Iran is conducting a campaign to extract sensitive U.S. data and use it to harm Americans and our allies, and policymakers are not doing enough to stop it.
President Donald Trump‘s Feb. 4 executive order ordering the government to start a robust campaign against Iran’s intellectual property theft is a good start, drawing attention to a serious and long-overlooked problem. Yet, Congress and relevant agencies need to build on this momentum and do more to caution industry about the critical threat of Iranian IP extraction, explaining how to identify it, protect against it, and stop it.
As China’s high-profile efforts to surveil Americans via TikTok demonstrate, foreign enemies continuously seek to use America’s openness and societal freedoms to their own advantage. Less prominent but just as dangerous, Iran is stealing U.S. high-tech data and using it in the projectiles targeting Americans and our allies on the battlefield.
A December 2023 indictment alleged a dual U.S.-Iranian national stole sensitive data and components from his U.S. employer and sent them to Iran’s Sanat Danesh Rahpuyan Aflak, an Iranian defense firm building drone navigation systems. These components precisely guide Iranian drones to their targets, including a January 2024 drone attack that killed three U.S. troops in Jordan.
This attack underscores a broader problem: Iran’s data theft helps close the capability gap at little cost to Tehran, threatening U.S. and ally mission success. As one senior U.S. official put it, “Iranian drones we’re recovering on the battlefield in Ukraine and throughout the Middle East are found to have sensitive U.S. communications systems and microelectronics.” Iran and its proxies regularly use drones with U.S. components to target Americans — including in many of the 200-plus attacks on U.S. troops in the Middle East in the past 16 months.
Iranian IP theft expands beyond drone navigation systems to include the extraction and theft of sensitive data on U.S. airspace, military aircraft components from U.S. defense contractors, and confidential technical data and prototypes with applications in missile research. In every case, the actions could lead to “catastrophic” consequences without any guarantee this sensitive data remained in Iranian hands since both China and Russia have been beneficiaries of Iran’s thievery in the past.
The United States must not accept Iran’s IP theft as a fait accompli. The U.S. needs to go on offense against the broader Iranian problem set, including greater financial and military pressure against the regime. In addition to changing the calculus of Iran’s presently high-reward, low-risk data theft, policymakers need to shift more attention to defending against Iran’s efforts. The primary interagency IP theft entity, the Disruptive Technology Strike Force, has unsealed charges against over 35 defendants in at least 25 cases in its two-year history, but this task force’s batting average is likely far lower than it could be.
Cracking down on Iranian IP theft will require Congress to use its subpoena powers to investigate how Iran extracted critical information from sensitive U.S. sectors in the first place. Lawmakers should hold hearings and closed-door briefings with officials in the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and State to learn how Iranian agents gained employment eligibility in sensitive U.S. sectors and, in some cases, security clearances. Only by gaining a better understanding of these security lapses can lawmakers prevent a recurrence.
Iranian IP theft’s sophisticated nature requires Congress to push relevant federal agencies, namely the Departments of Commerce, Homeland Security, and Justice, to improve their cooperation with and guidance to the private sector. Though the federal government issues cyberattack guidance to industry, it should issue clear, parallel guidelines about insider threats, including indicators of suspicious behavior and how to compartmentalize sensitive information. The DTSF should also establish an anonymous tip line, like the FBI’s cyber division tip line, for suspected adversary theft.
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To help industry cope with this growing threat, Congress should revive stalled legislation requiring the Commerce Department to better publicize IP threats to U.S. companies and to make it easier for firms to request an interagency federal IP theft investigation. Congress must adequately fund the DTSF’s component agencies, the Departments of Commerce and Justice, to ensure they are sufficiently capable of combatting this growing threat.
U.S. policymakers must take urgent action to address the rampant threat against our intellectual property by foreign adversaries or risk seeing it used against us on the battlefield.
Retired Lt. Gen. William Bender is former chief information officer of the United States Air Force and a participant in the Jewish Institute for National Security of America’s 2019 Generals and Admirals program. Yoni Tobin is a senior policy analyst at JINSA.
