Need To Know: Technolog: In Praise Of Cyberwar
It's better than the alternative. How malware could actually help keep the peace.
By Michael Hirsh
National Journal, June 9, 2012
EXTRACT:
Above all, cybertactics could supply a new way out of an old conundrum — a kind of halfway house between the only two effective options that nations trying to resolve conflicts have known: diplomacy and war. “Having a tool that can slow certain programs you’re worried about that’s short of war may make war less likely,” Bunn says. David Sanger, who reveals the U.S. role in Stuxnet in his new book, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, writes that in designing Stuxnet with Israel, American officials were seeking in part “to dissuade the Israelis from carrying out their own preemptive strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities. To do that, the Israelis would have to be convinced that the new line of attack was working.”
