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It’s been only a month since the activation of Iran’s first nuclear power plant and there’s already a major crisis concerning proliferation. But this crisis has nothing to do with nuclear arms proliferation. Rather, the scare has to do with the proliferation of the Stuxnet worm, a malicious computer program that has invaded the plant’s computers and since spread to computers worldwide.
The viral program is very sophisticated and appears designed specifically to attack the plant. It first was released onto workers’ computers, designed to try to reach plant’s control systems. Unlike other more sophisticated attacks which appeared to be primarily geared for monitoring, this attack was designed to do damage. It contained logic to sabotage nuclear fuel enrichment centrifuges. The centrifuges, made by German equipment electronics giant Siemens, would be made to fail in a virtually unnoticeable way.
The Bushehr plant is located near Natanz, central-Iranian city located almost 200 miles south of the capital city of Tehran. The plant is a joint endeavor between Iran and Russia. While the U.S. and others have chastised Russia for its involvement, the U.S. intelligence community has asserted that it doesn’t believe Iran to be currently developing nuclear weapons at the facility.
Mahmoud Jafari, project manager at the Bushehr nuclear plant is quoted in The Telegraph, a UK newspaper, as stating that the viral worm never achieved its goal. Comments Mr. Jafari, “[It] has not caused any damage to major systems of the plant.”
But according to international whistle-blower site Wikileaks, a serious nuclear accident occurred at the plant sometime before mid-June. The site’s founder, Julian Assange, wrote:
Two weeks ago, a source associated with Iran’s nuclear program confidentially told WikiLeaks of a serious, recent, nuclear accident at Natanz. Natanz is the primary location of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.
WikiLeaks had reason to believe the source was credible however contact with this source was lost.
WikiLeaks would not normally mention such an incident without additional confirmation, however according to Iranian media and the BBC, today the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Gholam Reza Aghazadeh, has resigned under mysterious circumstances. According to these reports, the resignation was tendered around 20 days ago.
Inspectors examined the claims, but found no distinguishable traces of an accident.
A time stamp on the virus reveals that it was made in January. What is equally remarkable to its sophistication in terms of attack behavior is the lack of sophistication when it comes to the worm’s proliferation.
If it had constrained its infections to Bushehr, it would likely not have been noticed for some time. Instead, the worm was extremely aggressive in its infection vectors, spreading to fifteen other Siemens plants, and tens of thousands of non-plant computers worldwide. In Iran 60,000 computers are infected. In Indonesia, 10,000 machines are infected. And in the United States thousands of computers are believed to be infected as well.
That creates a dangerous situation, as numerous parties, including international governments and black-hat hackers, are racing to reverse-engineer the code and exploit the infected machines. The infected machines may not only compromise personal details, but may compromise industrial infrastructure in Iran, Indonesia, India (another infection site), and the U.S.
Melissa Hathaway, a former United States national cybersecurity coordinator, comments, “Proliferation is a real problem, and no country is prepared to deal with it. All of these guys are scared to death. We have about 90 days to fix this before some hacker begins using it.”
So who is behind the attacks? The New York Times quotes a former U.S. intelligence office as saying that the attack was the work of Israel’s equivalent of America’s National Security Agency, known as Unit 8200. According to IEEE Spectrum‘s December issue, Israel had previously used a cyber-attack to shut off radar systems in Syria, allowing it to evaluate what it believed to be an under-construction nuclear reactor.
Regardless of who perpetrated the attack, the primary issue now is stamping it out, before it can be used for even more nefarious purposes. Early reports were unclear about the transmission vector, but suggested it may be spreading via USB sticks and other removable media.
Journalist and author Reese Erlich spoke on, “Obama’s Challenge: Iran, Nuclear Weapons and the Fate of the Middle East.”
Scott Horton :
On April 1, 2010 I participated in a panel discussion at the University of California at Riverside titled “Obama’s challenge: Iran, Nuclear Weapons & the Mideast” with Reese Erlich, Larry Greenfield and Christopher Records – here is some of my part. Thanks to Mansoor Sabbagh for the video.
How long can we allow the maniacs who are driving us to the brink of World War Three to stay in power? We’d better do something soon, or we will all be done for.
My special thanks to Gilad Atzmon, whose reading of the “Israeli Peace Manifesto” helps to point up the gulf between what they say and what they do. The original text can be found at: http://www.pro-israel.org/ Gilad’s rather more honest writing can be found at: http://www.gilad.co.uk/ He’s a pretty cool saxophone player, too.
Any copyrighted material in this video has been used in the interests of the survival of humanity, and anyone who objects to its use is one sick individual. We have allowed the sociopaths with their wealth, greed and selfishness to rule us for too long, only by making an effort, ourselves, will anything ever change.
My thanks to those whose videos and still pictures have made my job just a little bit easier in trying to persuade people that all is not as it seems to be: To wwwcelticvideocom for the clips from the video ” IDF Israeli soldiers beat local and international protesters” at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al-Itd… where you will find information about purchasing the full video.
Other links:
Israeli Nuclear Weapons estimates: http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/…
By Lawrence Davidson
“…the Zionist movement has … convinced most Israeli and Zionist Jews of the correctness of Nakba denial. That is, that the Nakba never really happened and that the history of the founding of Israel was nothing other than the heroic struggle of a people to survive.”
9 August 2010
Lawrence Davidson argues that the phenomenon of Holocaust questioning in Iran and elsewhere in the Muslim countries is directly linked to Israel’s cynical exploitation of the Holocaust to justify its policies and bludgeon its critics.
On 5 August 2010 Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper, citing a story by the Iranian news agency Fars, reported that a non-governmental organization in Iran had “launched a website with cartoons about the Holocaust aimed at undermining the historic dimensions of the mass murder of Jews”. Israelis and Zionists reacted angrily to this announcement.
Spokesmen at Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum, stated that the website was “yet the latest salvo emanating from Iran that denies the facts of the Holocaust and attempts to influence those who are ignorant of history”. The Ha’aretz report also noted, somewhat resentfully, that “since the 1979 Islamic revolution, Iran has not acknowledged Israel as a sovereign state and even refrained from using the name Israel, instead referring to the Jewish state as the Zionist regime”.
This is obviously a hot issue and so I will begin my examination of this report by stating that the Holocaust is a proven factual event and the number of six million Jewish victims killed is roughly accurate. Histories based on detailed research on this subject include the early classic study by Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, first published in 1961 and followed later by his Sources of Holocaust Research (2001). Other recent works include David Engel’s The Holocaust: the Third Reich and the Jews (1999) and S. Hochstadt, Sources of the Holocaust – Documents in History (2004). There are many other works as well.
by Tomas Rosa Bueno (source: CASMII)
Saturday, July 24, 2010
In international politics, if an action seems reckless or callous and the ones taking it are not certified loonies, usually it’s because it was made to look that way, on purpose. To send a message.
Take Israel’s attack in international waters on a civilian flotilla that resulted in the death of nine Turkish passengers. There were many ways that flotilla could have been prevented from reaching a Gaza port that did not imply resorting to violence; and then again, if they didn’t care about killing a couple of passengers to send a first-level warning to all would-be humanitarian Gaza friends, they could have waited until the flotilla had actually breached the blockade and reached the territorial waters where they arguably have a right to patrol and control, making whatever harm that befell the blockade-breachers their own “fault” and giving Israel’s actions at least the appearance of legality. But no, they had to do it in international waters in a way that made it sure that violence would erupt. And killed nine unarmed civilians in the process.
You can say whatever you want about Israel’s military, except that they are incompetent – and they’re certainly not loonies. All the subsequent half-baked excuses about “unexpected reaction” by the victims and the obviously biased unilateral “investigation” of the incident are part of the show: Israel did not make an “error” in deciding to attack the flotilla as it did, nor was the job “botched”. The message was loud and clear: we will do whatever it takes to prevent the breaching of the Gaza blockade, and we do not care what the rest of the world thinks. So loud and so clear that despite the show of international indignation about the killing of nine civilians in international waters and despite all the saber-rattling about sending “hundreds” of flotillas, so far not one thing has been done to hold Israel accountable for its actions, and the Gazans are still abandoned to their fate, being collectively punished for having cast the wrong ballot four years ago.
Furthremore, there was a second message being sent: they’re mad dogs, look at what they have done and think of what they may do if we don’t appease them. That this “appeasement”, in the form of sanctions against Iran, serves another purpose is just part of the game: we give you an excuse, you watch our back, and we both talk about something else while we do it. More than ever, what you do does not matter, the important thing is what you are seen to be doing – and “seeing” is open to manipulation of all sorts.
There can be no doubt, at least as far as Middle East Policy is concerned, that AIPAC is the Voice of America.
Although I have heard AIPAC pronounced in two distinct ways, one of which is A-PAC, I have chosen to pronounce the acronym with the same initial sound as in the word ‘aisle’. To me, this pronunciation is more appropriate, because the use of the A for America sound is subtly misleading. The organization has nothing to do with A for America, it is all about I for Israel.
In the graphic illustration near the end of this video, had the mathematical relationships been absolutely accurate, either the Orange would have filled the screen or the pea would have been invisible. The discrepancy between the power AIPAC wields, compared to the rest of the American population, is immense, and that power benefits one nation: Israel.
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