The tales of two leakers. Snowden and Gen. Cartwright.

Even as Manning is being tried by a Military court  and Snowden is being called a traitor and hunted around the world for leaking details of American surveillance crimes, an American general is under investigation for leaking the use of the Stuxnet worm in a cyber attack on Iran . The difference in the way the three leakers are being and will be  treated is striking comment on the sheer hypocrisy of the American system. 

NATO research team calls Stuxnet attack on Iran an 'act of force'

Published time: March 26, 2013 03:37

A group of 20 law and technology experts has unanimously agreed that the Stuxnet worm used against Iran in 2009-2010 was a cyberattack. The US and Israel have long been accused of collaborating on the virus in a bid to damage Iran’s nuclear program.

While that accusations against Washington and Tel Aviv have never been confirmed by either government, a NATO Commission has now confirmed it as an “act of force.”

Last year anonymous government officials came forward to tell The New York Times that researchers at the Idaho National Laboratory, which is overseen by the US Department of Energy, passed technical information to Israel regarding vulnerabilities in cascades and centrifuges at Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment plant.

That information, it is believed, was used to design the Stuxnet worm that set Iran’s nuclear program back an estimated two years.

“Acts that kill or injure persons or destroy or damage objects are unambiguously uses of force,” according to the Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare, which lead author Michael N. Schmitt said was written to outline “how does existing law apply to cyberspace.”

Schmitt told The Washington Times that “according to the UN charter, the use of force is prohibited, except in self-defense.” Under the guidelines detailed in the Manual, the concept of self-defense could include “anticipatory self-defense,” which would allow a nation an act of aggression in the event that it perceives a threat as imminent.

The 20 experts were drawn from around the world and took three years to complete the 300-page manuscript, which they were careful to note was not an official policy decision by NATO. 

They disagreed over whether the Stuxnet attack qualified as an “armed attack,” which would constitute the beginning of wartime aggression that, under the Geneva Convention, could be followed by the use of force.

“We wrote it as an aid to legal advisers to governments and militaries, almost a textbook,” Schmitt told The New York Times. “We wanted to create a product that would be useful to states to help them decide what their position is. We were not making recommendations, we did not define best practice, we did not want to get into policy.”

US officials have continued to deny American involvement in the attack, but the timing specified by the anonymous sources coincides with an order from President Bush authorizing an increased information exchange with Israel over Iranian nuclear facilities.

During a 2009 conversation with The New York Times, an American official said any secret action against Iran would classify officially as “science experiments.”

http://rt.com/news/act-force-iran-cyberattack-831/]

Top Ten Ways the Beltway Press will treat Gen. Cartwright differently from Snowden

Posted on 06/28/2013 by Juan Cole

NBC reports that Gen. James “Hoss” Cartwright is under investigation as the source for David Sanger’s 2012 New York Times article revealing that the United States is behind the Stuxnet computer virus, which was used to infect computers at Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment facilities and at the Bushehr nuclear energy plants and delay their going hot.

High government officials in Washington routinely leak classified information, as part of turf battles inside the government. Cartwright may have been using Sanger to ensure that Stuxnet was not wholly abandoned (it was his baby). That such leaks are so routine, and are part of Washington’s way of doing business, is what makes the harsh espionage charges against people like Edward Snowden so hypocritical. He who is without leaks should cast the first stone.

The Cartwright story (and remember that he is only a suspect) intersects with Edward Snowden’s revelations about National Security Administration spying in many ways. It seems likely that suspicion is now falling on Cartwright because the NSA knows David Sanger’s phone number and has been looking at everyone he talked to on the phone in the months leading up to his article. We know that the NSA has been repeatedly requesting massive amounts of US phone information and storing it for easy search. Since Sanger’s article is proof that an illegal act was committed, as Obama said at the time, getting a FISA warrant to go through Sanger’s already-stored records would have been child’s play. When the PATRIOT Act was proposed, the FBI promised it would be used only for counter-terrorism. But that promise has for many years rung hollow.

http://www.juancole.com/2013/06/beltway-cartwright-differently.html