How the government killed a secure e-mail company

Michael Phillips writes: In mid-July, Tanya Lokshina, the deputy director for Human Rights Watch’s Moscow office, wrote on her Facebook wall that she had received an e-mail from edsnowden@lavabit.com. It requested that she attend a press conference at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport to discuss the N.S.A. leaker’s “situation.” This was the wider public’s introduction to Lavabit, an e-mail service prized for its security. Lavabit promised, for instance, that messages stored on the service using asymmetric encryption, which encrypts incoming e-mails before they’re saved on Lavabit’s servers, could not even be read by Lavabit itself.

Yesterday, Lavabit went dark. In a cryptic statement posted on the Web site, the service’s owner and operator, Ladar Levison, wrote, “I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.” Those experiences led him to shut down the service rather than, as he put it, “become complicit in crimes against the American people.” Lavabit users reacted with consumer vitriol on the company’s Facebook page (“What about our emails?”), but the tide quickly turned toward government critique. By the end of the night, a similar service, Silent Circle, also shut down its encrypted e-mail product, calling the Lavabit affair the “writing [on] the wall.”

Which secret surveillance scheme is involved in the Lavabit case? The company may have received a national-security letter, which is a demand issued by a federal agency (typically the F.B.I.) that the recipient turn over data about other individuals. These letters often forbid recipients from discussing it with anyone. Another possibility is that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court may have issued a warrant ordering Lavabit to participate in ongoing e-mail surveillance. We can’t be completely sure: as Judge Reggie Walton, the presiding judge of the FISA court, explained to Senator Patrick Leahy in a letter dated July 29th, FISA proceedings, decisions, and legal rationales are typically secret. America’s surveillance programs are secret, as are the court proceedings that enable them and the legal rationales that justify them; informed dissents, like those by Levison or Senator Ron Wyden, must be kept secret. The reasons for all this secrecy are also secret. That some of the secrets are out has not deterred the Obama Administration from prosecuting leakers under the Espionage Act for disclosure of classified information. Call it meta-secrecy. [Continue reading…]

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Police state: In America journalism itself has been criminalised

Lindsey Bever writes: Committing an act of journalism could soon become an imprisonable offence.

New York Times reporter James Risen has been ordered to testify in the criminal trial of former Central Intelligence Agency official Jeffrey Sterling, who has been indicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 – for leaking classified information to Risen for publication in his book, State of War. Last month, the US court of appeals for the fourth circuit in Richmond, Virginia, ruled that Risen could not claim a reporter’s privilege under the first amendment to win exemption from being compelled to testify.

In effect, the court has ruled that the journalist must reveal his source. That sets a dangerous precedent now applicable in Maryland and Virginia, home to the NSA and CIA – the very states in which national security journalism matters most. If a reporter cannot guarantee confidentiality to an important source willing to provide information that may be of vital public interest, the job of journalism itself has been criminalised. If a reporter like Risen refuses to co-operate and name names, he himself may face time behind bars.

Indeed, like a dedicated few before him, Risen has vowed to go to prison rather than break his vow of confidentiality in the courtroom. Although there will almost certainly be an appeal, the court’s ruling is a potentially devastating blow to investigative journalism. Given its significance, it is shocking how little publicity the Risen/Sterling case has yet received from major media outlets with a direct interest in its outcome. [Continue reading…]

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Snowden initiates review of U.S. surveillance operations — Obama takes credit

“I called for a thorough review of our surveillance operations before Mr. Snowden made these leaks,” President Obama claimed today in a press conference at the White House.

Oh really? Was this in a classified memo? Was it going to be a secret review whose findings would never be made public?

And if Obama was already working on this issue, how come it wasn’t until after the first leaks that for the very first time he sat down with the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board?

If this board now has an essential role in the review Obama has just proposed, there is no evidence whatsoever that he attached much significance to the board’s operations prior to the leaks. As Government Executive reported this week:

The little-known Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, created in 2007 on a 9/11 Commission recommendation, was limping along for years with no appointees or staff leadership. All that changed with this summer’s revelations of domestic surveillance of Americans’ telephone activity by the National Security Agency.

The board — an independent agency that consists of four part-time members and a full-time chair who advise the president and Congress on the balance between security and privacy — this month will finally welcome its first executive director, attorney Sharon Bradford Franklin. That’s after it took more than two years for President Obama to nominate and for the Senate to approve the board members — Chairman David Medine was just confirmed in May.

Board members were not briefed on the NSA’s surveillance operations until June 19, two weeks after the first leaks had been published by The Guardian.

Obama now claims that the new review could have proceeded in a more orderly fashion in the absence of the media attention that has been generated, thanks to the leaks.

As far as this president is concerned, that government which governs best is the one whose operations we know least about and care even less about.

(The following clip from Obama’s news conference is preceded by a 30-second commercial.)

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New York Times calls on Congress to outlaw mass surveillance of Americans

The New York Times Editorial Board: It was bad enough in 2008 when Congress allowed the agency to spy without a warrant on e-mails and text messages between Americans and foreign targets of an investigation. That already strained the Fourth Amendment’s protections against illegal searches, but lawmakers decided it was justified as part of a terror investigation.

It turns out, as Charlie Savage revealed in The Times on Thursday, that the N.S.A. went far beyond those boundaries. Instead, it copies virtually all overseas messages that Americans send or receive, then scans them to see if they contain any references to people or subjects the agency thinks might have a link to terrorists.

That could very well include innocent communications between family members expressing fears of a terror attack. Or messages between an editor and a reporter who is covering international security issues. Or the privileged conversation between a lawyer and a client who is being investigated.

Data collection on this scale goes far beyond what Congress authorized, and it clearly shreds a common-sense understanding of the Fourth Amendment. It’s as if the government were telling its citizens not to even talk about security issues in private messages or else they will come to the attention of the nation’s spies. “By injecting the N.S.A. into virtually every crossborder interaction, the U.S. government will forever alter what has always been an open exchange of ideas,” said Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Obama administration officials justified this unwarranted expansion of surveillance powers with the usual hairsplitting arguments over semantics. It’s not “bulk collection” of messages if the messages aren’t stored, they said (even if every message is analyzed by supercomputers as it is sent). It’s legitimate to search through conversations “about” a target, even if the target isn’t part of the conversation. Naturally, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved these half-baked assertions with a secret opinion.

The disclosure of this practice makes it more urgent than ever that Congress clamp down on what is unquestionably the bulk collection of American communications and restrict it to clear targets of an investigation. Despite President Obama’s claim this week that “there is no spying on Americans,” the evidence shows that such spying is greater than the public ever knew.

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Police state: After Lavabit, Silent Circle also shuts down its encrypted email service

IDG News Service reports: Silent Circle also shuttered its encrypted email service a few hours after Lavabit shut down citing an ongoing legal battle.

“We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now,” Silent Circle wrote in a blog post on Friday in reference to the closure by Lavabit.

The company, with U.S. headquarters in Maryland, said it had not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else from any government, and “this is why we are acting now.”

The closure of Lavabit and Silent Circle reflect concern among email providers about government orders for customer data under the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Most of these come in the form of “gag orders” that prohibit the service providers from discussing in public the orders for disclosure of customer data. [Continue reading…]

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What it means to be an NSA ‘target’: New information shows why we need immediate FISA Amendments Act reform

Electronic Frontier Foundation: An important New York Times investigation from today [Thursday] reporting that the NSA “is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country,” coupled with leaked documents published by the Guardian, seriously calls into question the accuracy of crucial statements made by government officials about NSA surveillance.

The government has previously tried to reassure the public about its use of FISA Amendments Act Section 702 surveillance practices, emphasizing that, under Section 702, the government may not “intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States.” Indeed, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee Senator Feinstein, in a letter to constituents who wrote to her expressing concern about the NSA’s spying program, said this: “[T]he government cannot listen to an American’s telephone calls or read their emails without a court warrant issued upon a showing of probable cause.”

We’ve written before about the word games the government plays in describing its surveillance practices: “acquire,” “collect,” and “content” are all old government favorites. The New York Times report proves Feinstein statement is false, and it’s clear it’s time to add “target” to the list of word games as well.

First, at least this much is clear: a “target” under the FAA must be (a) a non-US person and (b) not physically located within the United States. A “person,” for purposes of the FAA, includes individuals as well as “any group, entity, association, corporation, or foreign power.” Under the FAA, the government can thus “target” a single individual (e.g., Vladimir Putin), a small group of people (e.g., Pussy Riot), or a formal corporation or entity (e.g., Gazprom).

So, when the NSA decides to “target” someone (or something), it turns its specific surveillance vacuum at them. The NSA then believes it can intercept and analyze all electronic communications of the target (telephone conversations, email conversations, chat, web browsing, etc) so long as the “target” is overseas and remains overseas. As others have noted, this includes conversations the “target” has with Americans, which would then be “incidentally” collected. Keep in mind this does not require a warrant or even the approval of a court, which is only one way Senator Feinstein’s reassurance was demonstrably false. But there’s still more. [Continue reading…]

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NSA closes security loophole. Employees must now use pigeon post instead of email

David Sanger, the NSA’s representative at the New York Times, recently reported that in order to prevent the emergence of another Snowden, the agency is imposing a “two-man rule” on system administrators, or what one might call a peer-policing policy so that these guys don’t do anything naughty when left to their own devices. A logical implication of that policy would be that this duplication of roles would mean that the agency would need to hire more system administrators.

Reuters now reports:

The National Security Agency, hit by disclosures of classified data by former contractor Edward Snowden, said Thursday it intends to eliminate about 90 percent of its system administrators to reduce the number of people with access to secret information.

Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, the U.S. spy agency charged with monitoring foreign electronic communications, told a cybersecurity conference in New York City that automating much of the work would improve security.

Automated? Seriously? If what system administrators do can be automated, why are there system administrators? Or are they like manual typesetters resisting the implementation of electronic typesetting? Or has the NSA always employed about ten times as many systems administrators as it needed?

Yes, my Onion-style headline is made up, but the real one — “NSA to cut system administrators by 90 percent to limit data access” — makes about as much sense. It’s like the Air Force saying it can now fire most of its maintenance workers because it’s started operating aircraft that can fix themselves.

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Thousands of Native American children removed from their homes by the state of South Dakota

Jason Coppola reports: On June 4, 2013, a draft complaint was delivered to United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights officials Giorgia Passarelli and Rekia Soumana in New York City regarding the removal of thousands of Native American children from their families and tribes in South Dakota.

It has been carried out in a manner which, says the Great Sioux Nation, could be defined as genocide. This charge is based on section 2 (e) of the UN genocide convention of 1948 and the Federal Genocide Implementation Act of 1987. It states:

“(a) Basic Offense – Whoever, whether in time of peace or in time of war and with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in substantial part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such –

(1) kills members of that group;

(2) causes serious bodily injury to members of that group;

(3) causes the permanent impairment of the mental faculties of members of the group through drugs, torture, or similar techniques;

(4) subjects the group to conditions of life that are intended to cause the physical destruction of the group in whole or in part;

(5) imposes measures intended to prevent births within the group; or

(6) transfers by force children of the group to another group;

shall be punished…”

The draft complaint was hand-delivered by Daniel P. Sheehan, Chief Counsel to the Lakota People’s Law Project, in response to the more than 700 Native American children removed from their homes and placed in foster care each year in South Dakota. Of those children, about 87 percent are placed with non-native families or group homes, far from their Indian communities, culture, and ceremonies.

This, the Sioux charge, is in violation of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) passed by Congress in 1978 which was intended to protect Indian nations, families, and culture by allowing children to remain with their extended families, a central theme in their indigenous belief system, even if in foster care.

The taking of Indian children has a long and disgraceful history in the Americas.

According to a report prepared for congress by Indian Child Welfare Act directors from South Dakota’s nine American Indian tribes, with assistance from the Lakota People’s Law Project, “For the Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota (Sioux) people of South Dakota, the absorption into state care began with the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty”.

The Fort Laramie Treaty guaranteed the Sioux Nation “the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation” of their ancestral lands spanning five US States including South Dakota. The treaties have been broken by the US Government ever since the discovery of gold in the Black Hills. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. staff flee from another diplomatic mission

The New York Times claims that a threat against the U.S. consulate in Lahore was unrelated to the threat that resulted in U.S. embassies being closed across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, but I suspect that the word “related” needs to be parsed carefully. In other words, even if the threat in Pakistan was not part of the same plot, it may well be related in the sense that a growing number of militants are seizing on the opportunity to find out how easy it is to make the State Department panic.

The United States ordered staff members pulled from its consulate in Lahore, Pakistan, on Friday, citing terrorist threats, and also advised Americans against traveling to Pakistan as violence continued to rattle the country for another day.

“The Department of State ordered this drawdown due to specific threats concerning the U.S. Consulate in Lahore,” the warning said. Except for a small number of emergency personnel, the diplomats in Lahore were moved to Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, a senior Obama administration official said.

At this point, it does not appear that the threat against the consulate is related to a broader terrorism alert that prompted the State Department to close 19 diplomatic missions in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, the official said.

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The politics of AIPAC’s anti-Iran-diplomacy letters

Marsha B Cohen writes: Mitch McConnell did it, Harry Reid didn’t. Elizabeth Warren did it, Bernie Sanders didn’t. Al Franken did it, Tom Coburn didn’t.

I’m referring to the signing of the latest letter, crafted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and proffered by Senators Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), urging President Barak Obama to turn a cold shoulder to newly elected Iranian president Hassan Rouhani while pursuing a more confrontational and aggressive Iran policy. The Arms Control Association’s Greg Thielmann has already penned an important discussion of why this measure complicates efforts to reach a peaceful solution with Iran, which I highly recommend.

It is worth recalling that another Iranian president-elect, Mohammad Khatami — a reformist whose surprise election shocked the Iranian political establishment — was also greeted by sanctions pushed through Congress. On August 19, 1997, weeks after Khatami took office, President Bill Clinton confirmed that virtually all trade and investment activities by US persons with Iran were prohibited. Those sanctions not only boosted Iranian hardliners who oppose a detente with the US, they also helped ensure that Khatami and his supporters would be unsuccessful in making many of the economic improvements and political changes needed to improve the lives of the Iranian people. His crippled victory was followed by the election of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005. Since then, dozens of letters, resolutions and sanctions bills have emanated from Congress, which of late seems incapable of accomplishing anything else. [Continue reading…]

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Police state: Snowden’s email provider, Lavabit, shuts down to resist U.S. government invasion

Amy Davidson writes: Not every suspension-of-service notice for an e-mail company comes with a link to a legal-defense fund. Ladar Levison, the owner and operator of Lavabit, whose clients, reportedly, have included Edward Snowden, made it sound today as though he could use the help. “I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit,” Levison wrote in a note posted on his site.

I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on—the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.

As Kevin Poulsen and others have pointed out, our collective experience has prepared us to guess what is going on here: Levison got either a national-security letter “or a full blown search or eavesdropping warrant.” In the weeks since the Guardian and Washington Post first began publishing stories with Snowden’s documents, the picture of the National Security Agency’s domestic-surveillance practices that’s come together is different from the one most everyone held before we’d ever heard Snowden’s name. And it has left the Administration’s explanations of what it does and doesn’t do looking pretty spotty, and at times just false.

Rebecca Greenfield adds: Because of the type of encryption Lavabit uses, peer-to-peer, even if the government intercepted Snowden’s emails sent using Lavabit, it wouldn’t be able to read them without his encryption key. If the NSA was only after those old emails, shutting down Lavabit wouldn’t do them much good anyway. But if the government demanded that Lavabit install a method for monitoring its users communications, as in an ongoing data collection program like PRISM, shutting down would be a drastic-but-effective way to avoid participation. So far, only one company is known to have challenegd a FISA order of that kind: Yahoo, and it lost.

If Lavabit doesn’t exist, then the NSA can’t monitor it. Of course, that just means Snowden will have to find another ultra-secure email provider. Maybe he should consider a company with zero American ties, per Levison’s urging:

This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.

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Al Qaeda shows how easy it is to make America cower

The New York Times reports: The gloating among jihadists and their sympathizers began last week, right after the United States shut down almost two dozen diplomatic posts across the Middle East in response to a terrorist threat.

“God is great! America is in a condition of terror and fear from Al Qaeda,” wrote one jihadist in an online forum. Another one rejoiced: “The mobilization and security precautions are costing them billions of dollars. We hope to hear more of such psychological warfare, even if there are no actual jihadi operations on the ground.”

The jihadists are not the only ones who see the new terrorist alert in a caustic light.

The Obama administration’s decision to evacuate so many diplomats on such short notice — however justified by the seriousness of the threat — has upset some of its foreign partners, who say the gesture contributes to a sense of panic and perceived weakness that plays into the hands of the United States’ enemies, and impedes their efforts to engage with people in their countries.

Some American officials have also said they believe the administration overreacted, in large part because of the political fallout from the attack last year on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens. Since that attack, security procedures have been tightened at American diplomatic outposts across the Middle East. Those embassies are already so heavily fortified against attacks that many diplomats lament it is more and more difficult for them to do their jobs.

“I think since Benghazi the administration has been in a defensive crouch, and they are playing it as safe as they can,” said Will McCants, a former State Department counterterrorism official who is now an analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses in Alexandria, Va. [Continue reading…]

As there is indeed every reason to assume that this is all post-Benghazi caution, it’s more than ironic that this follows the death of a diplomat who was renowned for his courage in engaging with the population where he was stationed. After all, what’s the point of having embassies if they end up just becoming fortified hiding places for Americans who dare not venture out?

No doubt, the epicenter of cowardice is Washington itself which doesn’t so much fear for the lives of its diplomats as much as it fears for the political fallout from any attack on a U.S. embassy.

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The new McCarthyism: Unhappy with U.S. foreign policy? Obama administration thinks you might be a threat to America

A Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) slide profiles an 'insider threat.'

The Huffington Post reports: Watch out for “Hema.”

A security training test created by a Defense Department agency warns federal workers that they should consider the hypothetical Indian-American woman a “high threat” because she frequently visits family abroad, has money troubles and “speaks openly of unhappiness with U.S. foreign policy.”

That slide, from the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), is a startling demonstration of the Obama administration’s obsession with leakers and other “insider threats.” One goal of its broader “Insider Threat” program is to stop the next Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden from spilling classified or sensitive information.

But critics have charged that the Insider Threat program, as McClatchy first reported, treats leakers acting in the public interest as traitors — and may not even accomplish its goal of preventing classified leaks.

DISA’s test, dubbed the “CyberAwareness Challenge,” was produced in October 2012, a month before the Obama administration finalized its Insider Threat policy. The slide about Hema is included in a section of the training about “insider threats,” which are defined by an accompanying guide as “threats from people who have access to the organization’s information systems and may cause loss of physical inventory, data, and other security risks.” [Continue reading…]

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Obama: ‘The odds of people dying in a terrorist attack obviously are still a lot lower than in a car accident, unfortunately.’ Unfortunately?

Did Obama mean ‘fortunately’ and misspeak when he said ‘unfortunately’?

No.

If he was really wanting to underline the fact that car accidents pose a vastly greater threat to Americans than does terrorism, then he would be acknowledging that this administration and its predecessor have got their priorities wrong — that is, if they truly believe it’s their job to keep Americans safe.

So, he wasn’t celebrating the fact that terrorism poses a minimal risk to the average American.

Neither, presumably, was he saying that it’s unfortunate that terrorists aren’t doing a better job at killing people.

All he could have been implying was while it’s unfortunate that lots of people get killed in car accidents, there’s not much the government can do to reduce that risk. The resources of the U.S. government (provided by U.S. taxpayers) are much better being dedicated to minimizing what is already statistically a virtually non-existent risk posed by the threat of terrorism.

In the pathology of Washington-speak which marches in lock-step with the interests of the Military-Technology Complex, this is what it means to keep things in perspective.

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NSA searching vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications

The New York Times reports: The National Security Agency is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance, according to intelligence officials.

The N.S.A. is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, a practice that government officials have openly acknowledged. It is also casting a far wider net for people who cite information linked to those foreigners, like a little used e-mail address, according to a senior intelligence official.

While it has long been known that the agency conducts extensive computer searches of data it vacuums up overseas, that it is systematically searching — without warrants — through the contents of Americans’ communications that cross the border reveals more about the scale of its secret operations.

It also adds another element to the unfolding debate, provoked by the disclosures of Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, about whether the agency has infringed on Americans’ privacy as it scoops up e-mails and phone data in its quest to ferret out foreign intelligence. [Continue reading…]

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IRS manual detailed DEA’s use of hidden intel evidence

Reuters reports: Details of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program that feeds tips to federal agents and then instructs them to alter the investigative trail were published in a manual used by agents of the Internal Revenue Service for two years.

The practice of recreating the investigative trail, highly criticized by former prosecutors and defense lawyers after Reuters reported it this week, is now under review by the Justice Department. Two high-profile Republicans have also raised questions about the procedure.

A 350-word entry in the Internal Revenue Manual instructed agents of the U.S. tax agency to omit any reference to tips supplied by the DEA’s Special Operations Division, especially from affidavits, court proceedings or investigative files. The entry was published and posted online in 2005 and 2006, and was removed in early 2007. The IRS is among two dozen arms of the government working with the Special Operations Division, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.

An IRS spokesman had no comment on the entry or on why it was removed from the manual. Reuters recovered the previous editions from the archives of the Westlaw legal database, which is owned by Thomson Reuters Corp, the parent of this news agency.

As Reuters reported Monday, the Special Operations Division of the DEA funnels information from overseas NSA intercepts, domestic wiretaps, informants and a large DEA database of telephone records to authorities nationwide to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. The DEA phone database is distinct from a NSA database disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Monday’s Reuters report cited internal government documents that show that law enforcement agents have been trained to conceal how such investigations truly begin – to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up the original source of the information.

DEA officials said the practice is legal and has been in near-daily use since the 1990s. They have said that its purpose is to protect sources and methods, not to withhold evidence.

Defense attorneys and some former judges and prosecutors say that systematically hiding potential evidence from defendants violates the U.S. Constitution. [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s new president, Hasan Rouhani, moves to cut size of Revolutionary Guard

The Wall Street Journal reports: Iran’s new president, Hasan Rouhani, moved to significantly reduce the presence of the country’s elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in Tehran’s next government — a trend U.S. and European officials cautiously take as a hopeful sign for international efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear program.

Mr. Rouhani’s cabinet appointments in recent days have marked a sharp reversal from a nearly decadelong trend in which IRGC personnel increasingly have dominated many branches of Iran’s government, and their companies have taken over key industries in the national economy.

The IRGC is the country’s most powerful military, economic and security force, and has led the decision-making on Tehran’s role in the conflicts in Syria, Iraq and the Palestinian territories, according to Iranian and Arab officials. Its nation-wide paramilitary organization, the Basij, was the lead force in the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in 2009.

About half of outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s last 18-person cabinet consisted of IRGC personnel, either active officers or recently retired ones. Estimates are that Mr. Rouhani has selected three, according to Western officials and Iran experts.

Mr. Rouhani has stressed since winning Iran’s presidential election in July that his primary focus will be on revitalizing Iran’s crisis-hit economy and rolling back a U.S.-led sanctions campaign on Tehran that has cut the government’s oil revenues by more than half.

At least 10 of Mr. Rouhani’s cabinet appointments are technocrats and economic planners with ties to Iran’s former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who sought to promote international trade while in office during the 1990s. [Continue reading…]

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