The government of Iran claims to have obtained “thousands of pages of information” from devices used by the U.S. Navy sailors briefly detained in January.
On Tuesday, Iranian state TV quoted Gen. Ali Razmjou, a naval commander in Iran's Revolutionary Guard, as saying that “information filling about 13,000 pages” was retrieved from laptops, GPS devices, and other gadgets.
“If only the Navy issued phones that were encrypted so even governments couldn't get in,” quipped my Freedom of the Press Foundation colleague Trevor Timm.
This is also why we can't have good-guys-only backdoors.
And yes, it does appear that the government of Iran measures all of the extremely sensitive U.S. military data it steals as the spoils of war in total number of pages it takes to print the data out. Never change, Tehran. Never change.
From the Navy Times report:
He said the move falls within Iran's rights under international regulations, and that the information recovered could be used in "various fields." Iranian authorities returned all the devices taken from the Americans even though it had the right to confiscate them, he said.
The Guard plans to publish a book on the incident based on international reactions and coverage of the event, Razmjou added.
Yep. A book.
Photo released by Iranian Revolutionary Guards on Jan. 13, 2016, shows detained US Navy ships. Sepahnews via navytimes.com
