Downed Plane Victims Submit Complaint At International Criminal Court

Although the Biden administration says it is "obligated" to allow the hardline president Ebrahim Raisi into the country to attend the United Nations' General Assembly, Republican Senator Ted Cruz is circulating a bill that would alter the law to facilitate a visa ban on all Iranian officials sanctioned for their ties to Ali Khamenei, the country's ruler, the Washington Free Beacon reported on Wednesday. 

The proposed bill is likely to attract bipartisan support due to the failure of an earlier pressure campaign over the Biden administration’s insistence on its obligation under US law to issue a visa. A bipartisan group of 52 US representatives wrote a letter to the White House earlier this month calling on President Joe Biden to deny "entry visas" for Raisi and his delegation. 

However, Cruz’s proposed bill -- which may be cited as the "Strengthening Entry Visa Enforcement and Restrictions Act of 2022" or the "SEVER Act of 2022" -- would formalize efforts in Congress to pressure the administration into barring Raisi due to Tehran's active plots to assassinate US officials such as former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and former national security adviser John Bolton.

"The United States is absolutely able to deny entry to anyone who threatens our national security," Cruz told the Washington Free Beacon. "Raisi is a mass-murdering terrorist who was handpicked by the ayatollah -- and he's coming to the United States while there are Iranian agents trying to murder former American officials and dissidents on American soil."

Ahead of the start of the UN General Assembly, Antonio Guterres said the International Atomic Energy Agency’s “independence exists, must be preserved and is essential. The IAEA cannot be an instrument of parties against other parties.” 

Tehran’s demands that the IAEA shut its probe into suspected Iranian nuclear activity have become a key sticking point as the talks to revive the 2015 deal drag on.

Also on Wednesday, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell described the talks to bring Iran and the US back into the deal as an “stalemate,” saying that “I am afraid that with the political situation in the US, and so many directions without being conclusive, now we are going to stay in a kind of stalemate.”

He added that over the past couple of months, “the proposals were converging but unhappily, after the summer, the last proposals are not converging -- they are diverging,” highlighting that “The last proposals from the Iranians were not helping because we were almost there, then new proposals came and the political environment is not the most propitious. I am sorry to say, but I don't expect any breakthrough in the next days.” “From my side, I don't have anything more to propose.” 

Later in the day, two-thirds of the IAEA's 35-nation Board of Governors endorsed a non-binding statement by the United States, Britain, France and Germany pressing Iran to explain about uranium traces found at three undeclared sites.

Mohammad-Mehdi Rahimi, head of Raisi’s public relations office on Tuesday said the president has no account on Twitter. The announcement has left many wondering about the identity of those behind the account thought to be the president's official account, as it introduces itself. The account has been tweeting in his name since before he won the controversial presidential elections of June 2021.

According to Twitter the account was created in March 2021. It has been in regular use since May 26, 2021, more than 3 weeks before the election, and has over 173K followers including Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei, Vice President Mohammad Mokhber, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and the official news agency IRNA. The last tweet from the account which posted a quote from the president was posted on August 12th.

Most official news agencies and pro-Raisi news websites retweeted the tweets from @raisi.com account in Raisi's name throughout this time but the president’s media team never denied their authenticity until now.

“Denial of authenticity of Raisi's Twitter is one of the greatest blunders of the president’s media team … The question arises, if the account belongs to him, how come nobody is taking responsibility for it. Has something been said there that doesn’t suit the purposes of Raisi's team?” reformist Rouydad24 asked Wednesday.

The second scenario is that there is a Twitter account in Raisi's name that nearly all ministers, vice presidents, as well as the official government and cabinet accounts follow, retweet, and quote but nobody knows who it belongs to, Rouydad24 added.

“This is even a bigger blunder. One should ask not only the administration’s media team, but also security and intelligence bodies, how such a blunder could happen without anyone noticing?How is it that a fake Twitter account was publishing the Iranian government and president’s official stances, and no one investigated the matter for once?” Rouydad24 asked.

The semi-official Iranian Students News Agency, ISNA, was the first to report on June 1, 2021 that Raisi had officially joined Twitter. ISNA provided a link to the account.

Many of the earlier tweets posted on the account were written in first person voice and expressed then-Chief Justice and presidential candidate Ebrahim Raisi’s views on domestic and foreign policies, including accusations against his predecessor’s government and his election rivals.

“I have been making calls and consultations to make the elections more competitive and inclusive, which you and [the disqualified candidates] themselves may not know about, since yesterday evening when I found out about the vetting results,” the very first tweet made from the account said.

The tweet referred to the controversial disqualification of three of Raisi’s main rivals -- former parliament speaker Ali Larijani, former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Vice President Es’haq Jahangiri – by the election watchdog, the Guardian Council.

Later tweets, after Raisi took office, often described his administration's approach to US sanctions, negotiations to restore the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers (JCPOA), selling oil, and regional and international matters. These tweets were regularly quoted by both domestic and foreign media.

Instagram is the only major social media platform not blocked in the country where other platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Telegram cannot be accessed without the use of anti-filtering software and VPNs (virtual private networks).

According to the prosecutors, the suspects targeted hundreds of victims in the US and other countries, encrypting and stealing data from victims’ networks and threatening to release it unless exorbitant ransom payments were made. In some cases, the victims made those payments.

A senior Justice Department official said that the hackers are not believed to have been working on behalf of the Iranian government but instead for their own financial gain, and some of the victims were even in Iran. 

The case was filed in federal court in New Jersey, where a municipality in Union County was hacked last year. One of the victims was a domestic violence shelter in Pennsylvania, which – according to the indictment -- was extorted out of $13,000 to recover its hacked data.

In the latest actions as part of the US government’s response to the malicious cyber activities by Iranian actors, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) also sanctioned ten individuals and two entities Wednesday for their roles in malicious cyber acts, including ransomware activity. 

The OFAC said all the individuals and entities designated Wednesday are affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (IRGC).  

Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian E. Nelson said, “We will continue to take coordination action with our global partners to combat and deter ransomware threats, including those associated with the IRGC.”

According to a Wednesday report by Security firm Proofpoint, Iran-aligned espionage threat actor TA453 deployed a social engineering impersonation technique, informally called Multi-Persona Impersonation, in mid-2022 in which the threat actor uses at least two stolen or hijacked personas on a single email thread to convince targets of the legitimacy of the campaign. The personas used are real people that the target knows and trusts.

TA453 historically targeted academics, policymakers, diplomats, journalists, and human rights workers, and would engage in one-to-one conversations with the targets but this changed since they started the new technique. For example, the actors included a variety of questions intended to generate a dialogue about Israel, the Persian Gulf States, and the Abraham Accords, while these questions are generally meant to establish a pretext for sending a follow-up credential harvesting link or to deliver a malicious document.

The company’s researchers said they observed the activities of TA453 throughout late 2021 and through 2022 – which overlaps with activity tracked as Charming Kitten, PHOSPHORUS, and APT42 – noting that TA453 innovated its approach in a quest to fulfill its intelligence priorities. In late June 2022, this evolution resulted in campaigns utilizing what Proofpoint calls Multi-Persona Impersonation (MPI), a new subset of impersonation. 

The security firm described the method as “an intriguing technique” because it requires more resources be used per target -- potentially burning more personas -- and a coordinated approach among the various personalities in use by TA453.