Exiled Iranian programmer: 'My life was in danger'
An Iranian computer programmer explains why he fled his native country after his government grew tired of his opposition to its cyber warfare scheming.
Q: What are some of the specific activities the government is working on and who are the main targets? Israel? The U.S.?
A: They were asking me to do defensive and offensive projects. In defensive, they wanted to make teams including me and some others to secure their servers and wanted me to work on their customized operating systems so they were more secure from attack or from being attacked by other countries.
Other parts of my job were working on foreign servers and resources, trying to find data and information (presumably in an effort to uncover weaknesses). I didn't exactly know what they might use it for or which organization would work on it from there. Sometimes, people would come from other countries for training with a special Iranian trainer and sometimes they sent highly-trained Iranian operatives to work in foreign countries.
Q: When did you leave Iran and what were the circumstances?
A: After I rejected several work offers from the government, they started to use their power to scare me. I was still rejecting the offers but after an election and plenty of security issues with their servers being hacked everything started to turn bad for me.
Q: How so?
A: They started to see me as one of the attackers so they started putting me in situations where I felt like my life in danger. I had no choice but to leave, so in January 2010 I did.
