A Quantitative Analysis of the Human Resources Activity of the Iranian Cyber Army

Abstract

The Iranian cyberspace has been developed in a natural process of Internet technologies being introduced in the society for more than a decade. However, governmental policies have had dominant impacts on its development. Specifically, during the campaigns for presidential elections in 2009, in the absence of freedom of speech in real world and stagnancy of traditional media in providing a criticising content in favour of democracy, citizen journalism played a major role in covering the news in the independent space of the web. Since then, the Iranian state authorities have inevitably decided for new strategic plans in order to control and object the flow of free information through virtual social networks. One of the strategies inducing publicly that cyberspace and its provided opportunities are threats to national security and therefore, establishing and enhancing a cyber army to save the virtual battlefield have been adopted as an implicative response to the situation. Now, it is quite arguable to claim that Iranian cyber army has operated successfully and the human resources who support the governmental policies and could be referred as pro-government warriors in soft war are still ready to keep on their predefined roles. This research activity, including an initial survey on the literature of soft war and a brief chronology of formation of the Iranian cyber army, performs an analysis on a number of determined statistical features of the online activity of these pro-government warriors in order to evaluate the validity of the acclaimed statement. In this paper, by referring to the quantitative outcomes of the study, it is tried to clarify whether the Iranian state authorities have successfully managed pro-government cyber warriors or not.