More intel dump from the New York Times. This sort of thing is predicated on the assumption that- Our enemies can't read; or
- They're not really our enemies; or
- They're not really the newspaper's enemies. The rest of us will have to shift for ourselves; or
- The enemy has surely found all this stuff out by talking to the same set of egotistical blabbermouths the Times reporter talked to so it doesn't matter; or
- A story like this is more important than the nation it damages.
From his first months in office, President B.O. secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran's main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America's first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.The Times suggests that Obama the Bold immediately saw the potential of cyberweapons and unleashed them on the Medes and the Persians after Bush had merely screwed around with them. In truth, they've been around for years but nobody's head's been swollen enough to blow a major operation like this until now.
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.
Had something like Stuxnet occurred in, for example, the Clinton administration, the response would have been to look blank and let the whole thing blow over. The absolute best cover for any intel operation is looking stoopid.
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.Proper response: "Shut what down?"
Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code,
You can buy a decent decompiler for under $50. If you're a Linux kind of guy (or intel organization) you can get one open source. Decompilers take binary and translate it to machine language. I haven't looked at them other than in passing for the past ten years or so, but I recall somebody mentioning that there are some available that'll translate the machine language into C code. Most decent programmers can read C code, which means that if they had the worm trapped they could look at it. Even if they were bone stoopid they would be left with a pretty good idea of what the blasted thing did and how. So I guess it was 'unclear' whether they knew a lot or a whole lot.
and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc,
The fact that you can recognize it doesn't mean you can kill it. Watch 'Alien' if you don't believe that one.
Mr. Obama decided that the cyberattacks should proceed. In the following weeks, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another after that. The last of that series of attacks, a few weeks after Stuxnet was detected around the world, temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium.
"Your Enormity! The infidels and their Zionist cohorts have mutated the worm and it has devoured 1000 of our centrifuges!"
"By Allen's Hennaed Beard! Obama is too crafty for us, curse his non-existent mustache!"
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 But don't worry your pretty little head about sources and/or methods being compromised.
These officials gave differing assessments of how successful the sabotage program was in slowing Iran's progress toward developing the ability to build nuclear weapons. Internal B.O. regime estimates say the effort was set back by 18 months to two years, but some experts inside and outside the government are more skeptical, noting that Iran's enrichment levels have steadily recovered, giving the country enough fuel today for five or more weapons, with additional enrichment.