Slack reportedly bans Iranian users, even if they're not in Iran

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/20/slack-reportedly-bans-iranian.html

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Good going Slack.
Let those algorithms kill your reputation.

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Oh lord. If visiting an OFAC-restricted country (as judged by IP tracking) means your Slack acct gets shut down, well, good luck to

  • everybody who has visited Cuba in the last year or so since travel restrictions got lifted;

  • NGO employees trying to do work in any of the affected countries;

  • people with family members still living in Iran

…and this is just off the top of my head based on people I actually know.

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Was it algorithms, or did the Iranian government give them a little list?

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I know a Persian living in the US. Not sure he uses Slack.

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Good. Let this idiotic platform die already, and go with open protocols that don’t make your internal communications dependant on the whims of a third party.

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Racism pure and simple.

Racism disguised as patriotism. I’m glad I never used Slack in my life. Now I know that I never will.

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Why would the Iranian government help an American company enforce US sanctions against Iran?

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Or why would the Iranian government get an American company to pull the plug on suspected dissidents?

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If the Iranian government wanted to silence critics on social media, they would first target instagram which is huge there.

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It all depends on which services they can intercept.

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Indeed. It would have been trivial simply to ban accounts created by IP addresses originating from within Iran. They’re going out of their way to dragnet ethnic Iranians/Persians who may be citizens of other countries and have nothing but family in Iran. Slack deserves all the heat they take for this, they’re willing to do more work to be more racist than the law requires.

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Or maybe they got a nasty visit from some US regulator and are taking a shotgun approach because the government demanded it.

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Not impossible, but I’d have to see the receipts on that one. The limping Federal government has bigger fish to fry. And even if some bureaucrat told them they had to, the law still doesn’t require it. Either way, someone at Slack made the conscious decision to try, albeit hamfistedly, to identify and ban ethnic Persians outside of Iran. I’d be very interested to know who at the company decided that.

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Slack are clearly amateurs at ITAR.

My impression is that they are banning accounts which have ever been used from Iran. So if an ethnic Iranian developer goes home to visit family, and does some work from there, the account is in danger.

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But the author claimed he’s “not working with Iranians on slack.”

how did he log into Slack from an Iranian IP, unless he’s not telling the whole truth?

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Probably minimaxing their evil for the best eventual return.
Could’ve just been people who bought off-Pom pomegranate juice.
Just keep searching for those tips on how to let down when you
haven’t eaten for a week and your locust-proof juicer has NATO
damage. And makeup tutorials on how to look like Mr. Bean…

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I have slack on my phone. It is connected to a personal account which I use with my wife and my son, as well as account operated by my employer. Even if I don’t directly look at the work account, slack is still checking it through my data connection.

I could travel to Iran, and get my employers account banned.

Two years ago I traveled to Europe via Hong Kong and later noticed that a GPS tracking app which I wrote, got an internet connection during the three hour wait for the next plane, and marked my location. I didn’t expect that to happen at all.

So the iranian IP address could have been used while traveling, or it could be a geocoding mistake. Perhaps that IP address is associated with Iran but actually used in Kuwait.

Or the owner of a phone lent it to a friend or relative who went to Iran, and slack wasn’t disabled during the trip.

There are lots of possible ways it could happen.

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Visiting family, vacation - onion router.

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A lot of people need to use Slack to do their job. Many of them are probably not in a position to influence their employer’s choice of communications tools.

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