MEDIA ROOTS — During an episode of Media Roots Radio last year, Abby and I speculated on who might be behind the infamous ‘stuxnet’ virus, a sophisticated piece of computer malware designed to interfere with Iran’s uranium enrichment process. We guessed that it was perhaps the United States and Israel working in concert on a covert warfare effort with the shared goal of derailing any potentiality of Iran producing a nuclear bomb.
Well, it turns out that our assertions were correct. The United States and Israel essentially came out swinging, bragging about the success of this covert and highly sophisticated act of cyber terror against Iran.
According to The New York Times:
“This account of the American and Israeli effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program is based on interviews over the past 18 months with current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program…… None would allow their names to be used”.
So there you have it, another PR campaign in the form of “anonymous sources.” It almost gives it a more exciting extra dimensional tone, instead of the boring old ‘known sources’ we usually rely on.
Software publications and programmers alike are decrying the US government for what they call “opening Pandora’s box.” Some have a more reasoned approach saying that similar clones of stuxnet can be used against corporations and businesses via industrial sabotage. Others declare that this opens the door for a new kind of cyber warfare that terrorists can and will use since we handed them the tools to do it. The latter theory rings of the all too familiar ‘blow back’ hypothesis, one which we try to avoid on this website. With our increasing power and surveillance technologies, where will the United States draw the line in disrupting the activities of other nation states? As long as US troops aren’t dying in battle, most likely no one will notice. And even if they do, people as a whole won’t care very much.
We can safely assume that stuxnet is just an additional tool in the arsenal for the covert war already being waged against Iran. In January of this year, 32-year-old Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a nuclear scientist working on the Iran nuclear program and his driver were assassinated with a sophisticated remote controlled magnetic bomb stashed underneath their car. On November 4th of 2011, an Iranian missile test accident caused the deaths of 14 people, including the head of Iran’s missile program, Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, at an integral military research site. Many speculate that this was again a sophisticated form of a computer virus like stuxnet or even stuxnet itself that altered the course of the launched rocket causing it to fly back down directly on top of the observers.
Another Media Roots article entitled ‘Stuxnet, A Declaration of War?‘ describes in detail how the US has been waging a consistent covert war against Iran since 2005 (Seymour Hersh wrote about it). The main difference now is that the US has directly admitted involvement in events that were long suspected to be the invisible hand of US intelligence and black ops. It’s now out in the open, perhaps intended as a game of cat and mouse where the intention is to see what happens when we throw the truth it in their face.
Robbie Martin for Media Roots
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NY TIMES – Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.
At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.
“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.
Continue Reading Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran
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Article Photo by AP/Fars News Agency, Mehdi Marizad, Headline Photo by Flickr user Mypoorbrain
