Hacktivists Leak IRGC 'Secret' Document On Looming Unrest

Radio Farda, a United States-funded station and based in the Czech Republic, reported Tuesday it had been given the “highly confidential” document by the ‘Edalat-e Ali’ group and published an account, the day after the group hacked live streaming on the website of Iranian state television.

Edalat-e Ali released the document on Twitter Wednesday, saying the minutes were from a November meeting of IRGC's ‘Livelihood-Based Security Crises Prevention Taskforce.’ They record an intelligence official, whose surname is given as Mohammadi, citing a survey that social discontent had increased by 300 percent in the previous year. "The society is boiling over and may explode,” the official reportedly said.

The hackers said the meeting took place at the IRGC Sarallah Headquarters, responsible for the security of Tehran, on November 21 with representatives of various bodies including the Tehran Prosecutor's Office, the intelligence ministry, police, and IRGC intelligence.

The minutes recorded Mohammadi saying that "several shocks” − including a fall in the stock market prices – had led Iranians to doubt the ability of President Ebrahim Raisi's government, which took office in August, to improve the situation and warned that protests were taking place over high inflation, delays in paying wages, and water shortage.

A police officer, ‘Colonel Kaviani,’ said that since the beginning of the Iranian calendar year on March 21 there had been a year-on-year increase of 48 percent in protest rallies with a 98 percent increase in participants, mainly in front of the parliament and the ministry of labor. He predicted a 22 percent increase in protests in subsequent months.

In the past few months many Iranian media and politicians have warned that economic pressures may lead to social upheavals. Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei said Monday, according to the IRGC-linked Javan newspaper, that people might lose trust in politics "if they see that social justice is diminishing."

Funeral of the Islamic Republic

Ahmad Naderi, a conservative member of parliament, on January 30 blamed the previous administration of President Hassan Rouhani administration for economic woes but also criticized Raisi’s draft budget bill. “We will reach a point where we will see great social upheavals if these approaches [in the economy] continue,” he said.

Hawks in the United States have for years argued that US ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions, which sent the Iranian economy from growth to deep recession in the two years after 2018, should be stepped up to foment social unrest.

The nature and motivation of the hackers Edalat-e Ali are unclear. The group appeared last August by circulating footage from security cameras in Tehran's Evin prison and recently hacked television coverage of the Iran-United Arab Emirates football match with a video showing Guy Fox masks from the 2005 US-British film V for Vendetta.

The group said they wanted to turn the ten-day celebration of the 1979 Revolution into "the funeral of the Islamic Republic.” Edalat-e Ali group's name evokes the first of the twelve Shiite Imams, Ali, but may also refer to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.