Beware Psiphon, CIA Tool Fueling Global Protests
Ever since foreign-backed riots broke out in Iran in mid-September, Western news outlets have frequently drawn attention to Psiphon. The free, open-source smartphone application and computer program allows users to circumvent national restrictions on websites and online resources, helping troublemakers organize and coordinate their activities, and send and receive messages to and from the outside world.
In the process, Psiphon has received untold amounts of highly-influential free advertising, and some Iranians - along with residents of West Asia more widely - will no doubt have been encouraged to download the software.
However, not a single mainstream source has acknowledged Psiphon’s spectral origins, let alone the malign aims it serves, and sinister purposes to which it can be put by its sponsors in the US intelligence community.
Psiphon was launched in 2009. Avowedly intended to support anti-government elements in countries the company considers “enemies of the internet”, the resource employs a combination of secure communication and obfuscation technologies, including VPNs, web proxies, and secure shell protocols (SSH), which allows users to effectively set up their own private servers that their own government cannot monitor.
Over Psiphon’s lifetime, it has been funded and distributed by a variety of spook-adjacent organizations. For example, it was for several years promoted by ASL19, founded by Iranian expat Ali Bangi in 2013 to capitalize on vast US funding flowing to “Internet Freedom” initiatives, in the Arab Spring’s wake.
A June 2011 New York Times probe into Washington’s “Internet Freedom” push concluded that all these endeavors serve to “deploy ‘shadow’ internet and mobile phone systems dissidents can use to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya.”
Bangi’s proximity to the US government was made abundantly clear when in 2016 he attended the White House’s annual celebration of Nowruz, invariably a coming-out party for elite state-sponsored “regime change” activists. Such high-level appearances, along with his status as a permanent fixture at tech conferences and digital rights events, cemented his place as a “rock star” figure within the Iranian diaspora.
Bangi was nonetheless forced to resign from ASL19 in 2018, after he ended up in court in Canada on charges of sexual assault and forcible imprisonment. A resultant profile in tech industry magazine The Verge alleged he had fostered a culture of widespread drug use, sexism, harassment, and bullying within the organization. On several occasions he was aggressive and even violent towards staff, with female employees a particular target of his ire.
With Bangi and ASL19 out of the picture, in 2019 Psiphon began receiving millions from the Open Technology Fund (OTF), created seven years earlier by Radio Free Asia (RFA), which in turn was founded by the CIA in 1948 following official authorization to engage in “black operations”. This included propaganda, economic warfare, sabotage, subversion, and “assistance to underground resistance movements.”
In 2007, the CIA’s official website ranked RFA and other “psychological warfare” initiatives such as Radio Free Europe and Voice of America among “the longest-running and most successful covert action campaigns” it ever mounted.
Today, RFA is an asset of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which is funded by the US Congress to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars every year. In August 2018, its CEO acknowledged “the organization’s “global priorities…reflect US national security interests.”
OTF was one of the several malign initiatives spun out of “Internet Freedom”. Individuals intimately involved in making this desire a reality are under no illusion as to the true raison d’etre they are serving. In February 2015, Jillian York, an OTF advisory board member, stated she “fundamentally” believed “Internet Freedom” was “at heart an agenda of regime change.”
OTF being the brainchild of a US intelligence-created “psychological warfare” platform illuminates a key purpose of Psiphon. Namely, ensuring citizens of countries in the crosshairs of ongoing US-led regime change efforts can continue to access Western state propaganda.
A November 2019 USAGM factsheet on “tools supported by OTF” gives top-billing to Psiphon.
“OTF provides USAGM networks with assistance to protect their content online and ensure it is resistant to censorship. For example, when USAGM news sites were abruptly blocked in Pakistan, OTF created mirror sites to ensure USAGM content remained available for key audiences,” the factsheet states. “OTF provides emergency support to independent media outlets and journalists facing digital attacks to get back online and mitigate future attacks.”
A May 2020 OTF report, on “highlights and challenges” of the year to date, likewise notes “veteran circumvention tool provider” Psiphon ensures USAGM-published content - including Voice of America Farsi - can reach audiences in countries in which it is banned.
In March, a dedicated section of the BBC website, published following the British state broadcaster’s prohibition by Moscow, offered an explanatory guide to how local residents can download the app via Android, Apple and Windows, in English, Russian, and Ukrainian. Psiphon was moreover promoted by the BBC Press Office’s official Twitter account at the same time.
Should users “find it difficult” to access Psiphon via established app stores, they were invited to send a blank message to a listed email address to receive “a direct and safe download link.”
In Iran, such utility is no doubt similarly invaluable given hostile media such as the BBC and RFA paint an utterly one-sided picture of the unfolding unrest, framing violent, incendiary actions by anti-government elements as peaceful, while wholly ignoring large-scale pro-government demonstrations.
Another core Psiphon strength from the perspective of Western power, is the resource funnels all user data to and through centralized servers, owned by the company itself.
While a user’s activities on the network might be shielded from the prying eyes of their own government, Psiphon can track what sites they are visiting, and their communications in real-time. This allows foreign actors to keep an unblinking eye trained on protesters and protest movements, and respond accordingly.
Psiphon’s meddling in Iran is now a long-established matter of public record. Back in 2013, the company published a blog hailing the “particularly big impact” it had made in the country, “coinciding with their presidential election.”
While acknowledging Tehran had “always been a big challenge for us,” Psiphon boasted that its software “stayed available” consistently during this time, despite repeated efforts to “severely throttle” its operation.
That none of this background has emerged in any of the countless fawning mainstream puff pieces on Psiphon is shocking, but unsurprising. After all, Western news outlets stand to materially benefit from a US-run protection racket projecting their agitprop to countless millions of people in secret.
And in becoming actively complicit in a US "regime change" operation, mainstream journalists are all less likely to acknowledge the reality of what’s happening in Tehran, why, and who and what stands to materially benefit from the government’s ouster.
The Internet has given incredible freedoms to humanity. The ability to share, discuss or discover anything and everything anywhere at anytime is powerful, and it's helped me personally. I wouldn't be the same person today if it was not for a free and anonymous internet.
It's quite saddening to see Internet freedom be co-opted for purposes like this. The intelligence apparatuses will lecture other countries on the sad state of their Internet access while they clench down on Internet freedoms back at home.
I like this article, Kit. Good research chops. But it seems to miss a big part of the story. I have been using Psiphon in China for years, mostly because it's free. I don't remember why, but I always assumed it was out of Pakistan despite the Canadian domain. That caused a little concern, because China-Pakistan relations could have meant that Psiphon was a honeypot to catch malefactors in China. I wasn't very worried, because I don't have anything to conceal and I have a friendly relationship with the China government. (I'm even supportive of them regarding their internal affairs: considering all of the rampant smearing by people like Matthew Tye, Winston Sterzel, and other creepy vloggers.)
Now I happen upon your article. Good stuff, informative, but I don't understand why you don't mention that Psiphon originated out of Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, and continues there. That's its home. I just looked it up, and you could have, and it's a very big thing that you don't mention it once in this article to provide balance. You portray Psiphon as a spook operation. If there's money coming directly into UT from the CIA, I'd be rather surprised. You make them sound like an arm of the spook government whose goal is regime change, when they're actually mostly just progressive promoters of the open internet and take credit for big change. Bangi's a creep for sure, but you almost make it sound as if he were pulling the strings at Psiphon. Of course he had nothing to do with them.
I'm a longtime Chicago activist of minor repute. I co-founded organizations like Protect Our Parks (fought privatizing of public parks), AIGA's Design for Democracy (improved the voting experience), and various hacktivist projects. Some of these received significant money (e.g., checks in the $50,000+ range) from partisan, anti-mainstream political players and wealthy malcontents with a healthy dislike for the Chicago Machine. We used the money for major lawsuits against the city. When we earned media about our accomplishments, you can be sure we boasted about them, but we also disclosed our funders, both nonpartisan and partisan. It's the law, either de jure calling for periodic publication or else available via request of access to records (equivalent of FOIA in Canada for publicly funded entities like UT). If Psiphon's people want to tout their influence on Iran, I think it's fair game, although they should probably disclose their funders. Did you look into this at all?
I know, I know, I'm a U.S. citizen and I don't like it any more than anyone else that my taxes go to the CIA's manipulative practices abroad. But notwithstanding its support sources, Psiphon's activities from Toronto qualify more as overt operations, not covert. Your article is of value to show the historical connections and sustained operation of these overt ops throughout the 20th century and continuing to this day, in the form of Radio Free and other media operations. China, the U.S., BBC, NYT, all big media outlets control public opinion in unsavory ways, to drive their big agendas. That's not news, it's an uncomfortable fact of the world that needs to change. See Manufacturing Consent.