Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has outed 18 U.S. companies possible as operating in co-ordination in the assassinations of Iranian leaders. For all of us it means that these devices and tech products by these companies are being used against the user. They can be hacked by the US government or the markers of these products and used to track, locate, gather data for any reason, commercial or even to murder people.

Therefore, it is important to seek open source alternatives as soon as they can be produced.

According to Iran’s Tasnim News Agency on the 31st, the IRGC claimed in a statement that "U.S. ICT (information and communications technology) and AI (artificial intelligence) companies, which design and track terrorist targets, are behind the terrorist attacks that killed Iranian citizens."

The 18 companies mentioned by the IRGC are

• Apple
• Google
• Meta
• Microsoft
• HP
• Intel
• IBM
• Cisco
• Tesla
• NVIDIA
• Oracle
• JP Morgan
• Boeing
• Dell Technologies
• Palantir
• General Electric (GE)
• G42
• Spire Solutions

In early March, Iranian drones attacked several Amazon data centers in the UAE and Bahrain.

The Iranian military announced in a separate statement that it attacked Siemens and AT&T’s communication and industrial centers. The military claimed, “The Siemens industrial software center is responsible for optimizing weapon production lines and designing military systems for the Israeli military using advanced technologies such as AI and industrial automation,” and “The AT&T communication center in Haifa is a hub supporting advanced networking technologies, cloud computing, and AI fields for the Israeli military.”

It is often undisclosed if technology companies products are hacking personal devices, harvesting data, or sending your location to third parties, all of which are not acceptable to be doing for any reason, in many countries without a warrant. Government ignore the practice and do not protect citizenry against this behavior instead many partake in it.