Does computer worm "stuxnet" attack Iranian Nuclear Program?

[Magda Hassan]

It is an act of war.

[Peter Lemkin]

Ah, another War...just what everyone wants and needs....

Report: Obama Has Waged Major Cyberweapons Campaign Against Iran

The New York Times has revealed President Obama has waged a major cyberweapons operation against Iran since the early days of his administration. The program, known as "Olympic Games," has been used to sabotage the computer systems at Iran's nuclear facilities. It began under the Bush administration, but was significantly expanded when Obama took office in 2009. Obama decided to continue with the program in 2010 even after part of it became public when it accidentally unleashed a computer worm known as Stuxnet across the global internet. Developed with the help of Israeli intelligence, Stuxnet is said to have destroyed some of Iran's centrifuges, but the full extent of the damage is unclear. The Obama administration's cyber-campaign in Iran is believed to be the first sustained effort by one country to destroy another's infrastructure through computer attacks.

[Jan Klimkowski]

More...

US was 'key player in cyber-attacks on Iran's nuclear programme'

President Obama sped up pace of computer sabotage in 2010 even after Stuxnet leak, according to New York Times report

Peter Beaumont

guardian.co.uk, Friday 1 June 2012 18.39 BST

The US was the principal player in the most sophisticated cyber-attack ever known and has been orchestrating a campaign against Iran designed to undermine the country's nuclear programme, it has been claimed.

According to anonymous senior administration sources, quoted in the New York Times, President Barack Obama decided to speed up an initiative launched by his predecessor, George W Bush, codenamed Olympic Games, which aimed to use computer viruses to attack Tehran's uranium-enrichment programme.

The disclosures about Obama's role in the cyberwar against Iran appear to show beyond doubt that the US, with the help of Israel, was behind the Stuxnet virus, which sent some of Iran's centrifuge machines spinning out of control. And it will raise questions about whether Washington was also behind the Flamer virus discovered by experts last week.

This also targeted Iran, though its main aim was to spy on the country's oil industry. It is believed to have downloaded vast amounts of information over two years and had technical capabilities never seen before.

The revelations about US involvement in cyberwar may be seized upon by China and Russia, which are regularly accused by Washington of cyber espionage and theft.

The depiction of Obama's hands-on role in cyber attacks follows the highly political disclosure in an election year that the president had taken a personal role in approving terrorist targets for US drone strikes. The revelations on Iran appear designed to neutralise Republican accusations that he has been weak over the issue of Iran's nuclear programme.

According to the New York Times, Obama took the decision to accelerate the pace of computer sabotage against Tehran in 2010, even after details about one of the cyber weapons developed to attack Iran, the Stuxnet worm, accidentally leaked on to the internet because of a programming error. It had been designed to target the country's Natanz plant.

At a meeting in the White House situation room within days of the worm's escape, Obama asked his advisers, including Leon Panetta, the head of the CIA, whether the effort should be wound up because it had been compromised.

According to sources in the room at the time, Obama asked: "Should we shut this thing down?", before opting instead to push ahead with the attacks. The Natanz plant was hit twice more by versions of the worm, which damaged up to 1,000 high-speed centrifuges then enriching uranium.

The revelation of Obama's involvement in ordering cyber-attacks on Iran in a joint programme involving Israel follows the disclosure that Iran had recently been hit by the Flamer virus, thought to be 20 to 40 times larger than Stuxnet.

According to the latest analysis of Flamer, it had a blue-tooth capability never seen before in a computer worm. The computer security firm Symantec said any laptop infected with Flamer would search for other blue-tooth-enabled devices, sucking up information that might include mobile phone numbers. This would help the attacker "identify the victim's social and professional circles".

The Kaspersky Lab, a Russian-based computer security firm that has studied Stuxnet and Flame, said the first Stuxnet attack on Iran took place around June 2009, but its existence did not emerge until almost a year later, appearing to fit precisely the timeline proposed by the New York Times' sources. Some experts have said there are sufficient similarities between the worms to suggest they have the same source.

Last year the US deputy defence secretary, William Lynn, declined to reveal whether the US was involved in the development of Stuxnet. "This is not something that we're going to be able to answer at this point," he said.

The timing of the disclosure to the New York Times's David E Sanger, who boasts of access to Obama and his closest officials, is particularly significant. In recent weeks, the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, has tried to portray the Obama administration as weak and muddled on foreign policy, most recently over the crisis in Syria. Recent sympathetic media disclosures appear to have been designed to counter this suggestion.

Stuxnet was launched in 2006 after President Bush was advised that a cyber weapon might be more effective than sabotage the CIA had introduced faulty materials into Iran's nuclear procurement networks.

The goal then was to secretly access Natanz's industrial computer controls, which had been designed by the German company Siemens, to acquire a blueprint of how it worked.

That achieved, a joint US-Israeli operation set about building a worm to attack the plant and make its centrifuges run out of control. As was suggested at the time, Stuxnet appears to have been introduced into the Iranian plant with contaminated thumb drives.

"That was our holy grail," one of the architects of the plan said, referring to how the plant was physically accessed. "It turns out there is always an idiot around who doesn't think much about the thumb drive in their hand."

US sources quoted blame Israel for the eventual discovery of the worm. They said the Israeli partners modified Stuxnet and made a programming error that caused it to escape and replicate in cyberspace.

The disclosures throw fresh light on the rapid development of US cyberwarfare capability and reveal its willingness to use cyber weapons offensively to achieve policies.

[Peter Lemkin]

That 'ol 'Bama sure has fooled lots of folks......! No Changes - except for the worse - and you can believe [or by stock, futures or credit default swaps] in that!:captain:

[Carsten Wiethoff]

From http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun...uxnet-leak

A retired US general, James Cartwright, is the target of a Justice Department investigation into the leaking of secret information about the Stuxnet virus attack on Iranian nuclear facilities in 2010, NBC News reported on Thursday, citing unidentified legal sources.
NBC said Cartwright, once the second highest ranking officer in the US military, was being investigated over the leaked information about the computer virus, which temporarily disabled 1,000 centrifuges used byIran to enrich uranium, setting back its nuclear programme.

This is of course the final admission that the U.S. (together with Israel and likely Siemens/Germany) was the author of Stuxnet. If a working international court of justice would exist, this would be a case.
And, of course, getting the whistleblower is important, stopping the crime is not.

[Magda Hassan]

The Strange Case of James Cartwright

John Quiggin
| July 2, 2013


In the flood of news surrounding Edward's Snowden's revelations about the surveillance operations of the National Security Agency, another equally consequential development in the crisis of the security state has gone largely unnoticed. This is the news that retired general James Cartwright, former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is under investigation by the Justice Department in relation to the leaking of secret information about the 2010 Stuxnet virus attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.
To understand the significance of this, it's important to observe that, as with the revelations of Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, this alleged "leak" did not reveal anything that was not known to the enemies of the United States. In all these cases, the leaks only confirmed what any member of the general public who had bothered to follow the story could reasonably infer.
A New York Times article from June 2012, which allegedly relied on leaks from Cartwright, revealed that Stuxnet was part of a U.S. program initiated by the Bush administration and carried on under Obama. However, a look at the May 2012 Wikipedia article on Stuxnet reveals that all this was already generally known, and unofficially acknowledged, although then, as now, neither the United States nor Israel has officially admitted involvement. The existence of the Stuxnet worm was discovered in 2010, when, as a result of defective code, it escaped from the targeted systems in Iran and spread rapidly around the world.
It was soon apparent that it represented a cyber attack requiring the resources of a national government, and that the United States and Israel were the only plausible suspects. Although this was not officially conceded, neither was there any real attempt at denial, or even a refusal of comment.
To quote Wikipedia (May 2012):

In May 2011, the PBS program Need To Know cited a statement by Gary Samore, White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction, in which he said, "we're glad they [the Iranians] are having trouble with their centrifuge machine and that we the US and its allies are doing everything we can to make sure that we complicate matters for them", offering "winking acknowledgement" of US involvement in Stuxnet. According to Daily Telegraph, a showreel that was played at a retirement party for the head of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), Gabi Ashkenazi, included references to Stuxnet as one of his operational successes as the IDF chief of staff.

The only effect of the New York Times report was to extend awareness of Stuxnet to a much broader cross section of the American public and to provide sufficient detail to make any attempt at denial futile. Exactly the same was true of the leaks of Manning and Snowden.
The only difference between the Cartwright leak and those of Manning and Snowden is that Cartwright was not a whistleblower seeking to expose government wrongdoing. Rather, as is the case with the great majority of leaks, Cartwright was an insider, presumably providing information to a friendly journalist that would allow his role in the case to be presented in a favorable light.
It's precisely for this reason that the investigation, and likely criminal prosecution, of this alleged leak is so significant. The investigation would not be happening without significant support from within the political class. In this case, the main instigators appear to be Republicans, angry that the original report was broadly sympathetic to the Obama administration, and supporters of Israel, concerned that revelations about Stuxnet might undermine their position of reflexive support for Israel's foreign policy.
This is something quite new. While politicians have been happy to go after their opponents for financial and sexual improprieties, there has been a clear taboo on criminalizing policy actions, such as the use of torture under the Bush administration. This has been a bipartisan position, allowing the commission of the gravest crimes in pursuit of U.S. policy goals.
The only comparable case, the conviction of former vice president Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on perjury charges relating to the leaking of the identity of a U.S. agent, ended with the commutation of his sentence and no prison time served. But while Libby's leak served the usual purpose of achieving favorable coverage for his policy goals, the naming of a secret agent was a genuine breach of security. Even so, there was no serious attempt to pursue the case once the perjury sentence was commuted.
The remorseless pursuit of whistleblowers under the Obama administration has raised the stakes considerably. For revealing information to the general public, Edward Snowden has been charged with multiple felonies under the 1917 Espionage Act, which carries a maximum penalty of ten years imprisonment for each crime. For the same offence, Bradley Manning, a member of the military, has been charged with "aiding the enemy," a crime which carries the death penalty (though it is not being sought in his case). There is no logical reason why similar charges could not be brought against Cartwright. Other whistleblowers are already serving lengthy prison sentences.


It is hard to know how this will play out. Perhaps we will see the end of the apparent immunity of the political class from prosecution in matters of this kind. In the absence of statutes of limitations, that will make for an uncomfortable retirement for many public officials past, present and future.
On the other hand, the possibility that politicians and senior officials might be subject to the same machinery that has been unleashed against the whistleblowers might lead them to draw back from the precipice. Perhaps we will see a rethinking of the view that telling the truth to the American public, when government officials would prefer to keep it secret, is a crime rather than a public service.
John Quiggin is a professor of economics at the University of Queensland, Australia and adjunct professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is author of Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us.
http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/t...right-8683

[Peter Lemkin]

Nah.....One set of rules for 'them'; one for the rest of us. 'They' leak regularly very Top Secret stuff - when it suits them for political or financial advantage - even just to boast or threaten. However, a real pleb whistleblower trying to alert the rest of the plebs of illegality or worse is apt to get the Manning/Assange/Snowden treatment - or worse.

[David Guyatt]

Nah.....One set of rules for 'them'; one for the rest of us. 'They' leak regularly very Top Secret stuff - when it suits them for political or financial advantage - even just to boast or threaten. However, a real pleb whistleblower trying to alert the rest of the plebs of illegality or worse is apt to get the Manning/Assange/Snowden treatment - or worse.

Oddly enough... I agree entirely. :mexican:

Whenever we see one set of rules invoked against a particular person or group, we probably need to post a contrasting example of another set of rules being invoked that insist on blind eyes being turned for the same sort of activity.

One example here would be the sale of US top secret info and weapons including nuclear secrets via the Turkish American Council mob for sale to the highest bidder including, possibly, international terrorists - a shocking story largely outed by Sybil Edmonds. This example, obviously, is nothing new.

[David Guyatt]

A timely piece from Voltaire Network:

The price of truth

by Thierry Meyssan

While the international press plays up the information leaked by Edward Snowden as a revelation concerning the PRISM surveillance program, feigning to have discovered what everyone should already have known for a long time, Thierry Meyssan is particularly curious about the meaning of this rebellion. From this perspective, he attaches more importance to the case of General Cartwright, who has also been indicted for espionage.

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | 1 JULY 2013 FRANÇAIS PORTUGUÊS ITALIANO ESPAÑOL

Former commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, former Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a former military adviser to President Obama, General James Cartwright is accused of spying: leaking to the New York Times information about the secret war against Iran in order to prevent an unnecessary war.Are American public servants, civilian or military, who face a minimum of 30 years in prison for revealing U.S. state secrets to the press, "whistleblowers" exercising power in a democratic system or are they "resistors to oppression" at the hands of a military-police dictatorship? The answer to this question does not depend on our own political opinions, but on the nature of the U.S. government. The answer completely changes if we focus on the case of Bradley Manning, the young leftist Wikileaks soldier, or if we consider that of General Cartwright, military adviser to President Obama, indicted Thursday, 27 June 2013, for spying.Here, a look back is needed to understand how one shifts from "espionage" in favor of a foreign power to "disloyalty" to a criminal organization that employs you.

Worse than censorship: the criminalization of sources

The President of the United States and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Woodrow Wilson, tried to confer on the Executive branch the power to censor the press when "national security" or "the reputation of the government" are in play. In his speech on State of the Union (7th of December 1915), he said: "There are citizens of the United States ... who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life, who tried to drag the authority and reputation of our government in contempt ... to destroy our industries ... and degrade our policy in favor of foreign intrigue .... We are without adequate federal laws .... I urge you to do nothing less than save the honor and self-respect of the nation. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed."However, Congress did not heed him immediately. After the U.S. entry into the war, it passed the Espionage Act, taking in most of the British Official Secrets Act. It was no longer a matter of censoring the press, but of cutting off access to information by muzzling the custodians of state secrets. This device allows the Anglo-Saxons to present themselves as "defenders of freedom of expression", though they are the worst violators of the democratic right to information, constitutionally defended by the Scandinavian countries.

Silence, not secrecy

Thus, the Anglo-Americans are less informed about what is happening at home than are foreigners. For example, during World War II, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada managed to keep under wraps something as big as the Manhattan Project, that created the first nuclear bomb, while it employed 130,000 people for 4 years and it was widely penetrated by foreign intelligence services. Why? Because Washington did not prepare the weapon for this war, but for the next, against the Soviet Union. As shown by Russian historians, the abdication of Japan was postponed until after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed as a warning to the USSR. If Americans had known that their country possessed such a weapon, their leaders would have had to use it to finish with Germany and not to threaten the Soviet ally at the expense of the Japanese. In reality, the Cold War began before the end of World War II [1].In terms of secrecy, it should be noted that Stalin and Hitler were informed of the Manhattan Project from its inception. They indeed had inside agents. Meanwhile Truman was informed in his capacity as vice president, but only at the last moment, after the death of President Roosevelt.

The real utility of the Espionage Act

In any event, the Espionage Act deals only secondarily with espionage as shown by its jurisprudence.In wartime, it is used to punish dissent. Thus, in 1919, the Supreme Court recognized in Schrenck v. United Statesand Abrams v. United States that calling for insubordination or non-intervention against the Russian Revolution fell under the Espionage Act.In peacetime, the same law serves to prevent public officials from exposing a system of fraud or crimes committed by the state, even if their revelations are already known, but not yet proven.Under the administration of Barack Obama, theEspionage Act has been invoked 8 times, a peacetime record. Let's put aside the case of John Kiriakou, a CIA officer who revealed the detention and torture of Abu Zubaydah. Far from being a hero, Kiriakou is actually anagent provocateur funded by the Agency, whose role it was to delude the public regarding pseudo-confessions extorted from Zubaydah to justify, a posteriori, the "fight against terrorism" [2].Let's also eliminate the case of Shamal Leibowitz, since his revelations were never released to the public. There remain six cases instructing us about the U.S. military-police system.Stephen Jin-Woo Kim confirmed to Fox News that North Korea was preparing a nuclear test regardless of U.S. threats; a confirmation that caused no harm to the USA other than pointing out their inability to be obeyed by North Korea. In another context, this information had already been released by Bob Woodward without provoking reactions.Andrew Thomas Drake revealed the mismanagement of the Trailblazer program to a member of the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee. He was alleged to have informed those congressmen tasked with keeping an eye on the intelligence agencies with regard to the billions that the NSA was secretly throwing out the window.Trailblazer sought to find a way to plant viruses on any computer or mobile phone. It has never worked.In a similar vein, Edward Snowden, an employee of the Booz Allen Hamilton technology consulting firm, published various NSA documents attesting to U.S. spying in China as well as on the guests of the British G20. Above all, he has revealed the scope of the military phone tapping and internet spy system, which no one can escape, not even the President of the United States. U.S. politicians described Snowden as "a traitor to kill" only because his documents prevent the NSA from continuing to deny before Congress activities long known to all.Bradley Manning, a simple soldier, sent to Wikileaksvideos of two blunders by the army, 500,000 intelligence reports on military bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, and 250,000 cables on the information gathered by U.S. diplomats in conversations with foreign politicians. None of this is of paramount importance, but the documentation projects a poor image of ​​the gossip collected by the State Department to serve as the basis for its "diplomacy."Jeffrey Alexander Sterling is a CIA employee who revealed "Operation Merlin" to the New York Times. More surprisingly, General James Cartwright was number two man in the military, in his capacity as Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and so close an advisor to the President as to be dubbed "Obama's general". He supposedly revealed "Operation Olympic Games" to theNew York Times last year and has been placed under investigation, according to CNN.Sterling and Cartwright don't buy into the Israeli myth of "the atomic bomb of the mullahs." So they tried to defuse the war into which Tel Aviv is trying to plunge their country. "Operation Merlin" consisted in sending to Iran false information about the manufacture of the bomb. In reality, it was supposed to push Iran to engage in a military nuclear program to justify a posteriori the Israeli accusation [3]. As for "Operation Olympic Games," it was meant to implant the Stuxnet and Flame viruses in the Natanz plant, to disrupt its operation, notably that of its centrifuges [4]. It was therefore intended to block Iran's civilian nuclear program. None of these revelations damaged U.S. interests, but they hindered Israeli ambitions.

Resistance heroes

A salon opposition presents the men indicted under theEspionage Act as "whistleblowers", as if the United States today were a real democracy and they were alerting citizens to the need to correct some errors. In fact, what they show us is that in the United States, from a common soldier (Bradley Manning) to the second in command (General Cartwright), men are trying as best they can to fight against a dictatorial system in which they discover themselves to be a cog. Faced with a monstrous system, they ought to be celebrated as major resistance figures such as Admiral Canaris or Count Stauffenberg.

[Magda Hassan]

Fired White House Tweeter Accused Official of Leaking Stuxnet

by Josh Rogin Oct 23, 2013 4:35 PM EDT

As the anonymous tweeter @natsecwonk, Jofi Joseph insulted a lot of peoplebut perhaps none more so than Obama's close advisor Ben Rhodes, whom he accused of leaking. By Josh Rogin

Jofi Joseph, the National Security Council official fired last week for Tweeting secretly under the moniker @natsecwonk, had publicly, albeit anonymously, accused a senior White House official of leaking classified information related to United States intelligence operations against Iran.

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Elena Scotti
Joseph, who was outed in a report Tuesday in The Daily Beast, criticized and insulted dozens of Obama administration officials, lawmakers, Capitol Hill staffers, and journalists during his two-year stint on social media. But his number-one target was Deputy National Security Advisor for Communications Ben Rhodes, a senior official close to President Obama. Rhodes worked for the same department as Joseph, albeit at a much higher level.

In the summer of 2012, Joseph issued multiple tweets under his @natsecwonk account suggesting that Rhodes was the source of classified information leaked to the press about the Stuxnet virus, a joint U.S.-Israeli cyber warfare effort to sabotage Iran's nuclear centrifuge program. Joseph, as an official in the non-proliferation bureau of the State Department and later inside the White House, was part of the administration's team working on the Iranian nuclear issue.

On June 14, just days after the FBI began a probe into the leak and the Senate Intelligence Committee started planning public hearings on the matter, Joseph, posing as @natsecwonk, pointed the finger at Rhodes.

"Gotta imagine Ben Rhodes is lawyering up now that a leak investigation is underway. If anyone in the Obama White House leaked, it was him," he tweeted.

Two days later, as speculation mounted that then National Security Advisor Tom Donilon was a source of the Stuxnet leaks, Joseph again suggested publicly on Twitter that Rhodes was the culprit.

"Folks, even if a National Security Advisor wanted to leak, he wouldn't be the one doing the leaking. His staff would #keepyoureyeonbenrhodes," he tweeted on June 16.

Joseph never indicated why he suspected Rhodes or presented any evidence that Rhodes had leaked classified information. On Tuesday, he told Politico that he regrets "violating the trust and confidence placed in me. He said the account started off as a parody but "developed over time into a series of inappropriate and mean-spirited comments."

This past June, CNN reported that the FBI was investigating former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright in connection with the Stuxnet leak.

"Gotta imagine Ben Rhodes is lawyering up now that a leak investigation is underway."

Rhodes declined to comment on Joseph's allegation. Former National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor, who worked for Rhodes from 2009 through 2012, strongly disputed Joseph's claims.

"I sat 10 feet away from Ben for two years and have worked closely with him since 2007. The guy has spent more time trying to prevent the publication of damaging classified information than you could ever imagine," Vietor told The Daily Beast. "These allegations are flat wrong, and they're completely ridiculous to anyone who knows Ben and the work he does at the White House."

Joseph's tweets about Rhodes were not limited to the senior official's handling of national security information. The account of @natsecwonk has been shut down, but The Daily Beast has archived records of the tweets, many of which refer directly to Rhodes:

NatSecWonk Did I just hear Tom Donilon bitch slap Jim Clapper? Wow! And then his teenage aide Ben Rhodes piles on… Meow! 8:36 PM Mar 10th, 2011

NatSecWonk Poor, poor Ben Rhodes … madly spinning away, trying to explain a policy that just makes no sense to anyone, right or left. 12:42 AM Mar 24th, 2011

NatSecWonk Hey @erin_pelton - when was the last time Ben Rhodes said something not painfully banal and obvious? What does Obama see in this guy anyway? 1:37 PM Nov 23rd, 2011

NatSecWonk Hey @joshroginhearing that some in the WH not very happy with Ben Rhodes' self-congratulatory and ill-informed Iraq commentary recently! 4:11 PM Dec 18th, 2011

NatSecWonk Apparently, Mr. Rhodes chose to send an email to WH/NSC staff a few minutes before midnight to inform everyone that the Iraq War has ended. 4:13 PM Dec 18th, 2011

NatSecWonk Prepare to be utterly bored: @erin_pelton Deputy Nat'l Security Advisor @rhodesb talks to CBS's @Norahodonnell on #Syria options and #Iran. 3:27 AM Feb 9th

NatSecWonk @CrowleyTIME It doesn't help that watching Ben Rhodes mouth banal platitudes at the podium is less interesting than watching paint dry… 2:25 AM Mar 28th

NatSecWonk What's so disturbing about the Hillary dancing photo is the high-def resolution of Ben Rhodes' balding pate. And Jake Sullivan behind him. 1:08 AM Apr 16th

NatSecWonk Oh Ben Rhodes, the sad and pathetic life of constantly spinning appears to be getting to you … 11:09 PM Jun 18th
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/20...uxnet.html