The New York Times reveals today that it is the Obama administration and Israel that launched cyber attacks on Iran via the worm named Stuxnet, and that Obama directly gave a secret order to have the program, named Olympic Games, proceed.
I wrote before about the hypocrisy in the US warnings against cyber warfare, given that the US and Israel were the most likely practitioners of it. I wonder if NPR’s Pentagon propagandist Tom Gjelten will report that the threatening rogue nations he has been warning us about are actually the US and Israel. The latest malware named ‘Flame’, again targeting mostly Iran, is likely part of the same program given its sophistication and complexity, which suggests that a government was behind it.
Watch how this story will disappear as new stories emerge of dastardly efforts by unnamed enemies of the US to launch cyber attacks and how our privacy rights must be further violated in order to give the government tools to combat it.
That is how the propaganda system works, not by totally suppressing unwelcome information but by practicing a form of willful amnesia.
Stuxnet did not just achieve its (dubious) objective, it also caused millions of dollars in damage and clean-up costs, worldwide. If you or I wrote and released a computer virus that did such damage, we’d be looking at prison time and punitive damages. Never mind that: a) it was an act of war b) its target involved “dangerous forces”(nuclear) under protocol 2 of the 1977 Geneva Conventions c) a war crime d) a civil crime e) a leak of classified information by the administration to make itself look better during an election year -- you can be sure nobody will do anything more than slap backs and giggle.
I suspect that if you or I released a virus that did comparable damage to US systems, we’d be “disappeared” in short order. If we did it to Israeli systems, we’d be assassinated messily and publicly.