President Barack Obama has during his time in office secretly sped up the wave of sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that control Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly widening America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, The New York Times reported.
According to participants in the cyberattacks program, Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — launched during George W. Bush’s presidency and code-named Olympic Games — even after one of the program’s viruses, a “worm” called Stuxnet developed by the U.S. and Israel, leaked to the public.
The last of that series of attacks temporarily took out almost 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had been spinning to purify uranium. The Obama administration estimates that the Iranian nuke-developing effort was set back by 18 months to two years by the intensified attacks, according to the Times.
Cyberattacks have been touted and criticized as an alternative to military action.
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11 Responses
sounds like a real secret. its great to let Iran know all the secrets. its a mitzvah to share!
It seems that both Israeli and American politicians seem incapable of keeping secrets (or alternatively, they are very clever at releasing disinformation). They should remember that the most important secret of World War II, that the Allies had broken the German codes, was kept secret for over 25 years after the war, just to be on the safe side (okay, and to hide the embarassment of publicizing some dubious decisions what the Allies did with that intelligence, particularly pertaining to the holocaust).
And it is out of the question that this information was deliberately leaked? It brings the cyber-alliance between Israel and the United States out into the open…it takes neither a rocket scientist nor a Shas bound chochum to figure our how that might be helpful.
This is only being leaked to boost 0bama. It will eventually turn out, just like with the Yemeni bomb story, that 0bama’s role was nothing, and that he’s damaged it by leaking.
Akuperma, where’s the relevance? Codebreaking capability was an ongoing advantage, and masking it was a further competitive advantage. For the computer viruses, the existence of the capability is known, due to its spread beyond the initial target and via normal commercial antivirus activity. The only secret was the sponsor/developer identity. What gain is there in keeping that secret?
This is a huge credit to President Obama. It shows that he takes the Iranian threat seriously. If you read the New York Times article this came out in, you’ll see Pres. Obama did this on advice from the Pres. Bush, it is to his credit that he accepted this advice. We should not withhold credit when it is due. Stuxnet was a relative success. It’s biggest failing was that it got out of control. I would like to know more about how that happened.
Here’s Obama bragging about expanding a program that Bush started! Attacking foreign countries without getting permission from congress. But the truth is that he probably had nothing to do with it. It’s likely that stuxnet was almost entirely an Israeli show with no more than a little technical advice from the US. This article makes it sound like the US lead the effort. Possible, I suppose but some evidence would be nice. Instead the article relies entirely on what 0bama’s people told the reporter.
This is purely to bolster our glorious president’s security/foreign policy credentials in an election year. “I got Osama, I gave Iran a Cyber black eye, I am wonderful so re-elect me.”
Anonimity86, it doesn’t say he did it on Bush’s advice, it says that the program started during Bush’s administration but 0bama personally pushed it. And there is no reason to believe any of this; the source is the administration itself, tooting its own horn, when the truth is probably very different.
To No. 7
Obama has been cleaning up after the mess created by Bush and Cheney for years and b’yh, will have another 4 years to complete the job. It will unfortunately be decades before this nation recovers from the lying and deception of that got us into Iraq and took the lives of thousands of our men and women who should have be focused exclusively on the real terrorists. Your hatred of Obama makes you blind to reality but that is nothing new.
Neither Bush nor Cheney lied at all, but Gadolbe’einav lies again and again.