There are a few things that are strange about this. Number 1 - it was weapons systems they attacked, so I'm going to assume you reach those through microwave somehow. If thats the case, simply storing your weapons in a faraday cage until you are ready to use them is a pretty effective countermeasure?
Secondly, why would you publicise you engaged in a bit of cyber warfare - particularly successful cyber warfare. This literally notifies the enemy to upgrade/fix/patch/take counter measures, solidifies their defenses, and provides a clear aggressor.
Amateur hour from the CISA... or perhaps someone needs a public win to justify another round of funding increases...
You publicize your attacks when you’re trying to start a war. Why is there a huge US troop build up in the Middle East right now? Make no mistake, John Bolton wants a war with Iran, he has said so in the past. This is exactly what happened with Iraq as well.
"I still think the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct." John Bolton four years ago. He's the guy who got the current POTUS to withdraw from JCPOA. And he's the guy who got DPRK to withdraw from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
He hates treaties. He believes in ordering countries what to do, and intimidating or bombing them if they don't comply, and treaties make that difficult.
He's delusional, not a credible person, and in no way has he been rehabilitated.
The implication is that, like with Stuxnet, the attack caused permanent or difficult to repair damage to the systems. Similar to the Iranian attack against Saudi Arabia banks where 30,000 desktops were encrypted and backup data was specifically targeted.
As far as providing a “clear aggressor” well there purpose was retaliatory for a drone which Iran admitted that they shot down.
Of course Iran claimed it was in their airspace. Shooting down a drone in international airspace is an act of war. When Iran decides to openly declare war with the US, they give the US carte blanche to deploy full conventional measures in response. US, for example, could sink every ship in the Iranian navy in 24 hours.
The point is that Iran at least took responsibility for the attack this time, versus the tanker attacks in the Strait.
And Trump claimed it was someone acting fast and loose because he doesn’t want to fight a war in the Middle East. Now that the US is the world’s biggest oil producer, we have a lot less incentive to be involved.
Trump ran on a platform of getting out of the Middle East. He would love nothing more. Iran shooting down drones and mining the Strait certainly makes that difficult.
There are powerful interests in the US that want a war with Iran. The President isn’t one of them, as we have clearly seen now with the air strikes having been called off.
You can't really store your air defense network in a faraday cage.
The second point is not surprising: Trump needed something after caving to Iran's show of force. Operational and effectiveness concerns are secondary, it's not an administration renowned for long term planning.
Because Trump felt not starting a war looked bad for him, so he published whatever attack he had on hand to prove he’s still a stronk man, that’s my guess anyway.
The hope with any attack is that its disruptive effects outweigh the intelligence your adversary gainsfrom observing your actions.
Or say you launched a cyber attack, but really you didn't, then they waste their time looking for non-existent backdoors. Considering the NSA has some pretty deep implants (uefi level, hard drive firmware level, iot/embedded) that can pass through airgaps (see: stuxnet), it'll be quite expensive to do a full sweep.
This wasn’t like they hacked into the network so they could deface a website or pop up a “You’ve been hacked!” message on the machines.
Recall the Iranian attack on Saudi banks which encrypted 30,000 desktops and destroyed the backups?
The implication is that the attack caused permanent or difficult to repair damage to the systems. There is a quote that they expect it to take months to bring everything back online.
I’m guessing it was meant to be more rhetorical than anything. It seems this was akin to a denial of service of sorts, so I think if US wanted to cause serious damage they would have.
They wouldn't have done it for nothing. If there's any truth in it, presumably it would have been part of a wider US attack, which Trump supposedly called off at the last minute.
Trump calling the attack off was a surprisingly sober call on his part. Killing Iranians because an unmanned drone was attacked, that at best flew purposefully extremely close to Iran's border, at worst actually crossed into it, would be an extremely unequal response and a major escalation.
I imagine part of the reason they shot it down is because the rhetoric coming from Washington is such, that an attack could come at any moment and is hard for the Iranians to tell if this is it or not, (which I think is part of the U.S. tactic to provoke them to do something stupid).
The U.S. would not tolerate Chinese drones off its coast either.
That is mutual under the "open skies" policy. But they don't like Russian presence in Venezuela and they certainly didn't like Soviet nukes in Cuba, even as they had U.S. ones in Turkey that the Soviets were supposed to tolerate.
Now, China is competitor number 1, so I don't think they would, (unless China agreed to do the same at its borders). And is not like Iran is not tolerating countless U.S. military bases around its borders, I just suspect they're at the edge of their seats, expecting an attack and sending an armed drone to their border doesn't seem too friendly.
The U.S. also knows that Russian planes flying are not there to bomb them, whereas the Iranians are hearing constant rhetoric that the U.S. is just about to bomb them.
No, under Open Skies the flights are over the national territory. This is not the same as non-negoitated probing flights along the border over international waters. These happen regularly.
Yeah, except it is not clear this in fact was "over international waters". The U.S. says it was, the Iranians say the drone crossed into their airspace. Now I know many take the U.S. word for it, but given the escalating rhetoric, given Iraq, given people like John Bolton are in the administration, I wouldn't.
Moreover, as I said, the U.S. knows Russia is not about to conduct a surprise bombing raid on them, so does Russia know the same of the U.S. - They both have nuclear weapons and doing so would be catastrophic for both sides. Iran on the other hand expects a U.S. bombing raid any moment and in fact Trump just admitted one was ready to go ahead, so it's a bit different.
In fact, I suspect the U.S. knows all this and provoking a reaction from the Iranians to support further action from the U.S. was precisely the goal of this drone.
I don't think "US knows it" is how border safety works. Either way I fail to see your point how that would be different with China.
As to motives, who knows. Iran could be trying to move confrontation from economic to military, where it has a shot on regional parity. With all talk about Bolton, Iraq, Vietnam and on this admin is very docile. Iran came out on top from this confrontation, bolstering its regional influence, so why not.
Iran has zero ability to win a regional war against the US, unless you consider bombing Israel to be critical damage to the US, or if the US has no stomt for Iranian casualties.
> According to well-informed sources, Iran rejected a proposal by US intelligence – made via a third party – that Trump be allowed to bomb one, two or three clear objectives, to be chosen by Iran, so that both countries could appear to come out as winners and Trump could save face. Iran categorically rejected the offer and sent its reply: even an attack against an empty sandy beach in Iran would trigger a missile launch against US objectives in the Gulf.
> Iran is not inclined to help Trump come down from the tree he has climbed and would rather keep him confused and cornered. Furthermore, Iran would love to see Trump fail to win a second term, and will do everything to help oust him from the White House at the end of his mandate in 2020.
> Moreover, Iran has established a joint operations room to inform all its allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan of every step it is adopting in confronting the US in case of all-out war in the Middle East. Iran’s allies have increased their level of readiness and alert to the highest level; they will participate in the war from the moment it begins if necessary. According to sources, Iran’s allies will not hesitate to open fire against an already agreed on bank of objectives in a perfectly organised, orchestrated, synchronised and graduated response, anticipating a war that may last many months.
[...]
> Sources confirmed that, in case of war, Iran aims to stop the flow of oil from the Middle East completely, not by targeting tankers but by hitting the sources of oil in every single Middle Eastern country, whether these countries are considered allies or enemies. The objective will be to cease all oil exports from the Middle East to the rest of the world.
I can't comprehend why national governments would engage in backroom deals to allow false flag attacks on themselves, knowing they'd be leaked immediately.
> Trump calling the attack off was a surprisingly sober call on his part.
I am not too sure. The US are already attacking Iran, by strangling its economy, effectivly subjecting it to a blockade. They don't need an open war for that, it would be an unnecessary cost, economic and diplomatic- but at the same time they have to show they're absolutely ready for it.
For the US (but in fact Israel and Saudi Arabia, the only ones that gain from this) the best option is to keep choking Iran in silence, without much hassle, so the rest of the world can keep looking the other way.
> The US are already attacking Iran, by strangling its economy, effectivly subjecting it to a blockade.
That is true, it's a policy the U.S. has employed in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion and is now also perusing in Venezuela. In some ways you're right, it makes it look like Iran's acting in a vacuum and the U.S. is doing nothing to provoke it.
On the other hand, if they were to bomb Iran, it's not like they'd let the sanctions go in exchange for the bombing, it would be in addition to the sanctions. And yes, it would draw minimal condemnation from the EU, China and Russia, but that's about it.
After some googling for what Suter is, it seems to be a system which detects electronic emissions sources, compares these with the known emitters to ID them, then somehow it accesses the enemy communications network to jam/disrupt/monitor the appropriate emitters.
But... I'm a bit puzzled.
The implication of a Suter-style "cyber attack" (not just dumb radar jamming) is that the target military communications network is compromised enough for the attacker to intelligently DoS certain nodes in it, send bogus packets or sniff traffic.
If this was the case here, then the USA basically told Iran that the Iranian infrastructure used for communicating with some of its military assets is compromised, and the USA showed how much it is compromised, too.
Pointing out weak spots in your enemy's defences sounds like a somewhat strange thing to do, since the enemy will no doubt fix those omissions rather quickly.
One reason I can think of was to prevent enterprising third parties from exploiting the same weak spots.
Suter actually (or at least used to ~13 years ago) compromise the CaC / FC systems from the radar point-of-view itself as the entry-point, so it's not necessarily over or via conventional networks (i.e. TCP/IP). Older Russian tech for SAM sites and the such had microwave controllers between the different components (i.e. multi-static radar), and it was possible to intercept/gain access/control from here in a shockingly convenient way.
It was essentially similar to (but via radio spectrum as opposed to light) gaining access to a police speed camera by firing light at the camera sensor, gaining control of it, and then re-programming it to either do nothing useful, or even in extreme cases take license plate pictures of police cars going under the speed limit. Sounds impossible (and likely is for my camera example), but...
I imagine in the mean time more modern Russian systems are now much more hardened to this type of attack, so maybe the situation is different...
The part I don’t get is the “in retaliation for shooting down a drone”.
If the drone was operating over Iranian territory, Iran is well within their rights to shoot it down. What would the US do with an Iranian drone operating over US territory? Over sensitive military sites?
Publicizing a low level attack on a weapons system is a ham fisted attempt at ratcheting, and it will probably work. I think it’s fairly likely we end up in a war with Iran, since Bolton has pretty much said that’s what he wants.
On some level, you have to figure any country operating in an atmosphere of sustained, overt adversity would have long since divested themselves from any amount of trust placed in areas of technology that one might consider "cyber" oriented.
To europeans its quite strange how easily the US would go to war... I guess this is a product of big oil and weapon lobbying, because theyre the only ones that benefit from this
To be honest, Israel is very very aggressive in terms of warfare and they’re only doing it so that they take more land... On the other hand the UK is just a puppet of USA... and this is coming from someone who lives in UK
We are very definitely a puppet in some matters to the US and it's only going to get worse once we exit the EU.
Our politicians don't have the backbone to stand up to the US and the ones that might are obliterated by the press (not a Corbyn fan but it's interesting to read what the press says and then what he actually said just to see how blatant it is).
Honestly I'm in favour of the UK taking a much lesser role in international affairs, as a second rate power we simply shouldn't be rattling around the place like it's the 19th century - We should be more like a Germany or Italy and less like US-lite.
You might want to look again at 1973 or the Southern Lebanon wars. Israel has been very restrained compared to what the US would do if Mexico was shelling a border town now and again.
The article does not say that they provided us with evidence of weapons of mass destruction at all. It says their internal assessment was based on speculation, not whatever you're trying to imply. Also:
"The committee also found that Israeli intelligence did not intentionally mislead Israeli officials about prewar Iraq’s WMD capabilities, nor was there an attempt to push the United States into invading Iraq, AP reported."
You'd better come up with some pretty convincing evidence for such allegations. There's nothing even related to your assertion in your link, neither in the "source to link" (that does not support anything the link says, which in its turn does support anything you say).
"Israel’s intelligence assessments of Iraq’s prewar WMD capabilities were based mainly on speculation, an Israeli parliamentary committee said in a report released yesterday (see GSN, March 24)."
First paragraph clearly states that this was based on speculation.
“Why didn’t we succeed in laying down a broad and deep (intelligence) framework so we could rely on reports and not speculation and assumption? That is the central question,” said inquiry head Yuval Steinitz of the governing Likud Party.
"The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has led to a close scrutiny of the role of intelligence agencies in both the United States and Britain. As Brigadier General (ret.) Shlomo Brom, points out, Israeli intelligence, which was in full agreement with American and British intelligence estimates, has, however, remained "in the shadows." General Brom, a senior research associate at Tel Aviv University's Jaffe Center, calls for an inquiry into the performance of Israeli intelligence agencies. In an article titled "The War in Iraq: An Intelligence Failure," first published in "Strategic Assessment," General Brom makes three key points: (1) Israeli intelligence agencies failed because they did not realize that Saddam Hussein's main goal was survival; (2) Israeli intelligence tends to adopt the worst-case scenario; (3) Inflated threat assessments exact a heavy price."
I'm not sure if you are unaware or not but there were no WMD's in Iraq. These are facts not allegations. The US, Israel and Britain were primary nations selling the American people a war based on bad intelligence and it can happen just as easily today as it did then.
So in short, you are backing out from your claim that Israeli intelligence provided us with evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that helped push a war? Good, so there’s no argument.
In case you’re implying the parent should also provide evidence: it’s way harder to prove the non-existence of something than the existence. I’m not sure if that’s a universal rule (in math for instance) but it’s certainly in something like a magic teapot behind mars.
I do think the strength of evidence should be somewhat correlated to the weight of claims,
Maybe a sidenote to extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I've expressed similar sentiment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17738147
It's "their" enrichment limit because they agreed to an arbitrarily low one under JCPOA. If they leave the agreement after other parties did so as well, this is not evidence of a nuke program. It is merely evidence of them enriching, which you can do for non-military purposes.
The evidence from the nuclear archive, which remains unreleased, seems to at best prove that they had a nuke program in the past.
They denied they had it then, too. They deny it now. Seems like the "deal" was just to get their foreign accounts unblocked. I'm curious how you'll explain away their ballistic missile development and testing.
> They denied they had it then, too. They deny it now.
There's no evidence they have nuclear weapons whatsoever. Israel on the other hand still denies the existence of nuclear weapons everyone knows they have.
If Israel is so hell bent on going to war with Iran, (perhaps because the current administration is so corrupt that doing so would be a nice distraction), they should do it on their own and bear the consequences. The US and the EU should not go to another devastating war in the Middle East on doctored Israeli intel.
There was an agreement the US pulled out of. Which part of that agreement talked about ballistic missiles?
I think you are confusing two separate things. One is a nuclear capable Iran and the other is about the military projection of conventional weapons. Both are troubling but one is more acute than the other.
The monitoring of Iran's nuclear program was working.
Ballistic missiles are not "conventional weapons". And Iran is quite a large country, so I wouldn't be so sure that "monitoring" was working either. Putting two and two together, _if_ Iran is still developing nuclear weapons in secret (probability of which is far above zero), they're closer than ever to "projecting" those weapons in the general direction of Israel and other allies in the region, and eventually at the US. All they'd need to do is swap out a dummy warhead with a real one.
May I suggest a book called Countdown to Zero Day by Kim Zetter?
Its main focus is to talk about Stuxnet, but it goes into quite some details to put that attack into context. Under the deal that the US pulled out of, IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) had the authority to walk into any space in Iran under any suspicion that they might be building a nuclear bomb there, overwriting any local law that might prohibit them from doing so. That deal is still in place, because other seven signatories weren't stupid enough to pull out of that agreement (including Iran).
> they're closer than ever to "projecting" those weapons in the general direction of Israel
I wish they did. There is serious need for some MAD in the area, especially with regards to Israel, that is way too happy to project its own overwhelming power with complete disregard for the legitimate interests of its neighbors.
To be clear: I don't wish Israel harmed or victim of any attack. I wish it contained by a matching power. Which is exactly what Israel doesn't want, and the reason for its pressuring the US to attack Iran or strangle it with sanctions.
Religious tomfoolery is also the root of why large swaths of the American public continue their unbridled uncritical support for the rogue nuclear nation of Israel. That Israel plays a key role in the nutty religious prophecies of various right wing doomsday evangelical cults around the US cannot be overlooked when considering the situation in the region.
Israel's non-signatory status in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, combined with their refusal to admit the obvious truth of having nuclear weapons despite their not-so-coy threats of using nuclear weapons all combine to paint an unambiguous picture: Israel is a rogue state. They are dangerous; a threat to world peace.
To their credit, Russia, China and the USA are all signatories. Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and India are not (what wonderful company Israel finds itself in!); they are all rogue states. Of those all four have border disputes, all four have nuclear weapons, and all four have made themselves a threat to world peace. Of these four, Israel is the only one that continues to lie about having nuclear weapons.
If Israel does not qualify as a "rogue nuclear nation", then the term has certainly been diluted.
However, this is not about nuclear proliferation, of course. Otherwise the US would impose tough sanctions on Israel and even threaten them with military strikes, because there is strong evidence that Israel has a secret nuclear weapons program. No more apologies!
We all know what the truth is. In reality the tough stance against Iran is and always has been all about access to oil, influencing the strategic balance in favour of the axis US-Saudi Arabia-Israel, and limiting Russian influence in the region. Everybody knows this and that's why nobody in his or her right mind buys the current sick Bolton nonsense.
If Iran blocked the Strait, it’s mostly Europe that would suffer at this point.
Personally I think it would be interesting to see EU have to defend its interests in the Middle East patrolling the Strait. There’s no need for the US to be doing it ourselves this time around.
But if you mean something other than Iran blocking free passage in international waters, you’ll have to clarify.
The Strait is one motivation, yes, but I was also talking more generally about the strategic balance in the region. Iran and Syria are the last countries in the region loosely aligned with Russia, and Iran is a major disruptive factor in the region. By destroying and occupying Iran like the US did with Iraq, in theory the majority of countries in the region would become subjugated by the US, hence long-term access to oil. Not that I think this strategy could ever work, but obviously similar thinking was also behind the Iraq invasion (in addition to the unfulfilled "promises" made by the CIA during the first Iraq war, which were a thorn in some of G.W.Bush's advisors).
Netanyahu's "evidence" from the very article you linked:
"Mr. Netanyahu did not provide any evidence that Iran had violated the nuclear agreement since it took effect in early 2016."
"Secretary of State Mike Pompeo" ... "conceded that the material dated to a project that had formally ended around 2003."
"“There is nothing new in Bibi’s presentation,” Rob Malley, a former senior official in Mr. Obama’s National Security Council" (...) "wrote" (...) "“All it does is vindicate need for the nuclear deal.”"
That's the same Netanyahu that campaigned for the Iraq invasion in 2003:
"Ehud Barak wrote a New York Times op-ed warning that "the greatest risk now lies in inaction". His predecessor as prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, published a similar piece in the Wall Street Journal, entitled: "The Case for Toppling Saddam". "Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do"
And the same Israel that pressured the US into ant-Saddam intervention 13 years before, in 1990:
There are only two groups that are beating the drums of war in the Middle East,' wrote American columnist Patrick Buchanan, 'the Israeli defence ministry and their amen corner in the US."
No, Israel publicly shared a few new details about the program they stopped in ~2002.
Iran has so far been very restrictive in how they have reacted to the USA violating the JCPOA, which Trump broke essentially because he is an idiot the listens to assholes, and complaining that the cross a line in a treaty you’ve killed yourself is obviously not a very convincing accusation.
Lots of states in the Middle east have ballistic missiles, and they use them to shoot large conventional explosives at each other, like Iran and Irak did during their war.
Note that the JCPOA is not a treaty. The President cannot unilaterally withdraw from a treaty, subject to any withdrawal requirements of the treaty itself. Same goes for the Paris Climate Accord, which was never put forward as a treaty in the US.
Note that other countries and their citizens don't typically give a hoot about the internal affairs if it looks as though countries go back on their word and signatures. Internal ratification is simply used as a way to sign treaties with 'fingers crossed'.
Joke's on the US: Iran has no need for its weapons systems. They have no enemies except the US, which prefers to wage economic war, aside from its "death from the sky" drones.
Wikipedia lists two: Syria civil war and Iraq civil war. In both instances in cooperation with the legitimate goverment of the nation, and against ISIL.
Sponsoring. So you count USA as participant in the Yemen war, in the Gaza blockade and in the illegal occupation of Palestine? They're sponsoring Israel and Saudi Arabia and supplying them with money and weapons.
Israel is not controlled by the USA to the extent Hizbollah is controlled by Iran. Hizbollah answers to the IRGC and Qassem Suleimani. So do various Iraqi militias.
Neither Israel or Saudi Arabia are proxies for the USA. Supported - yes, but they are not used as a strategic deterrent which operates on American command (US has enough power projection to do it by itself).
In the 80s when they were at war with Iraq, the CIA assisted the Iraqis in dropping poison gas on Iranian civilians.
Even if America were Iran's only enemy, America has a history of supporting other nations in wars against Iran. So Iran plainly still has an interest in putting up a capable defense against a conventional military attack.
Simplistically, maybe. In reality their arch-nemesis is "Gharbzadegi". The external ones merely strengthen them.
Wikipedia: Gharbzadegi (Persian: غرب زدگی) is a pejorative Persian term variously translated as ‘Westernized’, ‘West-struck-ness’[1], ‘Westoxification’, ‘Westitis’, ‘Euromania’, or ‘Occidentosis’.
It's about darn time. Regardless of the whole "nuke" situation, Iran has been a thorn in the side of companies for years. Between them and North Korea, civilian operations are regularly crippled and data stolen. I even know a company that got ransomware twice, both times from the North Koreans (company paid the first time, so they went back after them). Most of the time, companies don't widely disclose this (except to affected parties), so you don't hear about it, but it's very much out there and widespread (according to the FBI agents involved in this case and what I have heard). China and Russia do it too.
The FBI classifies such things as acts of terror, yet we have done nothing to protect our own companies. If Iran wants to keep attacking our nation to compensate for lost oil money, it is about time we start crippling their infrastructure until they simply have no way to send a packet to the outside world.
Besides the weird rehashing of "they're building nukes" propaganda, the linked articles https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/with-... and https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/us/politics/us-iran-cyber... seem much more informative in that regard.