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After reading Sanger's NYT piece, I am becoming more and more concerned about the administration leaking/deciding-to-release information about Stuxnet. As this

After reading Sanger's NYT piece, I am becoming more and more concerned about the administration leaking/deciding-to-release information about Stuxnet. As this article shows, once the cat is out of the bag people can start learning all kinds of interesting things about your intelligence activities. Usually such covert acts which could be considered an act of war are separate and disjointed. You find a spy in East Germany and it's a one-time incident. But with technology, you find one op and you start pulling the thread and all sorts of ops come out of the woodwork. I'm a libertarian and definitely support a more open society. But I also believe that any government must keep secrets on occasion. Whether or not Stuxnet (or any other sort of cyber-warfare) was a good idea is a separate issue. My concern is that, from a technology standpoint, there may not exist the separation of operations that is critically necessary for continued intelligence activities to be successful. Or, to rephrase, Stuxnet wasn't just the ratcheting up of cyber-warfare in the particular arena of nuclear non-proliferation. With the acknowledgment that the U.S. is responsible, and the way deconstructing one operation can lead to exposing another, it's ratcheting up the stakes for all intelligence-based cyber activities in all arenas. When the eventual shit storm comes, the U.S. will be the one that gets the blame for it (fairly or not).

gaius 14y ago
The US govt has basically thrown down the gauntlet to every hacker in the world and invited them to take a crack at the US. I hope the leak was worth it, for Obama's reelection campaign. Because it was incredibly irresponsible to boast about it, that is like a red rag to a bull.
- DanielBMarkham 14y ago
  I'm a firm believer that the president gets final call on what's secret and what's not. If that wasn't the case, you'd have the intelligence agencies basically running around unfettered. I also understand that it's an election year, and the party that is out of power is going to do their best to make everything into a crisis. Having said all of that, when the administration releases information that affects programs that might have taken large sums of money to develop over many years, that might have many more years of usefulness, that has the potential to change the geopolitical landscape for the country for the worse, and that draws attention from every hacker on the planet? It's a little more serious than the usual election year nonsense. My concern is that I do not believe the country received any benefit at all from the release, and the harm could go for quite some while. Quite frankly when things like this happens it helps make a strong case for the idea that the agencies _should_ keep things from oversight, and I think that's the worst part of the whole thing. We need to get rid of a lot of the secrecy we have -- perhaps 99% or more -- but the things that remain secret should be soberly treated as such. Time will tell what kind of damage has really been done after all the smoke clears. Hopefully not much, but I doubt it.
  - dantheman 14y ago
    But the administration has rules, yes secrecy is determined by executive order but there are processes to follow. You can't say some stuff is so secret that you can't confirm or deny and then in the next breath brag about it.
dfc 14y ago
"You find a spy in East Germany and it's a one-time incident. But with technology, you find one op and you start pulling the thread and all sorts of ops come out of the woodwork." Finding a spy in East Germany and finding a stuxnet are both one time incidents. The next step is processing the spy/malware and learning as much as possible as you can about your enemy; how did the malware propagate, how did the spy enter east germany, who did the spy/malware communicate with and how, etc. I do not think they are any different. What do you mean by separation of operations?
flyinRyan 14y ago
>But I also believe that any government must keep secrets on occasion. I'm not so sure. It's exactly this secret keeping that emboldens governments to violate international law, commit acts of war and so on in secret. If it had to be public knowledge that our government is about to commit an act of war against a country with nukes they might be stopped from doing so.

gaius 14y ago

The US govt has basically thrown down the gauntlet to every hacker in the world and invited them to take a crack at the US. I hope the leak was worth it, for Obama's reelection campaign. Because it was incredibly irresponsible to boast about it, that is like a red rag to a bull.

DanielBMarkham 14y ago
I'm a firm believer that the president gets final call on what's secret and what's not. If that wasn't the case, you'd have the intelligence agencies basically running around unfettered. I also understand that it's an election year, and the party that is out of power is going to do their best to make everything into a crisis. Having said all of that, when the administration releases information that affects programs that might have taken large sums of money to develop over many years, that might have many more years of usefulness, that has the potential to change the geopolitical landscape for the country for the worse, and that draws attention from every hacker on the planet? It's a little more serious than the usual election year nonsense. My concern is that I do not believe the country received any benefit at all from the release, and the harm could go for quite some while. Quite frankly when things like this happens it helps make a strong case for the idea that the agencies _should_ keep things from oversight, and I think that's the worst part of the whole thing. We need to get rid of a lot of the secrecy we have -- perhaps 99% or more -- but the things that remain secret should be soberly treated as such. Time will tell what kind of damage has really been done after all the smoke clears. Hopefully not much, but I doubt it.
- dantheman 14y ago
  But the administration has rules, yes secrecy is determined by executive order but there are processes to follow. You can't say some stuff is so secret that you can't confirm or deny and then in the next breath brag about it.

dfc 14y ago

"You find a spy in East Germany and it's a one-time incident. But with technology, you find one op and you start pulling the thread and all sorts of ops come out of the woodwork." Finding a spy in East Germany and finding a stuxnet are both one time incidents. The next step is processing the spy/malware and learning as much as possible as you can about your enemy; how did the malware propagate, how did the spy enter east germany, who did the spy/malware communicate with and how, etc. I do not think they are any different. What do you mean by separation of operations?

flyinRyan 14y ago

>But I also believe that any government must keep secrets on occasion. I'm not so sure. It's exactly this secret keeping that emboldens governments to violate international law, commit acts of war and so on in secret. If it had to be public knowledge that our government is about to commit an act of war against a country with nukes they might be stopped from doing so.