Or perhaps the Iran link was a misdirection. They were worried that people would notice the MITMed certs, so they MITMed a lot of Iranian customers to make it l

Or perhaps the Iran link was a misdirection. They were worried that people would notice the MITMed certs, so they MITMed a lot of Iranian customers to make it look like the attack came from there. > They can legally compel Google to give them the email of foreigners in a foreign country. They can, but they may wish to be more subtle than that. For example, if they were engaged in economic espionage, they might not want that story to break, and would be worried that someone at Google may leak the story. If they had to ask Google, there would be more people who would know about what's going on.