The Strange Battlefields of Twitter: Part 2, The Guard

I’ll get back to my hacker story, which is still developing btw, later, when I have put more of the pieces together. This kinda ties into that.

Cyberwar: Iran Government versus Worldwide Hacktivists - it is an incredible story how these guys and girls have worked to keep Iranians anonymous and connected to the web. These people never sleep. @austinheap is the lynchpin of this effort. Follow him on twitter for the whole story.

Yet another thing I love about Twitter is the connection and access to people you’d likely never meet otherwise. Where else could one come in from the garden with an arm full of rhubarb in Ohio or Saskatchewan or Oslo and while it is rinsing, sit down at Twitter and pick up a conversation with a member of the Republican Guard?

The Guard is key at the moment. There are numerous rumors of dissension in the Guard over the election and Khamenei‘s interfering son Mojtaba, and stories (unconfirmed) of arrests of officers allegedly plotting to join reformists.

The Basij of course works for the Guard, officially anyway/ Basij agents online and their admiring wannabees were just as you’d imagine the Basij in the streets to be to be, crude parrots for the party line and the regime’s twisted brand of Islam and patriotism. They were often cruel and preferred clubbing ppl over the head with insults to talking. And they were also young men, time bombs of nsecurity, bravado, unarticulated anger and repressed sexual energy. Compressed might be a better word. It was all channeled, with fearsome strength, into protecting Iran and the revolution from foreign agents and esp. America, just as their forefathers had saved Iran from Saddam and Reagan in the 1980s.

Even among this band of warped Manboys, though, there were people willing to drop the propaganda and engage in a mostly sane discussion, but only briefly, just until they remembered their job was to blast Twitter with gunfire and track down any Iranians who were online. The Basij guys were often held back by poor English, but some spoke it pretty well, and not all were stupid -- the Basij get many of the best places in Iran‘s universities. It was interesting to see too how many Westernisms crept into the Basij tweets, the “Hey Man,” “Dude,” the Hip Hop references, etc. This was done self-consciously, which differentiated the Basij from the Basij fans in the west. These imitators and trolls had done some research and could often ape the Basij for a while, but most outed themselves pretty quickly.

A favorite subject of the Basij was the Neda conspiracy, that Neda was killed by either Mossad or the BBC and the proof of this was that she was shot with a “foreign bullet,” (claims the regime). It was all just a plot to make the Basij look bad.

The Twitarmy (that is what it is called, really), fired back, “If Isr. or BBC wanted 2 kill Neda and frame Basij, wldnt they use Iranian bullet?”

The Republican Guard fellows on Twitter were a cut above, way above. The ones tweeting in English wrote in excellent but formal English switching back and forth between it and Farsi with ease. They liked to quote Persian and western literature and got a bit emotional when discussing Iranian history, the Khomeini revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, and Ahmadinejad. They seemed happy to argue reasonably about various issues, and sometimes raised good points about Gaza or the 2000 US election. Often, they cited literacy and education stats to show how much better Iranian women were doing when compared to most of the world (and when not being clubbed, tortured and killed by Basij), and to show that they weren’t completely against women’s rights. Still, they doggedly stuck by Ahmadinejad and Khamenei.

What gave them pause were appeals to their sense of patriotism and their belief they are working in a noble tradition, because they admire Cyrus the Great, the Constitutionalists, and Prime Minister Mossadegh -- all reformers in their day.

But what stopped them cold was the arrow to the heart. “Mr.R they R arresting torturing killing innocents best and brightest of Iran & World. U know its true. Great loss 4 all.”

I am not an expert on Iran, but someone who got interested for personal reasons 30-some years ago and has followed it, and particularly the reform movement, since. I know and have known a lot of Iranians inside and out, but I am an outsider with all that entails. So please correct me if I'm wrong.

And... this is not a scientific sampling of members of the Republican Guard, obviously (nor the Basij), and what we see in the West, especially online and in English, is usually just the tip of the iceberg. But there were a surprising number of sane Guard supporters on Twitter, and this is backed up by a lot of anecdotal evidence from Iranians, Greens, in the vein of, “My late uncle was in the Guard and he was a wonderful man.” It is just enough to give me hope that the Guard will ultimately turn away from the regime and do what’s best for Iran.

That’s my hippie side talking. My cynical, punk rock side says the only thing that will win the Guard is if their vast industrial empire and Swiss Bank Accounts are more secure under a new government than under the old, crumbling one, that they’ll fight to the last man against the reformists if their iron-clad grip on the economy is threatened.

Maybe it will take both approaches, some compromise on the economy as well as an appeal to the hearts and minds of the Guard to win them to the Greens. If it's true certain popular officers have been arrested, that means there will already be disgruntled rank and file ready to honor the arrested officers.

The Strange Battlefields of Twitter - Part 1

First off, I do love Twitter. As a supplement to the mainstream media, it's vital. But, if anything the last few weeks, it has shown it can't replace it. Citizen journalism in general made its bones recently, but it also became clear how important it is to have trained journalists vetting the material, checking the background, the sources, the assertions. Not that all members of the MSM do this well, but the best are very, very good at clearing the smoke away and getting at some sort of truth.

Still, Twitter proved to be a great listening post on the world -- not just twitter but all the "social media," bringing together a "Twitarmy" worldwide to help and support the Iranian protesters. The Iranians kept the world informed of their view of events, risking everything to bring out videos and photos. The foreigners found proxies to try to protect Tweeters in Iran, organized protests for them, Tweeted and RT'd links to photos, videos, MSM news stories. It was exuberant and invigorating watching this worldwide wave of revolution take on tyrants.

But things got dark very quickly.

People were beat and killed in the streets, hauled off to prison with no word to their families, and arrested in their homes, often after being tracked down online through the social media.

The regime was a little late to the online game but entered it with ferocity, and suddenly Twitter was crawling with spies, intelligence, counterintelligence, pro-regime trolls, ideological warriors, spammers, porn princesses, hackers and other troublemakers. What had been a cyberwar of ideas, information and support turned into a real battlefield in the larger Cyberwar, starring the same players and hangers-on as real world conflicts, and with real victims.

The intelligence people and their supporters blasted forth with disinformation and outright propaganda. Seconds after the Tehran government would announce something, the army of regime tweeters would be hard at work spreading the party line to the world, word for word in many cases, pausing at their long row of databanks at the Ministry of Interior only for Coca Colas and prayers. By now, the Iranian protesters were effectively silenced by the regime, many disappeared, many hiding, internet and phone blocked for the rest. Very little could be confirmed, and this made it easier for the regime to engage in a sickening crackdown away from the world's eyes, and for its counterintelligence to spread their toxins around the internet and create a fog to help hide it.

Very quickly, the obvious agents and spammers were marked as [#trollfail] and [#twitspam, #spam123] and blocked, but not before Green supporters outside Iran, fresh from watching videos of a bloody crackdown, had blasted back, so a lot of people were beating each other over the head with clubs online by trading vicious insults.

The second level was smarter. They set up accounts with green icons and information that made them sound like protesters or their supporters, and their initial tweets were anti-regime and pro-opposition. They gained followers and followed others and once they had their trust, they began to use them to retweet stories that questioned protesters and gave credit to the regime and/or which farmed IP addresses or spread viruses. It took a while longer to weed these people out and by then, a lot of damage had already been done.

At the top of this group they were much, much smarter and much, much scarier. This elite cybercorps emerged a little later, having lurked and studied the #iranelection thread first. That's when some of us met The Hacker and learned way too much about Cyberwar and Disinformation.

To be continued.