crowds. Ultimately, the authorities managed to quell the protests but not the deep dissatisfaction within the urban middle classes.

Iranians have used special software to bypass government firewalls and maintain access to Facebook, Twitter, Badoo and other Web sites. Iran has one of the largest Facebook communities in the Middle East and is one of the most densely Web-connected nations in the region, according to Internet World Stats, a Web site.

Online, Iranians brazenly show the parts of their lives that they used to keep secret from the state and others. Pictures of illegal underground parties, platinum blond girls without head scarves and couples frolicking on the beaches of Turkey are all over Iranian social media. They illustrate the rapid modernization that the Islamic republic has gone through during the past decade, changes that have left clerics, revolutionaries and many families struggling to understand.

“Within a period of 10 years, Iranians went from breaking social taboos to breaking everything,” said Bahar Rezaie, a popular Internet poet, model and designer. For her, social media in Iran illustrates what happens to a society that has a deep understanding of the world but is living under a government that has made laws out of traditions.

CONTINUE READING Full Story HERE...