In case you’ve been asleep, what appears to be an increasingly mentally unstable Donald Trump has further destabilized the middle east with a war nobody asked for or wanted. Most U.S. media coverage of Trump’s disastrous Iran war hasn’t been great, but they’ve still occasionally managed to communicate the pointlessness of the endeavor to the electorate (which speaks more of the unpopularity of the war than their reporting chops).
Some news outlets, like CNN, simply reported directly on what Iran had claimed. This, as you might expect, upset Donald Trump and his top FCC censor Brendan Carr, who are now threatening an “investigation” of CNN for simply repeating what was publicly stated:
The President, White House, and FCC's Brendan Carr are calling for action — and implying a criminal investigation — against CNN for… accurately reporting what Iran's state media shared as a statement from Iran's Supreme National Security Council.
Trump later would issue another statement over at his right wing propaganda website, calling for criminal action against CNN (and CNN only), while making up a whole bunch of nonsense (he may or may not believe is actually true):
Trump’s sensitivity here suggests they’re well aware that a massive, superior military has been getting dog-walked by Iranians because Trump and his advisors were too stupid to understand modern, cheap drone warfare and how shipping in the Straight of Hormuz actually worked. The shipping logjam is driving up gas prices and making life difficult for Republicans ahead of the midterms.
There is, of course, absolutely zero basis for any meaningful criminal action against CNN here of any kind that wouldn’t be laughed out of court on free speech grounds. As we’ve seen with corporate media that doesn’t mean they won’t still capitulate embarrassingly, but so far CNN is standing its ground. As it should, since again, all it did was report on an Iranian statement in a very basic way alongside dozens of other news outlets.
At which point, Trump will move on to threatening any remaining U.S. corporate media outlets that haven’t either embarrassingly capitulated or been purchased by a right wing billionaire. This is, as I keep repeating, an exact copy of Victor Orban’s autocratic media policy in Hungary, which involves having party-loyal oligarchs buy up all corporate media outlets and pummel the public with propaganda while the government strangles what’s left of real, independent reporting just out of frame.
Images from the missile strike in southern Iran were more horrifying than any of the case studies Air Force combat veteran Wes J. Bryant had pored over in his mission to overhaul how the U.S. military safeguards civilian life.
Parents wept over their children’s bodies. Crushed desks and blood-stained backpacks poked through the rubble. The death toll from the attack on an elementary school in Minab climbed past 165, most of them under age 12, with nearly 100 others wounded, according to Iranian health officials. Photos of small coffins and rows of fresh graves went viral, a devastating emblem of Day 1 in the open-ended U.S.-Israeli war in Iran.
Bryant, a former special operations targeting specialist, said he couldn’t help but think of what-ifs as he monitored fallout from the Feb. 28 attack.
Just over a year ago, he had been a senior adviser in an ambitious new Defense Department program aimed at reducing civilian harm during operations. Finally, Bryant said, the military was getting serious about reforms. He worked out of a newly opened Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, where his supervisor was a veteran strike-team targeter who had served as a United Nations war crimes investigator.
Today, that momentum is gone. Bryant was forced out of government in cuts last spring. The civilian protection mission was dissolved as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made “lethality” a top priority. And the world has witnessed a tragedy in Minab that, if U.S. responsibility is confirmed, would be the most civilians killed by the military in a single attack in decades.
Dismantling the fledgling harm-reduction effort, defense analysts say, is among several ways the Trump administration has reorganized national security around two principles: more aggression, less accountability.
Trump and his aides lowered the authorization level for lethal force, broadened target categories, inflated threat assessments and fired inspectors general, according to more than a dozen current and former national security personnel. Nearly all spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
“We’re departing from the rules and norms that we’ve tried to establish as a global community since at least World War II,” Bryant said. “There’s zero accountability.”
Citing open-source intelligence and government officials, several news outlets have concluded that the strike in Minab most likely was carried out by the United States. President Donald Trump, without providing evidence, told reporters March 7 that it was “done by Iran.” Hegseth, standing next to the president aboard Air Force One, said the matter was under investigation.
The next day, the open-source research outfit Bellingcat said it had authenticated a video showing a Tomahawk missile strike next to the school in Minab. Iranian state media later showed fragments of a U.S.-made Tomahawk, as identified by Bellingcat and others, at the site. The United States is the only party to the conflict known to possess Tomahawks. U.N. human rights experts have called for an investigation into whether the attack violated international law.
The Department of Defense and White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Since the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, successive U.S. administrations have faced controversies over civilian deaths. Defense officials eager to shed the legacy of the “forever wars” have periodically called for better protections for civilians, but there was no standardized framework until 2022, when Biden-era leaders adopted a strategy rooted in work that had begun under the first Trump presidency.
Formalized in a 2022 action plan and in a Defense Department instruction, the initiatives are known collectively as Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, a clunky name often shortened to CHMR and pronounced “chimmer.” Around 200 personnel were assigned to the mission, including roughly 30 at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, a coordination hub near the Pentagon.
The CHMR strategy calls for more in-depth planning before an attack, such as real-time mapping of the civilian presence in an area and in-depth analysis of the risks. After an operation, reports of harm to noncombatants would prompt an assessment or investigation to figure out what went wrong and then incorporate those lessons into training.
By the time Trump returned to power, harm-mitigation teams were embedded with regional commands and special operations leadership. During Senate confirmation hearings, several Trump nominees for top defense posts voiced support for the mission. Once in office, however, they stood by as the program was gutted, current and former national security officials said.
Around 90% of the CHMR mission is gone, former personnel said, with no more than a single adviser now at most commands. At Central Command, where a 10-person team was cut to one, “a handful” of the eliminated positions were backfilled to help with the Iran campaign. Defense officials can’t formally close the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence without congressional approval, but Bryant and others say it now exists mostly on paper.
“It has no mission or mandate or budget,” Bryant said.
Spike in Strikes
Global conflict monitors have since recorded a dramatic increase in deadly U.S. military operations. Even before the Iran campaign, the number of strikes worldwide since Trump returned to office had surpassed the total from all four years of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Had the Defense Department’s harm-reduction mission continued apace, current and former officials say, the policies almost certainly would’ve reduced the number of noncombatants harmed over the past year.
Beyond the moral considerations, they added, civilian casualties fuel militant recruiting and hinder intelligence-gathering. Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, explains the risk in an equation he calls “insurgent math”: For every innocent killed, at least 10 new enemies are created.
U.S.-Israeli strikes have already killed more than 1,200 civilians in Iran, including nearly 200 children, according to Human Rights Activists News Agency, a U.S.-based group that verifies casualties through a network in Iran. The group says hundreds more deaths are under review, a difficult process given Iran’s internet blackout and dangerous conditions.
Defense analysts say the civilian toll of the Iran campaign, on top of dozens of recent noncombatant casualties in Yemen and Somalia, reopens dark chapters from the “war on terror” that had prompted reforms in the first place.
“It’s a recipe for disaster,” a senior counterterrorism official who left the government a few months ago said of the Trump administration’s yearlong bombing spree. “It’s ‘Groundhog Day’ — every day we’re just killing people and making more enemies.”
In 2015, twodozen patients and 14 staff members were killed when a heavily armed U.S. gunship fired for over an hour on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in northern Afghanistan, a disaster that has become a cautionary tale for military planners.
“Our patients burned in their beds, our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building,” the international aid group said in a report about the destruction of its trauma center in Kunduz.
A U.S. military investigation found that multiple human and systems errors had resulted in the strike team mistaking the building for a Taliban target. The Obama administration apologized and offered payouts of $6,000 to families of the dead.
Human rights advocates had hoped the Kunduz debacle would force the U.S. military into taking concrete steps to protect civilians during U.S. combat operations. Within a couple years, however, the issue came roaring back with high civilian casualties in U.S.-led efforts to dislodge Islamic State extremists from strongholds in Syria and Iraq.
In a single week in March 2017, U.S. operations resulted in three incidents of mass civilian casualties: A drone attack on a mosque in Syria killed around 50; a strike in another part of Syria killed 40 in a school filled with displaced families; and bombing in the Iraqi city of Mosul led to a building collapse that killed more than 100 people taking shelter inside.
In heavy U.S. fighting to break Islamic State control over the Syrian city of Raqqa, “military leaders too often lacked a complete picture of conditions on the ground; too often waved off reports of civilian casualties; and too rarely learned any lessons from strikes gone wrong,” according to an analysis by the Pentagon-adjacent Rand Corp. think tank.
Released in 2019, the review Mattis launched was seen by some advocacy groups as narrow in scope but still a step in the right direction. Yet the issue soon dropped from national discourse, overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic and landmark racial justice protests.
During the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in August 2021, a missile strike in Kabul killed an aid worker and nine of his relatives, including seven children. Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin apologized and said the department would “endeavor to learn from this horrible mistake.”
That incident, along with a New York Times investigative series into deaths from U.S. airstrikes, spurred the adoption of the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response action plan in 2022. When they established the new Civilian Protection Center of Excellence the next year, defense officials tapped Michael McNerney — the lead author of the blunt RAND report — to be its director.
“The strike against the aid worker and his family in Kabul pushed Austin to say, ‘Do it right now,’” Bryant said.
The first harm-mitigation teams were assigned to leaders in charge of some of the military’s most sensitive counterterrorism and intelligence-gathering operations: Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida; the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; and Africa Command in Stuttgart, Germany.
A former CHMR adviser who joined in 2024 after a career in international conflict work said he was reassured to find a serious campaign with a $7 million budget and deep expertise. The adviser spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Only a few years before, he recalled, he’d had to plead with the Pentagon to pay attention. “It was like a back-of-the-envelope thing — the cost of a Hellfire missile and the cost of hiring people to work on this.”
Bryant became the de facto liaison between the harm-mitigation team and special operations commanders. In December, he described the experience in detail in a private briefing for aides of Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who had sought information on civilian casualty protocols involvingboat strikes in the Caribbean Sea.
Bryant’s notes from the briefing, reviewed by ProPublica, describe an embrace of the CHMR mission by Adm. Frank Bradley, who at the time was head of the Joint Special Operations Command. In October, Bradley was promoted to lead Special Operations Command.
At the end of 2024 and into early 2025, Bryant worked closely with the commander’s staff. The notes describe Bradley as “incredibly supportive” of the three-person CHMR team embedded in his command.
Bradley, Bryant wrote, directed “comprehensive lookbacks” on civilian casualties in errant strikes and used the findings to mandate changes. He also introduced training on how to integrate harm prevention and international law into operations against high-value targets. “We viewed Bradley as a model,” Bryant said.
Still, the military remained slow to offer compensation to victims and some of the new policies were difficult to independently monitor, according to a report by the Stimson Center, a foreign policy think tank. The CHMR program also faced opposition from critics who say civilian protections are already baked into laws of war and targeting protocols; the argument is that extra oversight “could have a chilling effect” on commanders’ abilities to quickly tailor operations.
To keep reforms on track, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would have to break through a culture of denial among leaders who pride themselves on precision and moral authority.
“The initial gut response of all commands,” Bryant said, “is: ‘No, we didn’t kill civilians.’”
Reforms Unraveled
As the Trump administration returned to the White House pledging deep cuts across the federal government, military and political leaders scrambled to preserve the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response framework.
At first, CHMR advisers were heartened by Senate confirmation hearings where Trump’s nominees for senior defense posts affirmed support for civilian protections.
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote during his confirmation that commanders “see positive impacts from the program.” Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy, wrote that it’s in the national interest to “seek to reduce civilian harm to the degree possible.”
When questioned about cuts to the CHMR mission at a hearing last summer, U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, head of Central Command, said he was committed to integrating the ideas as “part of our culture.”
Despite the top-level support, current and former officials say, the CHMR mission didn’t stand a chance under Hegseth’s signature lethality doctrine.
The former Fox News personality, who served as an Army National Guard infantry officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, disdains rules of engagement and other guardrails as constraining to the “warrior ethos.” He has defended U.S. troops accused of war crimes, including a Navy SEAL charged with stabbing an imprisoned teenage militant to death and then posing for a photo with the corpse.
A month after taking charge, Hegseth fired the military’s top judge advocate generals, known as JAGs, who provide guidance to keep operations in line with U.S. or international law. Hegseth has described the attorneys as “roadblocks” and used the term “jagoff.”
At the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, the staff tried in vain to save the program. At one point, Bryant said, he even floated the idea of renaming it the “Center for Precision Warfare” to put the mission in terms Hegseth wouldn’t consider “woke.”
By late February 2025, the CHMR mission was imploding, say current and former defense personnel.
Shortly before his job was eliminated, Bryant openly spoke out against the cuts in The Washington Post and Boston Globe, which he said landed him in deep trouble at the Pentagon. He was placed on leave in March, his security clearance at risk of revocation.
Bryant formally resigned in September and has since become a vocal critic of the administration’s defense policies. In columns and on TV, he warns that Hegseth’s cavalier attitude toward the rule of law and civilian protections is corroding military professionalism.
Bryant said it was hard to watch Bradley, the special operations commander and enthusiastic adopter of CHMR, defending a controversial “double-tap” on an alleged drug boat in which survivors of a first strike were killed in a follow-up hit. Legal experts have said such strikes could violate laws of warfare. Bradley did not respond to a request for comment.
“Everything else starts slipping when you have this culture of higher tolerance for civilian casualties,” Bryant said.
Concerns were renewed in early 2025 with the Trump administration’s revived counterterrorism campaign against Islamist militants regrouping in parts of Africa and the Middle East.
Last April, a U.S. air strike hit a migrant detention center in northwestern Yemen, killing at least 61 African migrants and injuring dozens of others in what Amnesty International says “qualifies as an indiscriminate attack and should be investigated as a war crime.”
Operations in Somalia also have become more lethal. In 2024, Biden’s last year in office, conflict monitors recorded 21 strikes in Somalia, with a combined death toll of 189. In year one of Trump’s second term, the U.S. carried out at least 125 strikes, with reported fatalities as high as 359, according to the New America think tank, which monitors counterterrorism operations.
“It is a strategy focused primarily on killing people,” said Alexander Palmer, a terrorism researcher at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Last September, the U.S. military announced an attack in northeastern Somalia targeting a weapons dealer for the Islamist militia Al-Shabaab, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. On the ground, however, villagers said the missile strike incinerated Omar Abdullahi, a respected elder nicknamed “Omar Peacemaker” for his role as a clan mediator.
After the death, the U.S. military released no details, citing operational security.
“The U.S. killed an innocent man without proof or remorse,” Abdullahi’s brother, Ali, told Somali news outlets. “He preached peace, not war. Now his blood stains our soil.”
In Iran, former personnel say, the CHMR mission could have made a difference.
Under the scrapped harm-prevention framework, they said, plans for civilian protection would’ve begun months ago, when orders to draw up a potential Iran campaign likely came down from the White House and Pentagon.
CHMR personnel across commands would immediately begin a detailed mapping of what planners call “the civilian environment,” in this case a picture of the infrastructure and movements of ordinary Iranians. They would also check and update the “no-strike list,” which names civilian targets such as schools and hospitals that are strictly off-limits.
One key question is whether the school was on the no-strike list. It sits a few yards from a naval base for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The building was formerly part of the base, though it has been marked on maps as a school since at least 2013, according to visual forensics investigations.
“Whoever ‘hits the button’ on a Tomahawk — they’re part of a system,” the former adviser said. “What you want is for that person to feel really confident that when they hit that button, they’re not going to hit schoolchildren.”
If the guardrails failed and the Defense Department faced a disaster like the school strike, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would’ve jumped in to help with transparent public statements and an immediate inquiry.
Instead, he called the Trump administration’s response to the attack “shameful.”
“It’s back to where we were years ago,” Bryant said. If confirmed, “this will go down as one of the most egregious failures in targeting and civilian harm-mitigation in modern U.S. history.”
We should all know by now that this iteration of the Trump administration absolutely loves using pop culture imagery, including that of video games, to help message its horrible policies. Want to gloat about ICE terrorizing American cities and generally pissing everyone off when they’re not too busy perforating innocents? Let’s use images from Pokémon and Halo! Want to celebrate the destruction of American health thanks to RFK Jr. being in charge of it? Time to whip together a Stardew Valleymeme!
It’s gross, of course. Wrapping these pop culture images around fascism, particularly where real deaths have been a result, is nauseating.
But if you want to make this absolutely as disgusting as possible, you need only to use video game footage to gloat about the body count America is racking up in its war/non-war with Iran.
On March 4, the official White House Twitter account posted a roughly one-minute-long video featuring numerous clips of real military strikes against different Iranian locations and targets. At the very start of the video is a clip from 2023’s Modern Warfare III that shows a player activating an MGB killstreak. This is a hidden killstreak for players who get 30 kills without dying. Once called, the bomb ends the match. The official video was posted with the caption: “Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue.”
This is disgusting. Using video game footage to gloat about the Iranian body count is simply sick. Set aside what you think about this war. Set aside whether you think this administration has any fucking clue what it is doing and what will come next once it’s done dropping its bombs. Set aside the open question of what our goals actually are here, whether we’re going to see American troops on the ground in Iran, or whether this will end up as another American quagmire in the Middle East. None of that is the point here.
This isn’t a fucking game. It’s war, no matter how hard the president and the Republicans in Congress want to pretend otherwise so that they don’t have to do their damned jobs. War is a very serious matter, a sentence that never should need to be written in the first place. Eschewing that level of seriousness by treating this like it’s some kind of a video game and we’re all just trying to earn trophies and badges for our kill counts is fucking sick.
IRAN: At least 1,230 people killed, including 175 schoolgirls and staff killed in a missile strike on a primary school in Minab in the country’s south on the war’s first day, according to the non-profit humanitarian group Iranian Red Crescent Society. It was unclear if the overall death toll included Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps military casualties.
Here’s an image of the mass graves Iran says it dug in order to put all of those children to their final rest.
I wonder, are those girls included in the body count to get the White House its Xbox achievement?
War is not a game. Treating it like a video game shows that these are deeply unserious people that are not only running our government, but currently prosecuting a war that they don’t want to call a war. The naked cruelty of it all, rather than treating the enemy and, more importantly, the American people with respect, is horrifying.
That they’re doing it in our name, all the more so.
In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike is joined by Konstantinos Komaitis, Senior Resident Fellow for Global and Democratic Governance at the Digital Forensics Research Lab (DFRLab) at the Atlantic Council. Together, they discuss:
Last year almost a dozen major U.S. ISPs were the victim of a massive, historic intrusion by Chinese hackers who managed to spy on public U.S. officials for more than a year. The “Salt Typhoon” hack was so severe, the intruders spent much of the last year rooting around the ISP networks even after discovery.
AT&T and Verizon, two of the compromised companies, apparently didn’t think it was worth informing subscribers any of this happened. Many of the attack vectors were based on simple things like telecom administrators failing to change default passwords on sensitive hardware entry points.
“The Federal Communications Commission will vote in November to repeal a ruling that requires telecom providers to secure their networks, acting on a request from the biggest lobby groups representing Internet providers.”
In a folksy Halloween blog post, Carr tries to pretend this somehow improves cybersecurity. According to Carr, ISPs pinky swore that everything is fine now, and frames obvious regulatory capture as the agency being more “agile”:
“Following extensive FCC engagement with carriers, the item announces the substantial steps that providers have taken to strengthen their cybersecurity defenses. In doing so, we will also reverse an eleventh hour CALEA declaratory ruling reached by the prior FCC—a decision that both exceeded the agency’s authority and did not present an effective or agile response to the relevant cybersecurity threats. So, we’re correcting course.”
Let me be clear about something: the Biden rules were the absolute baseline for oversight of telecom, basically requiring that ISPs do the absolute bare minimum when it comes to securing their networks, while being transparent with the public about when there’s been a major hack. This stuff was the bare minimum, and the U.S. is too corrupt to even do that.
This is part of Carr’s effort to destroy whatever was left of flimsy U.S. corporate oversight of regional telecom monopolies so he can ensure he has a cushy post-government job at a telecom-funded think tank or lobbying org. To that end, he’s been taking a hatchet to the very shaky FCC oversight standards that already helped result in the worst hack in U.S. telecom history.
It’s yet another example of how Trump policy is indistinguishable from a foreign attack. In many ways it’s worse, given that at least with Russia, Iran, and China, you’re spared the kind of phony piety and sanctimony coming from inside your own house.
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are not a privacy panacea, but they do empower Internet users in important ways. Proof of that can be found in the constant attempts by governments around the world to control who can use VPNs and for what purpose, most recently in Italy and Brazil. Hackread reports on another such move to bring a VPN operator to heel:
Windscribe, a globally used privacy-first VPN service, announced today that its founder, Yegor Sak, has been fully acquitted by a court in Athens, Greece, following a two-year legal battle in which Sak was personally charged in connection with an alleged internet offence by an unknown user of the service.
The case centred around a Windscribe-owned server in Finland that was allegedly used to breach a system in Greece. Greek authorities, in cooperation with INTERPOL, traced the IP address to Windscribe’s infrastructure and, unlike standard international procedures, proceeded to initiate criminal proceedings against Sak himself, rather than pursuing information through standard corporate channels.
The issue here is that the Greek authorities chose to prosecute Windscribe’s founder, Yegor Sak, rather than making an official request to the company for information about the alleged breach of the Greek system by a Windscribe user. That approach not only ignored established procedures for investigating such cases, it put a great deal of pressure on Sak — doubtless intentionally — in an attempt to force him to hand over information. Fortunately, the charges against Sak were dismissed last month, as the Greek court “did not find sufficient evidence to implicate Sak or Windscribe in any wrongdoing” according to Hackread.
If Greece had made VPN owners personally responsible for everything their users did online it would have set a terrible precedent, even if it would not have been legally binding elsewhere. In the face of such risks, some VPNs would doubtless have shut down, while others would have been forced to monitor closely what their users were up to. The Greek case was particularly important, because it involved a VPN provider that does not log user activity, and was therefore incapable of providing any information about the alleged abuse, even if ordered to do so.
It’s great news that the charges against Sak were dropped, albeit after a two-year legal battle, probably thanks in part to Windscribe’s no-logging policy. But the fear has to be that more governments will bring in laws that compel VPN services to keep logs in order to allow their users to be tracked and later identified. This is already the case in countries with repressive Internet laws, for example Russia, China, Iran, Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates. Moreover, as that article on Comparitech notes, even in countries that nominally protect privacy, like the US, UK, Canada and Australia, there are laws that could be used to force VPN services to log users or build in backdoors. It’s another reason why VPNs, useful as they are, should not be regarded as cast-iron protection against surreptitious surveillance by governments and others.
This week, the United Nations General Assembly is set to adopt the UN Cybercrime Convention, almost exactly five years after it approved a resolution to launch its negotiation. The Convention text has been widely panned by digital security experts, humanrightsorganizations, industry, even the UN’s own human rights office, among many others. Yet still it moves forward, propelled by prosecutors and justice ministries the world over and the treaty’s own internal processes, creating a vehicle for the further negotiation of tools for transnational repression.
History: an authoritarian power-play
The negotiations originated as an authoritarian power-play. In a letter to the UN Secretary General back in 2017, the Russian delegation to the UN proposed a treaty draft, one superficially hitting all the high notes of UN principles but substantively aiming to give states broad power to seek user data across borders in the context of ill-defined and often deeply repressive criminal offenses.
Its agenda was made all the clearer in the list of co-sponsors of the 2019 resolution, a who’s-who of authoritarians: Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bolivia, Burundi, Cambodia, China, Cuba, North Korea, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Kazakhstan, Laos, Libya, Madagascar, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Russian Federation, Sudan, Suriname, Syria, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. These are states that are unlikely to share data of criminal activity by their own nationals, or those within their countries, but they sure are eager to obtain data that may be held by companies headquartered in democracies, particularly if that data belongs to dissidents and others they deem to be criminals.
An international cybercrime treaty would give their data demands the veneer of international authorization.
At that original stage back in 2019, the United States and the member states of the European Union, among others, saw through the dictators’ agenda and opposed the launch of a negotiation. For these states, a new cybercrime treaty driven by authoritarians was not only a threat to individual rights and data protection; it just made no sense politically or institutionally.
Seventy-six states are parties to the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, a treaty that already provides a framework for transnational cooperation to address cybercrime. Any government anywhere, so long as it ensures that its domestic law provides the necessary protections for transnational data-sharing, can join Budapest. While, like every treaty, it has certain weaknesses and loopholes, Budapest has become the global standard, with strong support from the United States and others.
So why bother with a new treaty backed by authoritarians who simply would never commit to Budapest’s rules and oversight?
The big mistake: believing working within the system could limit the authoritarian power play
That, at least, was the leading argument for resisting negotiation of a new treaty. It made perfect sense then and it continues to make perfect sense now. But democratic states, after opposing the launch of the negotiation process in 2019, later made a strategic error.
They concluded that they should be a part of the negotiation in order to ensure that it would not establish new norms of data-sharing that could harm their interests. Inside the negotiation, they thought, they could prevent the worst of what the authoritarians would propose while perhaps getting better law enforcement cooperation on things that matter to them, such as prosecuting child endangerment and ransomware.
One can understand that original attitude, particularly if we see the negotiators as the giant squid working in the sushi bar in a New Yorkercartoon (“He feels he can do more good working within the system”). Democratic states engaged in a years-long negotiation and succeeded, from a defensive perspective, in removing problematic “crimes” from the treaty and providing at least a basis for guardrails against abuse. But it remains a deeply flawed treaty, in its drafting language and its substance, and it remains shocking to many observers that democratic states would support it.
Over three years of negotiations brought states from all over the world to hash out the treaty text within something called the Ad Hoc Committee. The negotiation stretched from 2021 to the summer of 2024, with states meeting over a dozen times in Vienna and New York. Democratic states fought for the best treaty they thought they could get, and a core cohort of human rights experts from civil society and UN institutions fought for serious protections against a treaty that would enable bad actors to use the treaty as a way to intimidate human rights defenders and journalists, among others.
The original sponsors, especially the Russian negotiators, resisted what they claimed to see as the watering down of significant new authorities and international crimes. Because this left the various key players often at loggerheads, the negotiation seemed on life-support as recently as early this year, only to revive, such that the Ad Hoc Committee adopted a final text unanimously in early August.
The treaty contains a preamble and nine chapters totaling sixty-eight articles, a dense international agreement that provides considerable room for abuse, not to mention debate over interpretation of key terms.
The first article lays out its purposes to “prevent and combat cybercrime more efficiently and effectively,” to “strengthen international cooperation” to address cybercrime (perhaps the key purpose from the sponsors’ perspective), and to build prevention capacity especially among developing countries.
Article 3 provides that the treaty will apply to “prevention, investigation and prosecution of the criminal offenses established in accordance with this Convention, including the freezing, seizure, confiscation and return of the proceeds from such offences” and to the “collecting, obtaining, preserving and sharing of evidence” for criminal investigations and proceedings.
This is a lot of words when the key obligation, evidence-sharing, is buried at the end.
The U.S. decides to embrace the treaty
U.S. negotiators cheered the treaty’s conclusion. In the U.S. Government’s explanation of its support for adoption of the treaty, its diplomats argued that it “reflects an historic achievement in the effort to combat the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images,” particularly on the ability to protect women and girls and to counter child sexual abuse material (CSAM). They added that the treaty will improve how the world prevents and punishes “ransomware, widespread cyber-enabled fraud, and illegal intrusions into computers and networks.”
They do not offer much more of substance than these areas of protection, apart from generic references to combating “pervasive and evolving cybercrime threats.” They recognize concerns about abuse of the treaty and, in a break from the traditional U.S. government approach of resisting vague treaty language in the principal instrument, seek to acknowledge the vagueness and danger inherent in the treaty.
Indeed, the U.S. explanation emphasizes, “we are joining consensus with the goal of moving the process forward and with the intent of advancing further clarifications and interpretive guidance to address stakeholder concerns.” This reason to join a treaty process – to fix it? – is naive on its face, particularly given the possibility that the second Trump administration could lean more toward the Russian than the American positions.
For argument’s purposes, let’s assume that the United States and other democratic supporters are correct that the treaty offers particular benefits. There is no doubt that some parts of civil society that focus particularly on crimes against children support it. It’s possible to acknowledge gains on that score and yet still ask, is that enough to embrace it?
Given the treaty’s purpose to facilitate the prevention and prosecution of crime, does it provide adequate safeguards – as all criminal systems must – to protect individual rights to privacy, to freedom of expression, to protest and dissent, to fair trial processes? Does it provide protection against an interpretation that enables a broad claim for what kinds of crimes fall under the treaty? I posed these questions to the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs, which responded as follows.
… the Commission certainly disagrees with your assessment that this Convention would be a ‘gift’ to its original sponsors. On the contrary, the text could not be farther from the draft text initially proposed by Russia. The recently agreed draft text of the Convention draws inspiration from the Council of Europe Budapest Convention on cybercrime, and from previous UN criminal conventions such as the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC) and the UN Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC). This ensures that the new UN Convention is fully consistent with the existing and well-established framework on the fight against cybercrime.
Furthermore, The UN cybercrime convention will set a new and unprecedented benchmark of conditions and safeguards for any future UN criminal law instruments in terms of ensuring respect for fundamental rights. There are several safeguards and grounds for refusal in the text that for example, exclude the possibility of using the future convention in any manner that would lead to the suppression of human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of expression, contrary to international human rights law or allow to refuse requests for international cooperation altogether.
The amendments tabled by Iran and supported by a number of authoritarian countries in the world as well as the harsh statement made by the Russian delegation at the end of the session also demonstrate that Russia and its allies are very dissatisfied with the final draft of the Convention
The full response can be found here and is also embedded below.
The Cybercrime Treaty is still a disaster for human rights
Notwithstanding the Commission’s fervent defense, very serious and experienced analysts and advocates disagree. Katitza Rodriguez, EFF’s policy director for global privacy and one of civil society’s indefatigable soldiers in the battle against the treaty, has written in article-by-article fashion about the treaty’s pervasive risks to human rights. Nick Ashton-Hart, another key player in the fight against the treaty, summarized it as “a data access treaty allowing governments worldwide to exchange citizens’ personal information in perpetual secrecy on any offense any two governments agree is a ‘serious’ crime.”
A former Justice Department official, now in private practice, has written with a colleague that the treaty “would weaken the United States’s ability to resist requests from authoritarian governments . . . [and] the United States’s ability to dissuade foreign states from assisting in improper, suppressive investigations launched from states such as Russia or Iran.”
Many ways the Cybercrime Treaty is open to abuse
Anyone with an interest should read these reviews of the treaty for their detailed assessment, and there are many others as well. Among the most fatal problems, at least from this author’s perspective, are the following:
First, the treaty obligates states to cooperate with one another for the purpose of, among other things, “collecting, obtaining, preserving and sharing of evidence in electronic form of any serious crime” (Article 35(1)(c)). They are to “afford one another the widest measure of mutual legal assistance” in the context of “serious crimes” and other Convention offenses (Article 40(1)).
Not only does this apply in normal criminal law processes, but the Convention also requires states to make available a point of contact “24 hours a day, 7 days a week” to provide “immediate assistance” to foreign law enforcement authorities in relation to Convention offenses and “serious crime.”
So what is “serious crime”? The Convention defines the term as “conduct constituting an offence punishable by a maximum deprivation of liberty of at least four years or a more serious penalty.”
That’s it.
It is a phrase that refers only to the extent of the penalty. It is not an uncommon phrase, but for the purposes of this treaty, it opens the door to assertions that any number of offenses should be the subject of data-sharing and enforcement cooperation to which states are obligated to adhere.
In Thailand, for instance, lese majeste penalties may be three to fifteen years imprisonment. Russia’s 2022 law prohibiting the defamation of the military comes with penalties of up to fifteen years imprisonment.
States around the world have similar sorts of repressive, anti-democratic laws, and the Convention provides them with a clear basis to demand cooperation in its enforcement.
Why? Because it’s evidently serious crime.
Second, and following up on that, it may be argued, as European and American negotiators do, that the Convention provides adequate safeguards so that they would never be required to share information in the context of serious crimes that have illegitimate purposes under human rights law.
Typically, they refer to Article 6, which provides, in full, the following:
Article 6. Respect for human rights
1. States Parties shall ensure that the implementation of their obligations under this Convention is consistent with their obligations under international human rights law.
2. Nothing in this Convention shall be interpreted as permitting suppression of human rights or fundamental freedoms, including the rights related to the freedoms of expression, conscience, opinion, religion or belief, peaceful assembly and association, in accordance and in a manner consistent with applicable international human rights law.
Treaty advocates argue that Article 6 provides adequate protection against the use of the treaty for purposes such as enforcement of the Thai and Russian laws, both of which are plainly inconsistent with international human rights law’s guarantees of freedom of expression.
But the language of Article 6 is weak.
For one thing, the first paragraph is based on an assumption that all states agree as to the nature of their obligations. Thai authorities may agree that its lèse-majestélaw implicates the freedom of expression, but they may argue that it is justified as a protection of the rights or reputations of others, or of public security.
When I raised concerns with the Thai government about application of the law to a student in 2017, for instance, the government responded exactly on these grounds.
This is just one example, and one can imagine an array of situations where states will demand the sharing of data, arguing their demand is consistent with international human rights law. To be sure, governments are free to disagree and refuse to share data, but the weaker the state, or the more it wants to find grounds for cooperation with the demanding government, the less likely Article 6 will provide any serious protection.
Meanwhile, the second paragraph of Article 6 is bizarre. On the one hand, its very presence suggests that democratic states believed the treaty could be interpreted to enable suppression of fundamental rights. Why else would they require this paragraph? But it also does not make much sense, because no “suppression” of human rights is permissible under human rights law; that is simply not how the law operates.
The article adds nothing to existing obligations states have under human rights law. Is it good that the democratic states insisted on this provision? It doesn’t hurt. And in fact, Iran tabled a resolution to have it removed, underlining its perspective. But it nevertheless does not provide the kind of protection these states may think it provides, certainly not in the context of states less able than the United States to resist demands from economically powerful states like China or Saudi Arabia.
Where are the safeguards against abuse?
Related to the above, the treaty does not provide anywhere close to the kind of specific safeguards it promises and that supportive states claim for it. In addition to the weak and generic Article 6, Article 24 aims toward an assurance that states may only carry out their treaty authorities “subject to conditions and safeguards provided for under its domestic law, which shall provide for the protection of human rights, in accordance with its obligations under international human rights law, and which shall incorporate the principle of proportionality.”
This is ineffective, but most importantly, it seems to suggest that human rights law’s main focus restricting state power is proportionality. While proportionality is indeed a core human rights concept, restrictions on fundamental rights also require demonstrations of legality (the principle that law be precise enough to avoid vagueness and not confer undue discretion on the state), necessity (that is measure is designed to achieve its goal and is the least intrusive means to do so) and legitimacy (that the purpose is proper under human rights law). Proportionality is just one element of the test.
This loose statement might be fine in a law review essay, but it is dangerous in a treaty implicating individual rights and international law enforcement cooperation.
The authoritarians are still happy with the treaty
Third, the treaty is also a framework for further work. And this is where the original authoritarian sponsors are most excited. Article 62 of the Convention provides for the negotiation of “supplementary protocols” once there are sixty states parties (i.e., sixty ratifications, not mere signatures).
This is where the future action will be, and Russia has already indicated that it is planning for this possibility. In a statement at the UN on December 4th, its representative said:
In August 2024, all UN Member States agreed on a draft Convention against Cybercrime, which, once approved by the General Assembly, will become the first international treaty in the field of international information security. We are convinced that this is the first step towards a universal international legal regulation of the use of ICTs.”
This goes far beyond any notion of criminal evidence-sharing, as problematic as that is. The Cybercrime Convention sets up an opportunity for Russia, China and others to press for continued negotiation to expand the scope of its coverage and seek international cover for the ‘regulation of the use of ICTs.’
Consider just three of the categories in Russia’s initial proposals for crimes to be covered under the Convention: creation and use of digital data to mislead the user; incitement to subversive or armed activities; extremism-related offenses. There are other proposals in its earlier interventions as well, but these three underscore the real nature of the authoritarian effort: to expand domestic repression into legitimate areas for global cooperation and pressure.
This was the main objective from the beginning: to provide a basis for states to enforce repressive laws in a digital context, wherever the underlying data may be held, or at the very least to provide a normative basis for them to seek to apply their laws across borders.
What now?
What’s next? The Cybercrime Convention, once adopted by the General Assembly, will be open for signature by states at a signing ceremony in early 2025, likely to be held in the well-known free speech nirvana, Vietnam. It requires forty states to ratify it before it will enter into force.
Having joined consensus and allowed this problematic treaty to move forward, democratic states need to rethink their positions. Key organizations in civil society will almost certainly urge the United States, Canada, EU states and other democracies not to ratify, and these states should pay them heed.
But the damage may already be done, a new instrument that lays the groundwork for an expansion of transnational repression, a normative foundation to undermine human rights law’s protection of freedom of expression, as Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights provides, “regardless of frontiers.”
With a new American administration whose leadership has long seemed sympathetic to the tropes of authoritarianism, a future of resistance and protection of digital rights cannot be guaranteed.
David Kaye is a law professor at UC Irvine School of Law, former independent chair of the Global Network Initiative, and UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression from 2014 – 2020
I don’t know why I’m drawn to doomed litigation but there’s no denying this impulse.
I know what the plaintiff wants to achieve. That much is made clear by Justin Rodrich’s reporting on the lawsuit for the Daily Beast. But I don’t know how he (or any other pronoun! — it’s filed as “Doe”) expects this to stop a rogue state from trying to kill them, much less put $5 million in his pockets.
Nonetheless, here we are:
An FBI informant who leaked sensitive government secrets that reportedly then led to a deadly U.S. drone strike claims Iran’s fearsome security apparatus has targeted him for assassination over the perceived betrayal, forcing him underground, in an undisclosed location, following a botched kidnapping attempt.
In a heavily anonymized federal lawsuit obtained by The Daily Beast, “John Doe” says Iranian agents torched his car, broke into his home, and threatened his relatives after learning he was working with the American government. He now lives “in constant fear” of being killed by Iranian agents who have carried out dozens of hits and hundreds of abductions in various countries “with impunity,” according to his complaint.
Because Doe is a marked man, he went into exile in a nearby nation where he “must now avoid any public interaction, in order to remain safe,” the complaint states.
Unlike a lot of other fatally flawed (perhaps a poor choice of words in this case) litigation I’ve covered, Doe has a legitimate beef: a foreign nation is trying to kill him on, perhaps on his own soil — soil, it must be noted, that does not belong to the nation of Iran.
As legitimate claims go, demanding to be compensated for living in constant fear of your own safety is a pretty good one.
But the beef aside, how does the plaintiff expect this to actually go? For one thing, the federal court must agree that Washington, DC is the proper venue to hear this case. It may decide that it is, but in doing so, may provide a few hints for Doe’s assassins as to their general location.
The plaintiff has also secured legal representation. If you’re a state-sponsored hacker, that’s where you’re going first if you’re trying to discover the location of a person you want to kill.
And, since Iran has allegedly already engaged in intimidation, attempted kidnapping, and other threats on the informant’s life abroad, it’s unlikely the country is going to suddenly develop a healthy respect for US civil litigation procedures and respond to this lawsuit in a timely fashion… or at all, actually.
Iran has already broken the gentlemen’s agreement over assassination in foreign countries that you’re not actually at war with. Given that, the threat of default judgment isn’t actually a threat. It’s just one more thing you can file in your “IDGAF” drawer.
Even if the Iranian government does respond to this lawsuit, one would expect the invocation of sovereign immunity. One would also hope that a US Court would refuse to rule that sovereign immunity covers extrajudicial assassinations by countries not currently engaged in declared wars on said target and said target’s nation.
One would hope. But then again, maybe it won’t!. I mean, that’s exactly the thing that’s central to the initiation of Iran’s (alleged) assassination attempts:
An FBI informant who leaked sensitive government secrets that reportedly then led to a deadly U.S. drone strike claims Iran’s fearsome security apparatus has targeted him for assassination over the perceived betrayal…
We’re not technically or legally at war with Iran. And yet! So, that kind of ruins that argument. This government is only at war with things at the moment. There’s the War on Drugs. The War on Terror. The War on Fentanyl. The War on [Political Hot Button Topic Du Jour]. But we’re not at war with Iran. Nor are we at war with Yemeni wedding parties or foreign journalists, but nonetheless we’ve killed both with extrajudicial military actions and/or drone strikes.
While that adds more legitimacy to the plaintiff’s arguments and, conversely, detracts from the imagined defenses of the Iranian government, the lawsuit [PDF] doesn’t have a chance in hell of (1) stopping Iran from trying to kill this person, and (2) resulting in a $5 million payout to cover the alleged damages suffered due to the threatened person having to shut down his businesses.
So, as tragic and awful as the plaintiff’s situation is, this lawsuit only has the potential to make things worse. All of this means nothing when you’re dealing with a government willing to violate any number of official and unofficial agreements to kill someone on foreign soil. And that appears to be something Iran’s government is especially willing to do:
All told, Doe contends, the Islamic Republic of Iran, which in recent years has declared war on, among others, a podcaster in Vancouver who discussed sex on the air and a journalist in Brooklyn who criticized the regime, has “intentionally inflicted emotional distress, induced severe mental anguish and emotional and psychological pain and suffering, and caused the need for medical treatment.”
If there’s any entity in the US with some legal culpability, it might be the FBI, which clearly hasn’t done its best to protect this informant. Then again, it might just be the informant’s limited OpSec ability, which allegedly resulted in him being “followed” by Iranian agents and photographed entering the “US facility” where he turned over information to their handlers.
This is all very awful and hopefully the publications of these allegations, as well as the resulting lawsuit, will prompt the US government to do what it can to protect its source and adjust its diplomatic relationship with the Iranian government. But suing Iran isn’t going to stop it from trying to kill people it wants dead. And it certainly isn’t going to be offering any settlements to foreign residents who have, so far, managed to avoid being assassinated.
Last summer Elon Musk sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) over its report about a rise in hate speech on ExTwitter. A few months ago, he sued Media Matters for their report about how ads can appear next to neoNazi content on the site. If he thought those two SLAPP suits would intimidate other groups pointing out the sketchiness of ExTwitter these days, it appears he was mistaken.
As I’ve highlighted in the past I’m not a huge fan of CCDH (or, really, Media Matters), as I think they both tend to exaggerate and remove context. CCDH’s research can be downright shoddy. But that doesn’t mean they should be sued for their speech. Of course, the intent was to scare off researchers from looking too closely at ExTwitter.
It doesn’t appear to be working, as the Tech Transparency Project (TTP — another non-profit I find to be pretty awful, and which falsely calls us a Google shill because Google sponsored a few of our events years ago, even as we regularly call out Google for being awful) has now released a report that highlights that ExTwitter may have violated US anti-terrorism laws in doing business with US-sanctioned entities, in that it found multiple paid for “verified” accounts on ExTwitter associated with terrorist-designated or sanctioned entities.
The accounts identified by TTP include two that apparently belong to the top leaders of Lebanon-based Hezbollah and others belonging to Iranian and Russian state-run media. The fact that X requires users to pay a monthly or annual fee for premium service suggests that X is engaging in financial transactions with these accounts, a potential violation of U.S. sanctions.
A blue checkmark account that bears the name and profile image of Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hezbollah, also indicates it is “ID verified,” a service that X offers to premium subscribers as a way to prevent impersonation. X requires users to submit a government-issued ID and a selfie to get verified in this way, though it is unclear if Nasrallah did so. X says these accounts get “prioritized support.”
Two other accounts for U.S.-sanctioned entities, Iran’s Press TV and Russia’s Tinkoff Bank, had gold checkmarks. A gold checkmark indicates the account is a “Verified Organization,” and at the time of TTP’s research, cost $1,000 per month. (X has since introduced a Basic tier that costs $200 per month.) Gold checkmark accounts get all the benefits of X’s Premium+ tier plus a $1,000 ad credit per month.
Yikes? Yikes!
There isn’t much of a way to twist this one. Even as I have my issues with TTP, this one seems pretty straightforward. It sure looks like ExTwitter conducted financial transactions with sanctioned entities. And, also, kudos to TTP for not being chilled by Musk’s bogus lawsuits against those other orgs.
This is the kind of thing that a functioning trust & safety team prevents. Maybe Elon shouldn’t have fired all of them.
Anyway, ExTwitter tried to defend this by… removing the checkmarks from the individuals (though not the $1000/month media orgs) and trying to insist there was nothing to see here:
If you can’t see that, it says:
X has a robust and secure approach in place for our monetization features, adhering to legal obligations, along with independent screening by our payments providers. Several of the accounts listed in the Tech Transparency Report are not directly named on sanction lists, while some others may have visible account check marks without receiving any services that would be subject to sanctions. Our teams have reviewed the report and will take action if necessary. We’re always committed to ensuring that we maintain a safe, secure and compliant platform.
Yeah, but if they weren’t named on sanction lists, why did you now suddenly take away their checks after they were called out? TTP also pointed out in response that it’s not at all clear what the claim that “some others may have visible account check marks without receiving any services that would be subject to sanctions” even means, given that since nearly a year ago, to get a checkmark, ExTwitter now requires you to purchase a subscription, which would be a transaction that is likely barred by the sanctions. TTP also points out that some of the orgs are clearly listed as sanctioned by OFAC.
I mean, all of this could have been avoided, as tons of experts had suggested early on, if Elon didn’t mix up verification (which means a specific thing) with premium subscriptions, which are very different. But, of course, Elon didn’t bother listening to any experts. Instead he fired them.
There’s a separate issue in all of this as well. As you may recall, just a year ago, the Supreme Court heard a case that dated back to pre-Elon Twitter, about claims that Twitter should be held liable under anti-terrorism laws for providing accounts to those associated with terrorists, and filed by the family of a victim of terrorist attacks. As the Supreme Court correctly found last May, this was clearly way too attenuated a connection. The ruling, written by Clarence Thomas is pretty clear why simply having an account isn’t enough to trigger liability.
But… also, it leaves open the possibility that doing more could very much trigger liability under anti-terrorism laws.
Because plaintiffs’ complaint rests so heavily on defendants’ failure to act, their claims might have more purchase if they could identify some independent duty in tort that would have required defendants to remove ISIS’ content. See Woodward, 522 F. 2d, at 97, 100. But plaintiffs identify no duty that would require defendants or other communication-providing services to terminate customers after discovering that the customers were using the service for illicit ends. See Doe, 347 F. 3d, at 659; People v. Brophy, 49 Cal. App. 2d 15, 33–34 (1942).14 To be sure, there may be situations where some such duty exists, and we need not resolve the issue today.
It seems pretty easy to read that paragraph to read the laws against engaging in economic transactions with sanctioned entities as triggering just that sort of duty…
You see, sometimes, trust & safety isn’t just about stopping idiots from harassing people on your site. Sometimes it’s there to help you avoid violating laws about aiding terrorists.
Despite Elon Musk’s disdain for the press, his legend wouldn’t exist without the media’s need to hyperventilate over every last thing that comes out of the billionaire’s mouth. We’re at the point where the dumbest offhand comment by Musk becomes its own three week news cycle (see the entire news cycle based on Musk’s comments on a baseless story about somebody cheating at chess with anal beads).
Of course it’s even worse if Musk says something that actually sounds important. Like when Musk recently proclaimed he’d be offering Starlink satellite broadband service in Iran in a heroic bid to help protesting Iranians avoid government surveillance and censorship. It was literally a two word tweet, but the claim, as usual, resulted in lots of ass kissing and a week long news cycle about how Musk was heroically helping Iranians.
I believe that @elonmusk and @spacex Starlink should win the Nobel Prize for Peace.
But the announcement was hollow. Not that you’d know this by perusing press stories. Only a few outlets, like Al Jazeera and The Intercept, could be bothered to dig behind the claims to discover the announcement didn’t actually accomplish much of anything real.
Iran quickly banned the Starlink website, and the only way actual Iranians would be able to use the service is if somebody smuggled Starlink dishes (aka “terminals”) into the country in the middle of a massive wave of violent unrest, something that’s likely impossible at any real scale. There’s also the issue of no ground stations tying connectivity together in Iran:
Musk’s plan is further complicated by Starlink’s reliance on ground stations: communications facilities that allow the SpaceX satellites to plug into earthbound internet infrastructure from orbit. While upgraded Starlink satellites may no longer need these ground stations in the near future, the network of today still largely requires them to service a country as vast as Iran, said Humphreys, the University of Texas professor. Again, Iran is unlikely to approve the construction within its borders of satellite installations owned by an American defense contractor.
So even if Musk wanted to offer struggling Iranians broadband access they’re extremely unlikely to be able to get dishes. And even if they could get dishes, they probably couldn’t use them because the necessary infrastructure wasn’t in place. Of course Musk knew this. But Musk also knows that any random bullshit that comes out of his mouth creates several weeks of free press because the ad-based U.S. press has steadily devolved into a billionaire-coddling bullshit clickbait and controversy machine.
The Intercept found it didn’t take much for large swaths of the Internet to believe that the billionaire had dramatically changed things in Iran with a tweet. Musk fandom is often a fan fiction based community, where truth is fairly negotiable:
That’s not to say that Starlink can’t help people in countries where emergency connectivity is needed, such as in Ukraine. Or rural Kentucky (assuming they can afford the $710 first month bill). But it is to say that turning your brain off every single time Elon Musk opens his mouth because you’ve convinced yourself he’s some kind of deity is violently annoying to people still living in reality.
And while Musk loves to whine and cry about the unfairness of the press, his legend literally wouldn’t exist without the endless supply of clickbait-seeking editors who are completely uninterested in the actual truth behind any and every claim the man makes, whether it’s the capabilities of “full self driving” or Starlink’s potential.
