National Security Leaks And Iranian Revenge -- Micah Zenko and Emma Welch, Council On Foreign Relations
On June 1, 2012, the New York Times featured a remarkable work of journalism by David Sanger that opened with the following revelation:
“From his first months in office, President Obama 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.”
In his 2009 book The Inheritance, Sanger revealed details about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) penetration of Iranian government computers—also known as cyber exploitation—that helped inform the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which judged “with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” Sanger also offered clues about activities covered in a spring 2008 presidential finding that authorized covert action in Iran, including “efforts to interfere with the power supply to nuclear facilities—something that can sometimes be accomplished by tampering with computer code, and getting power sources to blow up.” While there were leaks about suspected U.S. covert activities targeting the Iranian nuclear program, no confirming evidence about the offensive cyber attacks had been published before last month.
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My Comment: This focus on the messenger (David Sanger) .... and the damage that his reporting has done on our intelligence programs .... is .... in my opinion .... justified. But Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, is also right when she bluntly states that the main culprit behind recent leaks comes from this building.
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