Governments exist to create problems only they can “fix”.
In the past few days, the US Government officially admitted what anyone with a clue already knew – that the Stuxnet virus/worm was a joint operation of US and Israeli Intelligence authorized at the highest level designed to cause uranium enrichment centrifuges to blow up.
When Stuxnet was identified, it was using three different never before known holes in Microsoft products (zero day exploits). Siemens was pretty clearly cooperating with whoever created it – they make all kinds of industrial control system like those used to control nuclear power plants. Since the Iranian facilities were isolated from the Internet, getting the code where it was needed required another innovation – infecting thumb drives in a stealthy way in order to spread.
There is an old saying “knowing that something is possible is half way to knowing how to do it”. Once the Wright Brothers made their first flight, aerial combat by governments was inevitable. However well intentioned Operation Olympic Games was, having endorsed the idea of state run cyberwarfare and introduced weapons to people who had no idea how to make them on their own, the government now is seeking broad new National Security powers to prevent retaliation that will result from the forces we put in motion.
It seems to me that a cyber-attack conducted (or supported) by the U.S. against another country which results in significant property damage or civil disruption constitutes an ACT OF WAR, no different than if bombs and missiles were used.
Regardless of whether one thinks Iran represents a clear and present danger to the U.S., where did the president get the Constitutional authority to order this cyber attack? Did Congress secretly declare war on Iran? Or have government-initiated cyber-attacks been judged to be exempt from Constitutional constraints? What’s next, space-based weather control directed at countries or companies we want to threaten? Submarine-initiated earthquakes?
What does the US gov. want? More control
What will the US. gov. get with this? More control!
After half the US power grid goes down from a stuxnet
like worm, the American
public will be screaming for help from the people who put
them in the mess in the first place!!
That’s essentially the point of Michael Crichton’s book “State of Fear” (which I haven’t read) – that governments inevitably realizes that the way to increase their power and control is by 1)fabricating a crisis to create fear in the population and 2)proposing that the only way to “be safe” is to give up more and more of your personal autonomy to the Government and more control over your wealth, privacy and your property. The Founding Fathers knew that and proscribed a very limited role for government and made sure they were NOT creating a Democracy where what they did could be dissolved if just enough people were scared into doing it (or offered free Obama Dollars)
Unfortunately, State of Fear used Global Warming as the vehicle to show how the process works and the people who reviewed the book focused on the science arguments about global warming – and completely missed that Global Warming was just the vehicle to explain the process. It could just as easily be about terrorists with bombs in their underwear, “poison” peanut butter, North Korea building a missile or Iran enriching Uranium (or China hacking into Pentagon computers) or a hundred other things.