Iran to return US secret drone... as a toy

Reports say the US is to get its top secret surveillance drone back from Iran. In a form of a toy. (Image from www.thingiverse.com/)

Reports say the US is to get its top secret surveillance drone back from Iran. The catch is, the device, intercepted in December, has been reduced to 1:80 of its original size and is being marketed as a popular toy.

­Iranian state radio was quoted by Associated Press as saying on Tuesday that the US RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drone toy models would soon be on sale in Tehran.

They are expected to sell for 70,000 rials – around US$4.

One of the models will even make it to the White House in response to a formal request from Washington last month asking Iran to return the top-secret device.

State radio reports that the model will be of the original aircraft, but one eightieth of the actual size.

The top secret US drone was intercepted over the Iranian town of Kashmar, some 225 kilometers from Iran’s border with Afghanistan, in early December.

Engineers with the Iranian military confirmed they had managed to hijack the system inside the craft with ease and bring it to a safe landing without incident.

Since then, the Obama administration has asked Iran to return the drone, but Tehran has refused, claiming that its incursion into Iranian airspace had rendered it Iran’s property.

Reports also suggest the trophy might be put on public display after a thorough examination, and in a year or two it may be put up for auction.

Source: http://rt.com/news/iran-us-drone-toy-965/

Iran Is Said to Sentence 2 Hikers to 8 Years in Jail

Two American hikers imprisoned in Iran for more than two years have been convicted of espionage and sentenced to eight years in jail, according to an unconfirmed news report on Iranian state television on Saturday.

The sentences, if confirmed, seemed unexpectedly severe coming not long after senior Iranian officials said that the men might be released soon, perhaps as a humanitarian gesture during the current holy month of Ramadan. Ali Akbar Salehi, the foreign minister, was quoted by local news media as saying he hoped the end of the trial on July 31 would lead to their freedom.

The two Americans, Shane M. Bauer and Joshua F. Fattal, both 29, have spent two years in a Tehran prison after being arrested near the border with Iraqi Kurdistan in July 2009. A third hiker, Sarah E. Shourd, was released on $500,000 bail in September 2010, and the latest report said her case remained open.

The Islamic Republic of Iran News Network, an official television channel, reported that Mr. Bauer and Mr. Fattal were sentenced to three years for entering Iran illegally and to five years for spying for the United States, a brief news report on the network’s Web site also said that they had 20 days to appeal.

The three Americans, all graduates of the University of California, Berkeley, who were either studying or traveling in the Middle East, say they made an innocent mistake in wandering over the unmarked border, crossing when a soldier of unknown nationality waved to them to approach. They were only then told they had crossed into Iran and were arrested, Ms. Shourd, who is Mr. Bauer’s fiancée, has said.

Iran has never publicly presented any evidence of their spying, and Mr. Bauer and Mr. Fattal have entered a plea of not guilty. Masoud Shafiei, their lawyer, said in a telephone interview that he had not been informed of the verdict and would seek confirmation on Sunday.

The television news channel is close to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, however, and it would not be unusual for the news to leak out in this manner. The network attributed the report to an unidentified informed source within the judiciary.

In Washington, the State Department said that it was seeking confirmation via the Swiss Embassy in Iran, which represents American interests there. “We have repeatedly called for the release of Shane Bauer and Joshua Fattal, who have now been held in Iran’s Evin Prison for two years,” the statement said. “Shane and Josh have been imprisoned too long, and it is time to reunite them with their families.”

Ms. Shourd and the families of the two men declined to comment.

Mr. Shafiei said he had anticipated that the two might be convicted only of entering the country illegally and sentenced to time served. Speculation about the sentences, if confirmed, pointed to several issues.

First, Iran has said it seeks the freedom of about 10 Iranians it says are jailed in the United States. A heavy sentence, analysts said, would give the two Americans more weight as bargaining chips.

Another theory holds that the sentences could be a reaction to a recent letter to President Obama signed by 92 senators demanding that Washington seek sanctions against the Iranian Central Bank as a way to curb Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

Finally, the case has attracted negative publicity for Iran, with all the attention focused on the distressed mothers of the two men.

If Tehran is still planning to make a “humanitarian gesture” in releasing them, then a harsher sentence would make the move appear all the more magnanimous, Iranian analysts said.

Neil MacFarquhar reported from New York, and Artin Afkhami from Washington. Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Washington.

A version of this article appeared in print on August 21, 2011, on page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Iran Is Said to Sentence 2 Hikers to 8 Years in Jail.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/world/middleeast/21hikers.html

Hacker in Iran obtains web certificates that would enable spoofing of Yahoo, Google & other top sites

In a fresh blow to the fundamental integrity of the internet, a hacker last week obtained legitimate web certificates that would have allowed him to impersonate some of the top sites on the internet, including the login pages used by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo e-mail customers.

The hacker, whose March 15 attack was traced to an IP address in Iran, compromised a partner account at the respected certificate authority Comodo Group, which he used to request eight SSL certificates for six domains: mail.google.com, www.google.com, login.yahoo.com, login.skype.com, addons.mozilla.org and login.live.com.

The certificates would have allowed the attacker to craft fake pages that would have been accepted by browsers as the legitimate websites. The certificates would have been most useful as part of an attack that redirected traffic intended for Skype, Google and Yahoo to a machine under the attacker’s control. Such an attack can range from small-scale Wi-Fi spoofing at a coffee shop all the way to global hijacking of internet routes.

At a minimum, the attacker would then be able to steal login credentials from anyone who entered a username and password into the fake page, or perform a “man in the middle” attack to eavesdrop on the user’s session.

Comodo CEO Melih Abdulhayoglu calls the breach the certificate authority’s version of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

“Our own planes are being used against us in the C.A. [certificate authority] world,” Abdulhayoglu told Threat Level in an interview. “We have to up the bar and react to these new threat models. This untrusted DNS infrastructure cannot be what drives the internet going forward. If DNS was trusted, none of this would have been an issue.”

Comodo says the attacker was well prepared, and appeared to have a list of targets at the ready when he logged into the company’s system and began requesting certificates.

In addition to the bogus certificates, the attacker created a ninth certificate for a domain of his own under the name “Global Trustee,” according to Abdulhayoglu.

Abdulhayoglu says the attack has all the markings of a state-sponsored intrusion rather than a criminal attack.

“We deal with [cybercriminals] all day long,” he said. But “there are zero footprints of cybercriminals here.”

“If you look at all these domains, every single one of them are communications-related,” he continued. “My personal opinion is that someone is trying to read people’s e-mail communications. [But] the only way for this attack to work [on a large scale] is if you have access to the DNS infrastructure. The certificates on their own are no use, unless they have access to the DNS infrastructure itself, which a state would.”

Though he acknowledges that the attack could have originated anywhere, and been routed through Iranian servers as a proxy, he says Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime is the obvious suspect.

Out of the nine fraudulent certificates the hacker requested, only one — for Yahoo — was found to be active. Abdulhayoglu said Comodo tracked it, because the attackers had tried to test the certificate using a second Iranian IP address.

All of the fraudulent certificates have since been revoked, and Mozilla, Google and Microsoft have issued updates to their Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer browsers to block any websites from using the fraudulent certificates.

Comodo came clean about the breach this week, after security researcher Jacob Appelbaum noticed the updates to Chrome and Firefox and began poking around. Mozilla persuaded Appelbaum to withhold public disclosure of the information until the situation with the certificates could be resolved, which he agreed to do.

Abdulhayoglu told Threat Level that his company first learned of the breach from the partner that was compromised.

The attacker had compromised the username and password of a registration authority, or R.A., in southern Europe that had been a Comodo Trusted Partner for five or six years, he said. Registration authorities are entities that are authorized to issue certificates after conducting a due-diligence check to determine that the person or entity seeking the certificate is legitimate.

“We have certain checks and balances that alerted the R.A. [about the breach], which brought it to our attention,” he said. “Within hours we were alerted to it, and within hours we revoked everything.”

It’s not the first time that the integrity of web certificates has come into question.

Security researcher Moxie Marlinspike showed in 2009 how a vulnerability in the way that web certificates are issued by authorities and authenticated by web browsers would allow an attacker to impersonate any trusted website with a legitimately issued certificate.

Source: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/comodo-compromise/

Iran accuses 3 detained Americans of espionage

TEHRAN, Iran — A senior Iranian prosecutor accused three Americans detained on the border with Iraq of espionage on Monday, the first signal that Tehran intends to put them on trial.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called for the release of the three. The announcement came as Washington and Tehran are maneuvering over a deadlock in negotiations over Iran's nuclear program.

"We believe strongly that there is no evidence to support any charge whatsoever," Clinton told reporters in Berlin. "And we would renew our request on behalf of these three young people and their families that the Iranian government exercise compassion and release them, so they can return home."

Clinton said the U.S. would continue to make that case through the Swiss channels who represent U.S. interests in Tehran.

Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Josh Fattal, all graduates of the University of California, Berkeley, were arrested July 31 after straying over the Iranian border from northern Iraq. The U.S. government and their families say there were on a hiking vacation and crossed accidentally.

Tehran chief prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dowlatabadi says the three "have been accused of espionage" and that investigations were continuing, according to the state news agency IRNA. He said an "opinion (on their case) will be given in the not distant future."

It is not clear from his comments whether formal charges had been made, but such announcements are often a sign that charges are imminent if not already filed. In Iran's opaque judicial system, the process of indictment and trial often takes place behind closed doors.

The timing of the announcement raised the possibility that Iran was using the case to pressure the United States amid the negotiations over its nuclear program. Iran is also holding another American, academic Kian Tajbakhsh, who was arrested amid Iran's postelection turmoil and was sentenced last month to 12 years in prison for an alleged role in opposition protests.

In January, Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi was arrested in Tehran, was convicted of espionage, then released on appeal in May. Two months later, U.S. forces in Iraq freed five Iranians who they had been holding for months.

This undated file photo, released by freethehikers.org, Aug. 20, 2009, shows Americans Shane Bauer, left, and Sarah Shourd.

This image made from a July 29, 2009 video released Oct. 27, 2009
by Shon Meckfessel shows Fattal in the Kurdish city of Irbil, Iraq.

Source: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iUarMRGfLCax53RhHap9iLIi11hAD9BS2G182

A Letter to Ahmadinejad

H.E. Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
President of the Islamic Republic of Iran
Tehran, Iran

November 2, 2009

Dear Mr. President,

I am writing to appeal to you to intercede with the appropriate authorities for the immediate release of my friends Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Josh Fattal from detention in Iran.

I traveled from Damascus to Iraqi Kurdistan on vacation with Shane, Sarah and Josh in July. Several of our friends in Damascus had previously visited northern Iraq and recommended that we too make the trip to a region they told us was beautiful, peaceful and safe. We set out the day after celebrating the wedding of local friends at Shane and Sarah's apartment and had planned to be away for one week. That was three months ago.

Had I not had a cold and remained behind at our hotel when my friends hiked to the Ahmed Awa waterfall near your country's border, I would undoubtedly be in detention with them now. I was, in fact, en route to meet them when I received Shane's call that they had been taken into custody.

On August 6, I published a statement about our trip to northern Iraq which I attach to this letter. I had hoped the statement might clarify why we were in the area and help the authorities understand that Shane, Sarah and Josh had no intention of entering Iran. As I said in that statement, if they did so, it was because of a simple and very regrettable mistake.

Since then, I have maintained silence in deference to the investigation. As much as my friends' absence has been acutely painful, I understood that investigators would want to clarify the circumstances of their trip. I had hoped that the misunderstanding would be resolved quickly. Three months have now passed, and I cannot imagine what more the Iranian authorities might have to learn about my friends or what they were doing in the area. To help put to rest any such questions, I would like to offer to submit a notarized statement to your country's mission to the United Nations vouching for my friends and detailing the circumstances of our trip. If this is not sufficient, I would be willing to come to Tehran to attest to their characters in person.

Mr. President, by continuing to deprive Shane, Sarah and Josh of their liberty, Iran is working against some of the very causes it supports. Each of these three has a long and public record of contesting injustice in the world and addressing some of the inequities between rich and poor which you have spoken about through their humanitarian work in their own country and overseas.

I first met Shane in October 2005, after we had corresponded about our common interest in the Balkans, where I had lived for a time and where Shane had worked for one year in "Balkan Sunflowers," an independent organization helping Albanian and Roma youth in post-war Kosovo. Back in the United States, Shane continued his work with the underprivileged, as illustrated by his excellent "Hotel Poverty" photographic essay for the San Francisco Chronicle, and his article "Divorcing the US," from a trip we took to the poorest county in our country.

As a fluent speaker of Arabic, Shane has focused on injustices in the Arab world, in Iraq and Palestine in particular. The Christian Science Monitor published Shane's January 7 interview with Musa Abu Marzook, the only English-language interview with a Hamas leader during Israel's attack on Gaza. Two of his articles on the American occupation of Iraq were published as cover stories of major magazines just this summer.

Sarah and I met, by coincidence, the month after Shane and I met, when we found ourselves in the same car from San Francisco to New Orleans to help poor people begin to rebuild their homes after Hurricane Katrina. We both appear in a documentary entitled "Solidarity Not Charity" made about our group of volunteers. In Oakland, Sarah worked for one year in "Just Cause," which helped poor people fight evictions from their homes in the US.

I met Josh a week before we left on our trip, and was immediately drawn in by his warmth and humor. In the time we spent together, I was struck by his passion for justice, environmental sustainability, and intercultural understanding, as attested by his work with the Aprovecho community in Oregon, and as a teaching fellow on a study abroad program for university students.

I would like to mention one more friend who may be relevant. Earlier in July, Shane and I traveled to an Israeli hospital to spend time with Tristan Anderson, an American peace activist with whom Shane, Sarah and I have been close friends for many years. Tristan was shot in the head and critically wounded by an Israeli soldier after attending a non-violent protest against Israel's separation wall. He continues to fight for recovery. Shane and Sarah also visited Tristan in late March with Sarah's mother Nora, a nurse who counseled Tristan's family. There's a very simple explanation for these trips: We wanted to show solidarity with a dear friend whose support for Palestinian rights has been acknowledged in the Iranian media, throughout the Middle East and beyond.

I hope that this letter will help the Iranian authorities understand the true character of my friends. They have now been in custody for almost 100 days, which I hope you agree is more than sufficient punishment for their mistake. Please do everything you can to ensure that they are immediately released into the arms of their loving friends and families, who miss them more than my words can express.

Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.

Sincerely

Shon Meckfessel

Source: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091116/meckfessel

Statement on Missing US Hikers

On July 31, three Americans went missing while on a hiking trip in Iraqi Kurdistan and are presumed to be detained by Iranian authorities. One of them is Shane Bauer, a freelance journalist who has written for The Nation magazine ("Iraq's New Death Squad" June 22, 2009). Shane was not on assignment for The Nation at the time. Below is a statement by Shon Meckfessel, the fourth member of their party, who was not with them at the time of their disappearance.

---

Statement on Missing US Hikers
By Shon Meckfessel August 6, 2009

I'm writing this statement to help people understand what happened to my three friends, Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Josh Fattal, who went missing by the Iran/Iraq border. I have been close friends with Shane and Sarah for years, and recently met Josh, a longtime friend of Shane. Shane is a language student and freelance journalist; Sarah is an English teacher, and Josh arranges student exchange trips. All of us have done some writing about our travels, and all of us share a deep appreciation for Middle Eastern cultures.

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A Letter to Ahmadinejad

Iran

Shon Meckfessel : Nation writer Shane Bauer and his friends have been detained by Iran for almost 100 days. A fourth member of their party appeals directly to Iran's president for their release.
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Statement on Missing US Hikers

Middle East

Shon Meckfessel : Three Americans, including Shane Bauer, a contributor to The Nation, went missing while on a hiking trip in Iraqi Kurdistan and are presumed to be detained by Iranian authorities. A fourth member of their party provides insight into their trip here.

In late July the four of us decided to travel from Damascus, Syria to Iraqi Kurdistan for a short vacation. Sarah had to return to work in a week. While going there might seem strange to Americans, the Kurdish territory is actually very beautiful and quite safe. Since the Kurds gained autonomy in 1992, no American has ever been harmed there. The city of Sulaimania is increasingly popular with tourists, and a friend of ours told us it was the most beautiful area he'd ever seen.

We arrived in Sulaimania the night of July 29 and stayed at the Hotel Miwan. Walking around town the next day, we asked a number of people--taxi drivers, hotel staff and people on the street--for good places to experience the mountainous terrain in the area. Every one of them told us to visit a place called Ahmed Awa. Not one of these people mentioned that Ahmed Awa was anywhere near the Iranian border. In fact, on the wall of our hotel there were three photos of tourists standing near the Ahmed Awa waterfall.

Ahmed Awa seemed the clear choice for appreciating the stunning natural beauty around Sulaimania, far from any sort of risk. However, it may have been unclear to the people who encouraged us to visit Ahmed Awa that we intended to go hiking in the area, rather than simply visiting the waterfall.

There is no Lonely Planet Iraqi Kurdistan, and Ahmed Awa was not on the map we'd printed out. My sense--wrongly as it turns out--was that Ahmed Awa lay northwest of Sulaimania, in the direction of Dokan Lake (and Dokan Resort), another scenic area we'd considered visiting during our trip through Kurdistan. On the evening of July 30, Josh, Shane and Sarah set out for Ahmed Awa with the plan to camp out. I stayed behind at our hotel because I was coming down with a cold and wanted a night to recuperate. We agreed to meet up the next day near Ahmed Awa. I purchased an Iraqi SIM card for my cell phone to make sure we could find each other the next day (providing the area had a signal, which very luckily it did).

I spoke with Shane twice that evening. I called him at around 8 PM and he told me they'd just been dropped off near a strip of restaurants in Ahmed Awa. A couple hours later he told me they had followed a trail up from the strip of restaurants to the waterfall, and were continuing on the same trail to camp in peace. On July 31, I woke up feeling better and decided to join my friends. At about 11:30 AM I called Shane. He told me the weather had been mild all night. That morning they had woken up early and resumed hiking along the same trail. Shane sounded very calm and content, happy to be in a beautiful environment, and made absolutely no mention of any risk whatsoever. I am absolutely certain that they had no knowledge of their proximity to the Iranian border or they would have never continued in that direction. Shane told me they were planning to turn around soon. He thought we could meet up near the waterfall.

I sent Shane two text messages, one at 12:50 PM and one at 1:22 PM, to which he did not respond. At 1:33 PM I received a call from Shane during which he told me that they were being taken into custody and that I should call the embassy.

I hope that people understand my friends' presence in the area for what it was: a simple and very regrettable mistake.

Source: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090817/meckfessel