Iran says capable of jamming foes' communication systems

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 15:33 GMT

Source: reuters // Reuters

DUBAI, Jan 15 (Reuters) - Iran can disrupt enemy communication systems as part of its growing "electronic warfare" capabilities, a senior Iranian commander was quoted as saying on Tuesday.
Western analysts say Iran has launched increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks in a growing confrontation with foes, including the United States, Israel and Gulf Arabs, at a time of rising pressure on Tehran to curb its nuclear programme.
For its part, Iran has suffered a string of cyber attacks in the past year targeting industrial sites, an oil export terminal and oil platforms, Iranian officials have said. And a computer worm disrupted its nuclear activity in 2010.
The Islamic Republic has denied accusations that it hacked into U.S. banks last year, but has also devoted resources to building up its cyber defence capabilities.
On Tuesday, Brig. Gen. Ahmad Reza Pourdastan, Iran's ground forces commander, said that Iran was now capable of disrupting its enemies' communications.
"We have been equipped with electronic warfare systems in order not to remain just a defending force, and rather become able to jam the enemy's communication systems," said Brigadier General Ahmad Reza Pourdastan, Iran's ground forces commander, according to the Fars news agency.
"Communications are highly valuable in future and current wars and our armed forces have realised this completely and have prepared themselves proportionate to today's needs."
It was unclear whether Pourdastan was referring to military targets that Iran might consider a threat or civilian targets, such as what it considers to be subversive foreign media.
Satellite operators and broadcasters have repeatedly accused Iran of jamming their satellite signals. European satellite provider Eutelsat complained to international regulators last year that Iran had jammed signals from Persian-language channels broadcast by the BBC, Voice of America, and other operators.
Iran has tightened online security since its uranium enrichment centrifuges were hit by the Stuxnet computer worm, which Iranian authorities believe was planted by Israel and the United States in a bid to hobble its nuclear programme.
(Reporting by Yeganeh Torbati; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Written by : Farahmand Alipour

on : Monday, 7 Jan, 2013

Iran’s Broadcasting Feud

blog: SAFFRON

Tehran’s media machine is pulling out all the stops to broadcast beyond Iran’s borders, mainly succeeding in upsetting regional competitors and neglecting a domestic audience.

Former Speaker of the Iranian Parliament and reformist presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi (L) and Iranian hardline President and presidential candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (R) prepare for their live debate on state TV in Tehran in 2009.

Twenty years ago—when I was only seven years old—Iranian television broadcasting was limited to two channels. I remember well how one of the channels used to broadcast an Arabic program for an hour every Friday afternoon. Images of the Palestinian Intifada accompanied by mournful music make up a vivid part of my childhood memories.
Over recent years, the Islamic Republic of Iran has increasingly tried to expand its international broadcasting. That one-hour program twenty years ago has now been developed into a number of separate, costly television channels, including round-the-clock news networks, religious channels, film broadcasting, and so on.
Iran’s leaders have consistently accused foreign media of a so-called ‘cultural invasion’: a broadcasting campaign set to undermine the authority and legitimacy of Iran’s government. Amid the post-election protests in 2009, the government laid the blame on satellite television channels, accusing them of conspiring to spark protests in the streets of Iran. This view has not always been limited to the Islamic establishment; the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was convinced that the BBC’s Persian Service played a critical role in the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the ultimate fall of the Pahlavi regime.
The Iranian authorities have tried tirelessly to wean the Iranian public off their steady diet of foreign media. This has been achieved to a certain extent by passing preventive regulations and penalties on foreign media on the one hand, while launching costly international broadcasting for ‘safeguarding the truth of Islam and defending the ideals of the regime, Imam [Khomeini] and the Revolution.’ However, the expansion of Tehran’s international broadcasting empire has overall met with limited success and has ruffled feathers amongst Iran’s regional neighbors.
In November 1997, the leaders of the Islamic Republic decided to launch new TV channels to propagate their Islamic views and broadcast the self-professed ‘voice of the revolution’. These satellite TV channels started their work under the name Sahar, literally meaning “dawn”; programs were broadcast in Russian, Turkish, Urdu, Arabic, Azeri, French, Bosnian, and Kurdish. All of these continue operating and expanding their broadcasts, except those aired in Russian and Turkish.
The most prominent of these networks has been Sahar Arabic TV, the channel that caused an outspoken reaction from the French government after it broadcast a low-quality but controversial movie called The Blue Eyes of Zahra. The movie was severely censured by the French authorities for being anti-Semitic, accusing the channel of denying the Holocaust. After this incident, Sahar Arabic TV was replaced by Al-Kawthar channel, a Tehran-based, 24-hour Arabic-language television network. The channel aims to strengthen and expand Shi’a doctrine across the Middle East, and to bring Arab Shi’ites closer to the Shi’a government of Iran. According to the producers of the channel, most of their viewers are Iraqi and Lebanese Shi’ites.
Another controversial channel belonging to the Sahar Universal Network is Sahar Azeri TV, which has caused mounting tensions in relations between Iran and Azerbaijan. Both countries’ populations are predominantly Shi’ite; however, in the former country power lies unequivocally in the hands of clerics, while in the latter the leadership is fiercely opposed to religious governance. This fundamental difference between Iran and Azerbaijan has repeatedly elicited a negative reaction from Baku’s secular government, accusing Tehran of interfering with its internal affairs and pursuing their expansion of Islamism via their TV broadcasts in the Azeri language.
In December 2012, several senior employees of Sahar TV were arrested in Baku Airport. The reporters were detained on several charges, including drug trafficking. Ali Huseynov, the head of the socio-political department of the Azerbaijani Presidential Administration, visited Tehran and asked Iranian officials to halt Sahar TV broadcasts. On his return to Azerbaijan, local media quoted him saying, “I candidly and openly told Iranians that the Azerbaijan government is secular and following the path to modernity. Instead, the Iranian government is Islamist and ideological and is following its own way. You go your way and we go ours.”
Hoseynov also threatened to set up Shab TV, to be broadcast in Iran in retaliation for Sahar. Iran is evidently ignoring Azerbaijan’s threats. The Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) recently announced it will be increasing the working hours of Sahar Azeri TV from nine to twenty-four hours. The same plan is on the agenda for the French, Kurdish, and Urdu channels.
Iran’s broadcasting tensions with neighboring countries are not restricted to Sahar TV. Since the emergence of the Arab Spring, Iranian TV channels have come under attack from Gulf monarchies, especially in Bahrain. The Bahraini authorities have continually blamed Al-Alam TV for provoking unrest in the island kingdom.
Al-Alam is a Tehran-based, Arabic-language television network that began its work at the start of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. From its birth, it was evident that the main target audience was Iraq’s Shi’ite population. Although Al-Alam lags far behind Al-Jazeera and Saudi Arabia’s Al-Arabiya in terms of popularity and penetration, it has been influential among the Shi’ite populations of Iraq, Bahrain and Yemen.
The most significant confrontation between Iranian media and those of Persian Gulf neighboring countries has been over the crisis in Syria. Al-Alam sided with Damascus-based television channels and Hezbollah’s Al-Manar in defending Assad’s government—and in doing so, confronting almost every other major Arab TV channel.
The controversial Al-Mayadeen TV channel was born out of the media dispute between those Arabic-language channels supporting the Assad government and those opposing it. Several prominent reporters left Al-Jazeera and set up Al-Mayadeen to counteract the influence of what they perceived to be Al-Jazeera’s anti-Assad agenda. Many believe that Al-Mayadeen is sponsored by Iran, and its overall views are affiliated with Iran’s interests in the region.
In 2007, Iran launched its 24-hour English-language television channel Press TV, with the aim of breaking the monopoly of Western media. This was Iran’s first serious attempt at entering the arena of Western media. It has thus far failed in this mission, unable to breach the popularity of regional rival Al-Jazeera and certainly unable to compete with the quality of Western media. Ideological restrictions are mainly responsible for having stifled the channel’s development. Those that do watch Press TV are drawn from the Muslim minorities in Western countries such as the UK.
Tehran’s Spanish attempt has been equally futile. Hispan TV, the latest international 24-hour news channel launched by Iran, mainly targets South American countries. These countries have little in common with Iranian ideology beyond a general anti-American orientation. The channel appears to be totally out of touch with its target audience, mainly airing low-budget Iranian shows dubbed into Spanish and religious documentaries.
Regardless of the quality of Iran’s global media, Tehran’s vulnerability lies in its disproportionate investment in international broadcasting, neglecting the audience at home. The poor quality of local channels recruits the Iranian audience to Persian-language satellite channels. This trend is unlikely to slow down any time soon as international sanctions strangle the IRIB, now on the verge of bankruptcy. Iranian officials have made costly mistakes in prioritizing their target audience. Instead of focusing their efforts on the domestic audience, they are trying to win over viewers abroad. In dealing with the needs of their own citizens, Iranian officials have so far excelled in jamming satellite signals and prohibiting the ownership of satellite dishes, while monopolizing the running of any kind of TV or radio station.

Farahmand Alipour

Farahmand Alipour was the special correspondent to Mehdi Karroubi, one of the four presidential candidates in Iran’s 2009 elections. He is a graduate of Journalism with a major in Strategic Reporting from the School of Media, Tehran. Alipour now lives and studies in Italy, reading International Relations at Turin University.

More Posts

North Korea Steps Up Jamming

2012-12-19

Authorities seek to control the narrative on important political events in December.

AFP/NORTH KOREAN TV

North Korean TV shows Kim Jong Un (C) bowing during a memorial ceremony to mark the first death anniversary of his father Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang, Dec. 17, 2012.

North Korean authorities have intensified their jamming of foreign radio broadcasts since the beginning of December, blocking signals from South Korea and the United States almost every day during the last month of a year-long period of mourning for the country’s former leader Kim Jong Il, sources in China say.

North Korean jamming is usually sporadic due to electricity outages and the cost of special facilities, but has now been continuous since Dec. 1, said a source in the border city of Dandong, in China's Liaoning province.

“Listening to RFA [Radio Free Asia] and VOA [Voice of America] is almost impossible due to static, which has continued since the first of this month,” the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

A source in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture of China’s Jilin province confirmed that static had disrupted reception of RFA broadcasts, adding that broadcasts of South Korea’s KBS (Korean Broadcasting System) were also “getting harder to hear.”

North Korean jamming signals have also interfered with Chinese broadcasts, leaving state-run CRI (China Radio International) programs hard to listen to, said another source, who recently moved to China from Sinuiju, in North Korea.

“[CRI] broadcasting used to have better sound quality than anything coming from South Korea, but they are now hard to hear because North Korea’s National Security Department is sending jamming signals,” he said.

Mourning period

Sources tied the unusual period of unbroken jamming to the first anniversary of the death of former North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, and said that the jamming will likely continue until the end of December.

Hundreds of thousands of North Korean soldiers and civilians gathered in Pyongyang on Dec. 17 for a mass memorial to the late dictator presided over by his son and successor Kim Jong Un.

But North Korea’s mood of mourning was briefly broken last week by the launch of a long-range rocket that successfully placed a satellite in orbit.

North Korea’s authoritarian leaders typically fear that foreign broadcasts will undermine official narratives of important events, possibly leading to the current period of intensified jamming.

Speaking from Beijing, one observer of North Korean affairs said that if foreign radio is now difficult to listen to in the border regions, it may be “impossible” for a time to hear in North Korea itself.

North Korean authorities usually find it difficult to block all broadcasts, though, he said.

“More than 10 radio stations broadcast into the country from South Korea, and other broadcasts come from the United States and Japan,” the source said.

“They send signals on many different channels, so it is hard for the North Korean government to jam all radio broadcasting from outside the country.”

Reported by Joon Ho Kim for RFA’s Korean service. Translated by Ju Hyeon Park. Written in English by Richard Finney.

Copyright © 1998-2011 Radio Free Asia. All rights reserved.

North Korea Steps Up Jamming

Authorities seek to control the narrative on important political events in December.

2012-12-19

North Korean TV shows Kim Jong Un (C) bowing during a memorial ceremony to mark the first death anniversary of his father Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang, Dec. 17, 2012.

AFP/NORTH KOREAN TV

North Korean authorities have intensified their jamming of foreign radio broadcasts since the beginning of December, blocking signals from South Korea and the United States almost every day during the last month of a year-long period of mourning for the country’s former leader Kim Jong Il, sources in China say.

North Korean jamming is usually sporadic due to electricity outages and the cost of special facilities, but has now been continuous since Dec. 1, said a source in the border city of Dandong, in China's Liaoning province.

“Listening to RFA [Radio Free Asia] and VOA [Voice of America] is almost impossible due to static, which has continued since the first of this month,” the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

A source in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture of China’s Jilin province confirmed that static had disrupted reception of RFA broadcasts, adding that broadcasts of South Korea’s KBS (Korean Broadcasting System) were also “getting harder to hear.”

North Korean jamming signals have also interfered with Chinese broadcasts, leaving state-run CRI (China Radio International) programs hard to listen to, said another source, who recently moved to China from Sinuiju, in North Korea.

“[CRI] broadcasting used to have better sound quality than anything coming from South Korea, but they are now hard to hear because North Korea’s National Security Department is sending jamming signals,” he said.

Mourning period

Sources tied the unusual period of unbroken jamming to the first anniversary of the death of former North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, and said that the jamming will likely continue until the end of December.

Hundreds of thousands of North Korean soldiers and civilians gathered in Pyongyang on Dec. 17 for a mass memorial to the late dictator presided over by his son and successor Kim Jong Un.

But North Korea’s mood of mourning was briefly broken last week by the launch of a long-range rocket that successfully placed a satellite in orbit.

North Korea’s authoritarian leaders typically fear that foreign broadcasts will undermine official narratives of important events, possibly leading to the current period of intensified jamming.

Speaking from Beijing, one observer of North Korean affairs said that if foreign radio is now difficult to listen to in the border regions, it may be “impossible” for a time to hear in North Korea itself.

North Korean authorities usually find it difficult to block all broadcasts, though, he said.

“More than 10 radio stations broadcast into the country from South Korea, and other broadcasts come from the United States and Japan,” the source said.

“They send signals on many different channels, so it is hard for the North Korean government to jam all radio broadcasting from outside the country.”

Reported by Joon Ho Kim for RFA’s Korean service. Translated by Ju Hyeon Park. Written in English by Richard Finney.

Complaint filed in Paris about jamming of Radio Erena

Complaint filed in Paris about jamming of Radio Erena

Published on Thursday 8 November 2012.

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Reporters Without Borders filed a complaint with the public prosecutor in Paris on 6 November accusing persons unknown of acts of piracy against Radio Erena, an Eritrean exile radio station based in Paris which broadcasts by satellite to the Horn of Africa and which is backed by Reporters Without Borders.

A pirate transmission jammed the station’s signal on 14 August. Arabsat, the satellite operator that carried Radio Erena on its BADR-6 satellite, reacted by suspending the station because the jamming was disrupting other signals. It restored Radio Erena on 2 September only to suspend it again two days later, this time indefinitely, because the jamming had resumed. The station’s website was meanwhile the target of a cyber-attack on 28 August. More information about all these acts of piracy.

“Radio Erena’s programmes can no longer be heard by Eritreans living in Eritrea because its satellite broadcasting has been paralysed for more than three months,” Reporters Without Borders said.

“A judicial investigation has to be launched in France with the aim of establishing the precise origin of these acts of sabotage and prosecuting all those responsible, both the perpetrators and the instigators. We have done this because we want to shed light on all the circumstances surrounding this piracy, including where the jamming is coming from and who ordered it.

“Geolocation indicates that the pirate transmission jamming the signal originates from within Eritrea. The government must be doing this in order to gag an independent broadcaster it clearly finds very irritating. This should come as no surprise from the rulers of a country ranked last in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index for the past five years.

“But President Issaias Afeworki’s government will not get away with it. The complaint that we have filed points out that this piracy is completely illegal. Neither Radio Erena nor Reporters Without Borders have said their final word.”

The Radio Erena staff and its supporters have been able to repair the damage to the website while mirror sites have been created. But satellite broadcasting has not resumed so the station is not being received in Eritrea or anywhere else in the Horn of Africa.

For the time being Radio Erena is only broadcasting on the Internet, but only the Eritrean diaspora can access the web broadcasts because the Internet is not sufficiently developed in Eritrea.

As a Paris-based radio station, Radio Erena operates under a convention ratified by France’s Higher Council for Broadcasting (CSA). The complaint alleged “disruption of over-the-air broadcasting by an authorized service” and “disruption of an automated data processing system” under article L. 39-1 of the Post and Electronic Communications Code and articles 323-2 and 323-5 of the Criminal Code.

Radio Erena in the French and international press:

• “Radio Erena, fighting for the airwaves” (Libération)
• “Radio Erena, the free voice that Eritrea wants to gag” (Le Monde)
• “Radio Erena is the only independent radio station broadcasting in Eritrea, so it’s no surprise they don’t like it” (Interview with Biniam Simon by RFI’s Sonia Rolley

Jamming TV satellite broadcasts: Who is doing it, and how?

17 November 2012 Last updated at 00:16 GMT Help

There has been an increase in the number of complaints about the jamming of satellite TV signals around the world.
Broadcasters such as the BBC, Voice of America, France 24, Deutsche Welle and Al-Jazeera have all seen transmissions of their international programmes jammed recently.
The European Broadcasting Union has accused Iran and Syria of being behind the disruption and of attacking media freedom.
But authorities in Tehran and Damascus say that their broadcasts are also being interfered with.
But how does satellite jamming work? And what can be done about it?
Video produced by Thomas Hannen, with Mike Linstead from BBC Monitoring.

Satellite and internet jamming rises as broadcast industry seek to uphold UN Article 19

Date: 20.11.2012Last updated: 20.11.2012 at 18.40

Category: World Service

At a conference hosted by the BBC today, broadcasters and satellite operators condemned the sharp increase in jamming of broadcasts, and considered what steps can be taken to address the growing threat of intentional blocking of international broadcasts and internet services.

Article 19 of the universal declaration of human rights states that individuals should have ‘the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers’, but this right is not universally respected.
Satellite owner Eutelsat reports that jamming incidents doubled between 2010 and 2011. The number of incidents has increased three fold from 2011 to 2102. From January 2012 to November 2012, 340 incidents have been recorded. The Middle East-based operator Arabsat has recorded an increase in incidents of deliberate jamming of between 2011 and 2012 of nearly three times. Eutelsat estimates that between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of jamming in 2010 originated in Iran. In 2011, the source was mainly Iran with some interference traced to Syria and Bahrain. This year, most of the interference has been traced to Syria, but jamming also continues in Bahrain and Iran. The current regulatory process offers no direct sanction against countries that allow jamming to originate from within their borders.
Michel de Rosen, Eutelsat CEO says: "Today’s meeting adds more weight to the growing voice of condemnation of pollution of the airwaves and the need for decisive action to combat jamming."
Keynote speaker Jamie Saunders, Director International Cyber Policy at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, says: “The FCO is a strong supporter of freedom of expression, and we believe that the existing framework of international human rights law is as equally applicable in the digital environment as it is on the off-line world. Specifically, we believe that efforts to block and suppress broadcasting are wrong and are bound to fail over time: we need to understand what more can be done to address deliberate interference, and what part the Government should play.”
Peter Horrocks, Director of Global News at the BBC, says: “Satellite jamming is a growing scourge and a threat to the vital flow of free information. Throughout its history the BBC World Service has countered the efforts of jammers, whether on old shortwave or new satellites. We always called on the guile of the best editorial and technical minds to overcome jamming. Today we do that again to help tackle the menace of jamming."
On the internet, BBC Chinese has been blocked in China since its launch in 1999. BBC Persian has been blocked intermittently from 2006 onwards, and routinely since 2009. The BBC has run pilot services with Psiphon (a Canadian corporation that develops advanced censorship circumvention systems and technologies specifically designed to support users in countries where access to the internet is restricted) to deliver content into China, Iran, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan so that people who want to read BBC news are still able to do so. Over one million pages are viewed weekly through the BBC's Psiphon web proxies. In a study commissioned by BBC in Iran, 97 per cent of respondents believed that unmonitored and uncensored access to the Internet is a universal right.
Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Richard Ottaway MP says: “Gunboat diplomacy is history. Soft power is the future. We live in a globally networked world where human rights abuses cannot hide.”
The International Broadcasting without Barriers Conference brought over 100 delegates from a variety of satellite operators, broadcasters and stakeholders together to consider what political and technical steps that can be taken to make the distribution of media less vulnerable to interference. They face the challenge that jamming is becoming more frequent and there is currently no viable technical solution that can protect direct to home broadcast satellites.
Conference twitter hashtag: #BBCEndJamming