Make no mistake: The Iranian regime is running scared. So scared, in fact, that they — or someone else — appear to be cracking down on phone calls into the country.
A Friday report from the Associated Press indicated that since Israel began strikes against the Islamic republic a week earlier, many callers into the country have been answered by what sounds like AI bots — most of the time speaking in English.
It’s unclear where the voices come from — if all of them even originate from the same place — although a number of Iranians abroad have experienced the messages while trying to call home since the strikes started.
Take the case of Ellie, one of nine people who talked to the AP about the story. Her mom is described as being “diabetic, low on insulin and trapped on the outskirts of Tehran.”
She wanted her mom to evacuate and called from Britain to tell her so.
Instead, she reached a robotic female voice speaking in English: “Alo? Alo?” the voice said, then asking, “Who is calling?”
“I can’t heard you,” the voice said after a few seconds. “Who you want to speak with? I’m Alyssia. Do you remember me? I think I don’t know who are you.”
“I don’t know why they’re doing this,” Ellie said.
“Calling your mom and expecting to hear her voice and hearing an AI voice is one of the most scary things I’ve ever experienced,” said another woman living in the U.S. who called relatives at home in Iran and received the same message. “I can feel it in my body.”
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She called the message “psychological warfare.”
Another British woman who called her mother in Iran got a different voice.
“Thank you for taking the time to listen,” the message said. “Today, I’d like to share some thoughts with you and share a few things that might resonate in our daily lives. Life is full of unexpected surprises, and these surprises can sometimes bring joy while at other times they challenge us.”
“Close your eyes and picture yourself in a place that brings you peace and happiness,” it continued. “Maybe you are walking through a serene forest, listening to the rustle of leaves and birds chirping. Or you’re by the seashore, hearing the calming sound of waves crashing on the sand.”
“Five experts with whom the AP shared recordings said it could be low-tech artificial intelligence, a chatbot or a pre-recorded message to which calls from abroad were diverted,” the wire service reported.
“It remains unclear who is behind the operation, though four of the experts believed it was likely to be the Iranian government while the fifth saw Israel as more likely.”
One U.S.-based cybersecurity expert said he thought that the measures were implemented by Iran and designed to stop hackers, although he didn’t have any evidence to that. However, he said that they “fit the pattern of the Iranian government and how in the past it handled emergency situations.”
A former global policy vice president for Twitter, meanwhile, said he thought that Iran’s phone companies were defaulting calls to an automated system instead of allowing them to be completed.
And while one of the experts said they thought it was an Israeli job, Mehdi Yahyanejad — an activist and tech entrepreneur born in Iran — found this unlikely.
“It would be hard for anybody else to hack. Of course, it is possible it is Israeli. But I don’t think they have an incentive to do this,” he said.
Indeed, given the events of the past week, Israel likely wouldn’t be the losers if there was a way for outsiders not swallowing government propaganda 24/7 to communicate with those in Iran; given that the government has called for its citizens to delete messaging service WhatsApp on the spurious grounds that it’s an “Israeli” app mining data for the Jewish state, that lends more credibility to Tehran being behind this.
Of course, this could be a case of neither/nor; perhaps these messages are just crude default backups if there’s some sort of issue with the country’s communications infrastructure, as one would expect after the past week.
Whatever the case, the clampdown on information entering the state is only going to intensify now that U.S. warplanes have managed to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. That’s doubly true if President Donald Trump is right in his assessment and the attacks “obliterated” all three major Iranian nuclear sites — meaning that Tehran doesn’t have chips to bargain with. It’s a chilling reminder that the theocratic regime will do anything to hold onto its ill-gotten power, including potentially isolating citizens from their families in the outside world.
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