Facebook Still Deleting Accounts Tied to Iran and Russia

Social media giant Facebook on Wednesday removed two unconnected networks of accounts, pages, and groups “engaging in foreign or government interference,” one originating in Russia and the other one in Iran, both of which have alleged ties to intelligence services.

Calling the behavior “coordinated” and “inauthentic,” Facebook’s head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said both operations were acting on “behalf of a government or foreign actor.”

The Russian network primarily targeted Ukraine and its neighboring countries, while the Iranian operation focused mainly on the United States.

The people behind the groups and accounts “coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves, and that was the basis for our action,” the social-media company said.

In total, 78 accounts, 11 pages, 29 groups, and four Instagram accounts originating in Russia were removed.

Facebook’s investigation “found links to Russian and military intelligence services” within the Russian network.

The people behind the network would pose as citizen journalists and tried to contact policymakers, journalists, and other public figures in the region.

They would post content in Russian, English, and Ukrainian “about local and political news including public figures in Ukraine, Russian military engagement in Syria, alleged SBU (Ukrainian Security Service) leaks related to ethnic tensions in Crimea and the downing of the Malaysian airliner in Ukraine in 2014.”

Similarly, six Facebook and five Instagram accounts were removed originating in Iran that engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

Some tried contacting public figures and they shared posts on such topics as the U.S. elections, Christianity, U.S.-Iran relations, U.S. immigration policy, and criticism of U.S. policies in the Middle East.

About 60 people had followed one or more of the Iran-based Instagram accounts, the media company said.

*** What there is more….

Add in Vietnam and Myanmar.

Per Facebook in part:

Each of them created networks of accounts to mislead others about who they were and what they were doing. We have shared information about our findings with industry partners.

We’re constantly working to detect and stop this type of activity because we don’t want our services to be used to manipulate people. We’re taking down these Pages, Groups and accounts based on their behavior, not the content they posted. In each of these cases, the people behind this activity coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves, and that was the basis for our action.

We are making progress rooting out this abuse, but as we’ve said before, it’s an ongoing challenge. We’re committed to continually improving to stay ahead. That means building better technology, hiring more people and working closer with law enforcement, security experts and other companies.The individuals behind this activity posed as locals and used fake accounts — some of which had already been detected and disabled by our automated systems — to manage Groups and Pages, post and comment on various content. Some of these accounts represented themselves as citizen journalists and tried to contact policymakers, journalists and other public figures in the region.

Screenshot of content posted by some of these Pages Screenshot of content posted by some of these Pages  Read more here for more fake news sampling noted by Facebook.

The Detailed Iran Coverup of Ukraine Plane Struck by a Missile

(AP) — A leaked recording of an exchange between an Iranian air-traffic controller and an Iranian pilot purports to show that authorities immediately knew a missile had downed a Ukrainian jetliner after takeoff from Tehran, killing all 176 people aboard, despite days of denials by the Islamic Republic.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy acknowledged the recording’s authenticity in a report aired by a Ukrainian television channel on Sunday night.

In Tehran on Monday, the head of the Iranian investigation team, Hassan Rezaeifar, acknowledged the recording was legitimate and said that it was handed over to Ukrainian officials. A transcript of the recording, published by Ukrainian 1+1 TV channel, contains a conversation in Farsi between an air-traffic controller and a pilot reportedly flying a Fokker 100 jet for Iran’s Aseman Airlines from Iran’s southern city of Shiraz to Tehran.

“A series of lights like … yes, it is a missile, is there something?” the pilot calls out to the controller.

“No, how many miles? Where?” the controller asks.

The pilot responds that he saw the light by the Payam airport, near where the Guard’s Tor M-1 anti-aircraft missile was launched from. The controller says nothing has been reported to them, but the pilot remains insistent.

“It is the light of a missile,” the pilot says.

“Don’t you see anything anymore?” the controller asks.

“Dear engineer, it was an explosion. We saw a very big light there, I don’t really know what it was,” the pilot responds.

The controller then tries to contract the Ukrainian jetliner, but unsuccessfully.

Publicly accessible flight-tracking radar information suggests the Aseman Airlines aircraft, flight No. 3768, was close enough to Tehran to see the blast.

Iran’s Guard Accepts Responsibility for Plane Shootdown

In part from the NYT’s: Around midnight on Jan. 7, as Iran was preparing to launch a ballistic-missile attack on American military posts in Iraq, senior members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps deployed mobile antiaircraft defense units around a sensitive military area near Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Airport.

Iran was about to retaliate for the American drone strike that had killed Iran’s top military commander, Gen. Qassim Suleimani, in Baghdad five days earlier, and the military was bracing for an American counterstrike. The armed forces were on “at war” status, the highest alert level.

But in a tragic miscalculation, the government continued to allow civilian commercial flights to land and take off from the Tehran airport.Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the Guards’ Aerospace Force, said later that his units had asked officials in Tehran to close Iran’s airspace and ground all flights, to no avail.

Iranian officials feared that shutting down the airport would create mass panic that war with the United States was imminent, members of the Guards and other officials told The Times. They also hoped that the presence of passenger jets could act as a deterrent against an American attack on the airport or the nearby military base, effectively turning planeloads of unsuspecting travelers into human shields.
After Iran’s missile attack began, the central air defense command issued an alert that American warplanes had taken off from the United Arab Emirates and that cruise missiles were headed toward Iran.

The officer on the missile launcher near the airport heard the warnings but did not hear a later message that the cruise missile alert was a false alarm.

The warning about American warplanes may have also been wrong. United States military officials have said that no American planes were in or near Iranian airspace that night.

When the officer spotted the Ukrainian jet, he sought permission to fire. But he was unable to communicate with his commanders because the network had been disrupted or jammed, General Hajizadeh said later.The officer, who has not been publicly identified, fired two missiles, less than 30 seconds apart.

General Hajizadeh, who was in western Iran supervising the attack on the Americans, received a phone call with the news.

“I called the officials and told them this has happened and it’s highly possible we hit our own plane,” he said later in a televised statement.General Hajizadeh advised the generals not to tell the rank-and-file air defense units for fear that it could hamper their ability to react quickly if the United States did attack.

“It was for the benefit of our national security because then our air defense system would be compromised,” Mr. Hajizadeh said in an interview with Iranian news media this week. “The ranks would be suspicious of everything.”The military leaders created a secret investigative committee drawn from the Guards’ aerospace forces, from the army’s air defense, and from intelligence and cyberexperts. The committee and the officers involved in the shooting were sequestered and ordered not to speak to anyone.

The committee examined data from the airport, the flight path, radar networks, and alerts and messages from the missile operator and central command. Witnesses — the officer who had pulled the trigger, his supervisors and everyone involved — were interrogated for hours.

The group also investigated the possibility that the United States or Israel may have hacked Iran’s defense system or jammed the airwaves.Senior commanders discussed keeping the shooting secret until the plane’s black boxes — the flight data and cockpit voice recorders — were examined and formal aviation investigations completed, according to members of the Guards, diplomats and officials with knowledge of the deliberations. That process could take months, they argued, and it would buy time to manage the domestic and international fallout that would ensue when the truth came out.

The government had violently crushed an anti-government uprising in November. But the American killing of General Suleimani, followed by the strikes against the United States, had turned public opinion around. Iranians were galvanized in a moment of national unity.

The authorities feared that admitting to shooting down the passenger plane would undercut that momentum and prompt a new wave of anti-government protests.

“They advocated covering it up because they thought the country couldn’t handle more crisis,” said a ranking member of the Guards who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “At the end, safeguarding the Islamic Republic is our ultimate goal, at any cost.”

That evening, the spokesman for the Joint Armed Forces, Brig. Gen. Abolfazl Shekarchi, told Iranian news media that suggestions that missiles struck the plane were “an absolute lie.”

Why did Iran lie about shooting down the Ukrainian plane ...  source, Aljizeera
On Thursday, as Ukrainian investigators began to arrive in Tehran, Western officials were saying publicly that they had evidence that Iran had accidentally shot down the plane.A chorus of senior Iranian officials — from the director of civil aviation to the chief government spokesman — issued statement after statement rejecting the allegations, their claims amplified on state media.

The suggestion that Iran would shoot down a passenger plane was a “Western plot,” they said, “psychological warfare” aimed at weakening Iran just as it had exercised its military muscle against the United States.

But in private, government officials were alarmed and questioning whether there was any truth to the Western claims. Mr. Rouhani, a seasoned military strategist himself, and his foreign minister, Javad Zarif, deflected phone calls from world leaders and foreign ministers seeking answers. Ignorant of what their own military had done, they had none to give.

Domestically, public pressure was building for the government to address the allegations.

Among the plane’s passengers were some of Iran’s best and brightest. They included prominent scientists and physicians, dozens of Iran’s top young scholars and graduates of elite universities, and six gold and silver medal winners of international physics and math Olympiads.

There were two newlywed couples who had traveled from Canada to Tehran for their weddings just days earlier. There were families and young children.

Their relatives demanded answers. Iranian social media began to explode with emotional commentary, some accusing Iran of murdering its own citizens and others calling such allegations treason.

Persian-language satellite channels operating from abroad, the main source of news for most Iranians, broadcast blanket coverage of the crash, including reports from Western governments that Iran had shot down the plane.

Mr. Rouhani tried several times to call military commanders, officials said, but they did not return his calls. Members of his government called their contacts in the military and were told the allegations were false. Iran’s civil aviation agency called military officials with similar results.

“Thursday was frantic,” Ali Rabiei, the government spokesman, said later in a news conference. “The government made back-to-back phone calls and contacted the armed forces asking what happened, and the answer to all the questions was that no missile had been fired.”
On Friday morning, Mr. Rabiei issued a statement saying the allegation that Iran had shot down the plane was “a big lie.”

Several hours later, the nation’s top military commanders called a private meeting and told Mr. Rouhani the truth.

Mr. Rouhani was livid, according to officials close to him. He demanded that Iran immediately announce that it had made a tragic mistake and accept the consequences.

The military officials pushed back, arguing that the fallout could destabilize the country.

Mr. Rouhani threatened to resign.

Canada, which had the most foreign citizens on board the plane, and the United States, which as Boeing’s home country was invited to investigate the crash, would eventually reveal their evidence, Mr. Rouhani said. The damage to Iran’s reputation and the public trust in the government would create an enormous crisis at a time when Iran could not bear more pressure.

As the standoff escalated, a member of Ayatollah Khamenei’s inner circle who was in the meeting informed the supreme leader. The ayatollah sent a message back to the group, ordering the government to prepare a public statement acknowledging what had happened.

Mr. Rouhani briefed a few senior members of his government. They were rattled.Mr. Abdi said the government’s actions had gone “far beyond” just a lie.

“There was a systematic cover-up at the highest levels that makes it impossible to get out of this crisis,” he said.

Iran’s National Security Council held an emergency meeting and drafted two statements, the first to be issued by the Joint Armed Forces followed by a second one from Mr. Rouhani.

As they debated the wording, some suggested claiming that the United States or Israel may have contributed to the accident by jamming Iran’s radars or hacking its communications networks.

But the military commanders opposed it. General Hajizadeh said the shame of human error paled compared with admitting his air defense system was vulnerable to hacking by the enemy.

Iran’s Civil Aviation Agency later said that it had found no evidence of jamming or hacking.

Iran Refuses to Release Black Box of Downed Ukraine Plane

(Reuters) – Ukraine will press Iran to hand over the black boxes from the crash of a Ukrainian passenger plane at a meeting with a visiting Iranian delegation on Monday, Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko told reporters.

Ukraine would convey the message to visiting Minister of Roads and Urban Development Mohammad Eslami, that returning the black boxes would show that Iran wanted an unbiased investigation of the crash, Prystaiko said.

“His main task is to apologize and acknowledge what happened. We hope that we can go a little further than just political discussions and discuss practical problems. Among them in particular is the return of the black boxes,” Prystaiko said.

Iran has appeared to reverse course after its earlier decision to send abroad the black box flight recorders from the Ukrainian jetliner shot down earlier this month, saying Tehran would first review the audiotapes.

Hassan Rezaeifar, who is leading the investigation into the tragedy, was cited by the state-run IRNA news agency on Sunday as saying: “The flight recorders from the Ukrainian Boeing are in Iranian hands and we have no plans to send them out.”

“We are trying to read the black boxes here in Iran. Otherwise, our options are Ukraine and France, but no decision has been taken so far to send them to another country,” he added.

A day earlier, another Iranian news agency, semi-official Tasnim, cited Rezaeifar as saying that it was not possible to interpret the recordings in Iran, and that the black boxes would be sent to Kyiv, where French, American and Canadian experts would help analyze them.

Image result for ukraine plane  source

***Gotta wonder if the Iranians protesting against the regime know this.

A slew of influential Iranian artists, television personalities and sports stars have publicly broken with Tehran after the government denied for days that it shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane this month.

“Apologies for lying to you for 13 years,” Gelareh Jabbari, a host on the state-run Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting TV network, wrote last Monday in an Instagram post. The post has since been deleted, but it was seen by

“It was very hard for me to believe our people have been killed, forgive me for believing this late,” Jabbari, the anchor of the lifestyle show “Good Morning Iran,” added in an apparent reference to the 82 Iranians who were among the 176 passengers and crew members killed.

Iran initially denied that a missile had struck the plane on Jan. 8 shortly after it took off from Tehran, the capital, only to reverse course and admit that it had shot the plane down by mistake.

Many students and middle-class Iranians took to the streets in protest. In Tehran, some students refused to trample on paintings of U.S. and Israeli flags in an apparent rejection of the government’s attempts to deflect blame.

Those in more influential positions used their sway to send a message.

The government’s handling of the incident has served only to “confirm an existing sense of moral bankruptcy that the Islamic Republic is accused of,” said Afshin Shahi, an associate professor of Middle East politics at Bradford University in England.

“The Islamic Republic is facing the worst legitimacy crisis in its 40-year history, and the pressures are mounting from every angle,” he said, adding that state repression, censorship and the country’s economic woes in the last three years had created a profound sense of disillusionment. “The gap between the state and society has widened to an extreme extent.”

In a sign of how seriously Iranian authorities are taking the backlash, the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, delivered a sermon at last week’s Friday prayers praising recent strikes on Iraqi bases hosting U.S. forces.

Iran is Leading Protests in Iraq

In part: Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, led Friday prayers in Tehran for the first time in eight years and delivered a sermon in which he excoriated U.S. leaders as “clowns” and accused European countries of negotiating in bad faith over the foundering nuclear deal.

Khamenei also indicated that Iran might retaliate further for the U.S. drone strike that killed top Iranian commander Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, saying a missile attack on U.S. assets in Iraq had been a blow to America’s dignity and its status as a superpower.

The address comes at a delicate time for the ayatollah. Iran’s leaders are locked in a contentious dispute with the U.S., and they’re facing public criticism at home after admitting that Iran accidentally shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet, killing 176 people, most of whom were Iranian.

Taking aim at recent statements by President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in which they pledged their support for Iran’s regular citizens, Khamenei said, “These American clowns lie in utter viciousness that they stand with the Iranian people.”

Khamenei added, “They lie. If you are standing by the Iranian [people], it is only to stab them in the heart with your venomous daggers.”

Despite the ayatollah’s colorful language, as NPR’s Jane Arraf reports, his overall speech was “perhaps a little bit less fiery than many would have expected.” While the Iranian leader did criticize the U.S. and its allies, she says, “he did not make specific threats.”

In his sermon, the ayatollah also addressed a recent maneuver that could lead to the reinstatement of U.N. sanctions on Iran: the complaint filed Tuesday by foreign ministers of the U.K., France and Germany. Their formal accusation that Iran violated its commitments under the 2015 nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, triggers a dispute resolution process — and if that fails, U.N. sanctions on Iran, including an arms embargo, will likely return.

“The threat of the French and German governments and the vicious British government to send Iran’s case to the Security Council proved once again that they are the footmen of the U.S.,” Khamenei said.

So, what is planned and what should our forces and civilian government employees be prepared for?

*** ISW: Iran is preparing to increase political pressure against the U.S. presence in Iraq by generating significant anti-American protests on Friday, January 24 with support from nationalist Shi’a cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Iran seeks to integrate Sadr into a new “resistance front” that aligns Iranian proxy groups with Sadr’s popular influence to expel U.S. forces. Sadr has thus far supported this effort but retains freedom of action and will continue to support popular protests against the Iraqi state, which Iran views as a severe threat.

 

Sadr’s new resistance front (as he enhances relations with Tehran) includes a million man march against US forces in Iraq. Further, he condemned the Iraqi Parliament resolution as a weak response calling for the cancellation of the security agreement with the United States. Last Sadr held meetings with the PMF/Hashd al Shaabi and with Kataib Hezbollah, Asaib Ahl al Haq, led by terrorist Qais al Khazali and Hezbollah al Naujabas Brigades in Qom where he listed a number of demands of the Baghdad government and calls to action.

Image result for Muqtada al-Sadr Coordination, mobilization and locations are still being determined. It could happen in just Baghdad or throughout the country with Iran Shiite support and funding.

Daily Gas Pump Prices are Based on the Strait of Hormuz

Experts said Iranian officials are trying to demonstrate to the U.S. and its allies that the Islamic Republic is able to push back and gain leverage against the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” policy, which intensified after President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the landmark nuclear deal in May 2018 and reimposed crippling sanctions, making it difficult for Iran to export oil, the foundation of the country’s economy.

China, Russia and leading Western European countries have sought ways around the U.S. sanctions, but it has been difficult to bypass them.

“The message that Iran is sending is that it is capable of making international waters unsafe not just for the U.S., but for international trade,” said Reza H. Akbari, a program manager and Iran expert at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.

These are the reasons for oil tanker seizures and attacks by Iranian limpet mines.

Tensions between the West and Iran bubbled to a historic height in recent days after the assassination of top Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani and Tehran bombed two Iraqi bases that housed US troops.

They have sparked fears of wider US-Iran attacks in the greater region, which could take place in and around the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow body of water linking the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman, which feeds into Arabian Sea and the rest of the world.

strait of hormuz jan 2020

A satellite image of marine traffic passing through the Strait of Hormuz as on January 9, 2020.MarineTraffic.com

While Iran’s leaders claim to have “concluded” their revenge for Soleimani’s death — and President Donald Trump appears to believe them — many regional experts and diplomatic sources say Iran could unleash other modes of attack, which include unleashing allied militias to disrupt the Middle East.

One strategy could include Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, which would stop oil tanker traffic, disrupt global oil supply, and send prices shooting up.

Here’s what you need to know about this valuable strait.

Some 21 million barrels of crude and refined oil pass through the strait every day, the EIA said, citing 2018 statistics.

That’s about one-third of the world’s sea-traded oil, or $1.2 billion worth of oil a day, at current oil prices. The majority of Saudi Arabia’s crude exports pass through the Strait of Hormuz, meaning much of the oil-dependent economy’s wealth is situated there. Saudi state-backed oil tanker Bahri temporarily suspended its shipments through the strait after Iran’s missile strikes in Iran, the Financial Times reported.

Last June Iran shot down a US drone flying near the strait, and a month later a US warship — USS Boxer — also shot down an Iranian drone in the same area.

Shortly after Iran’s drone attack, President Donald Trump questioned the US’ presence in the region, and called on China, Japan, and other countries to protect their own ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump noted that much of China and Japan’s oil flow through the strait, and added: “So why are we protecting the shipping lanes for other countries (many years) for zero compensation.”

While a large proportion — 76% — of oil flowing through the chokepoint does end up in Asian countries, the US still imports more than 30 million barrels of oil a month from countries in the Middle East, Business Insider has reported, citing the EIA.

That’s about $1.7 billion worth of oil, and 10% of the US’s total oil imports per month.

Iranian leaders, who have also vowed retaliation for the death of Soleimani, have threatened to close down the strait multiple times in the past.

If Iran followed through with these threats, it would likely cause huge disruption to the global oil trade. As the strait is so narrow, any sort of interference in tanker traffic could decrease the world’s oil supply, and send prices shooting up.

Global oil prices have proven vulnerable to tensions between Iran and the West before. After the Trump administration said in April 2019 it would stop providing sanctions waivers to countries who purchase Iranian oil, prices rose to their highest level since November the year before, Axios reported.

How likely is Iran to shut down the strait?

Iran is more likely to disrupt traffic in the Strait of Hormuz than to engage in an all-out conventional war with the US, which is much stronger militarily.

But doing so comes with high costs to Iran.

To close down the entire strait, Iran would have to place at least 1,000 mines with submarines and surface craft along the chokepoint, security researcher Caitlin Talmadge posited in a 2009 MIT study. Such an effort could take weeks, the study added. (taken in part from here)