Iran Says Siemens Helped US, Israel Build Stuxnet
CWmike writes "Iran's Brigadier General, Gholam Reza Jalali, accused Siemens on Saturday with helping US and Israeli teams craft the Stuxnet worm that attacked his country's nuclear facilities. 'Siemens should explain why and how it provided the enemies with the information about the codes of the SCADA software and prepared the ground for a cyber attack against us,' Jalali told the Islamic Republic News Service. Siemens did not reply to a request for comment on Jalali's accusations. Stuxnet, which first came to light in June 2010 but hit Iranian targets in several waves starting the year before, has been extensively analyzed by security researchers. Symantec and Langner Communications say Stuxnet was designed to infiltrate Iran's nuclear enrichment program, hide in the Iranian SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) control systems that operate its plants, then force gas centrifuge motors to spin at unsafe speeds. Jalali suggested that Iranian officials would pursue Siemens in the courts, and claimed that Iranian researchers traced the attack to Israel and the US. He said information from infected systems was sent to computers in Texas."
I view everything which comes through government channels from Iran as Potential FUD. The rigged election, suppression of protests, detentions, disapperances, etc. of political opponents smells worse than when the Shah was running the country. For all we can tell they didn't really have a worm at all, but failed to read the owners manual properly.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Agreed, reduction has occurred. But you're not naive enough to sit their and pretend that Disarmament was ever the intention of the Nuclear powers under this treaty. The NPT was a political tool to coerce nation states into a public declaration that they wouldn't seek Nuclear Weapons - a damned if they do, and a damned if they don't approach. It completely fails to address the fact that Middle Eastern nation states live next door to a nuclear power who they have been at war at multiple times over the later half of the 20th Century who they distrust.
Israel didn't sign the NNPT, nor did India, Pakistan, or the DPRK, unlike India , the DPRK and Pakistan, Israel never tested a nuclear weapon, hasn't threatened anyone with one.
Iran signed and ratified the NNPT, so it's supposed to follow the rules.
So bringing Israel into a discussion about NNPT does what exactly?
I see, and the facts show that the US, Russian Federation, UK, France are all decreasing their nuclear stockpiles over time, China really isn't increasing theirs while a number of former Soviet states that had nuclear weapons gave them up (Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine).
So I guess that the nuclear powers are slowly abiding by the stipulation in the NNPT to reduce nuclear stockpiles.
Not at all. Each of those guys was an arguably fine leader, until they went off.
Hitler pulled the Germans out of the depression returning Germany to a prosperous state, even bringing the world the Volkswagen. Then he went nuts and invaded most of Europe, and slaughtered millions of people because he didn't feel they fit his weird mold of what a person should be. It was (in part) this fear-mongering that brought out a hatred of the gypsies, gays, Jews, and frankly any non-Arian that he used to really ramp up his world domination efforts.
Stalin likewise brought the Soviet Union back to prosperity after the depression, after a few failed attempts, and even eventually did a great job of fighting off the back-stabbing, Hitler-led Nazis. He then used the fear of a US-led world domination threat to become the counterpart super-power, including the introduction of the Iron Curtain. Fair enough, the US was no less fear-mongering at the time, with its own Cold War issues. While the US had McCarthism, Stalin had the KGB. At least the way it's been portrayed outside the Iron Curtain, it's a pretty powerful fear-based motivator.
Bush (the younger), whatever you think of his policies, used the attacks on the 11th of September (in part) to build a ferver that has led to full-scale military action against a few questionable countries, rivaling a cost and scale of World War II, and that doesn't seem to be slowing down. All manner of fear and mongering continues out of this one, the least of which is a fear and misunderstanding of most things Islam, Arab, or, well, really anything "over there."
I, on the other hand, am not trying to scare anyone, or blame anything on "the other guy." I'm just pointing out a few guys that have done that; by far, not a comprehensive list, either.
End the FUD
Hey, Iran, get a grip! You're throwing accusations all over the place without anything to back them up. Yeah you lied totally about your nuclear intentions and yeah someone pretty darn good gave you a good screwing over these last couple of years for it. Consider that this alternative was probably why bombs haven't been falling out of the skies on you yet. But your habit of blaming everything on The Great Satan and The Little Satan was old decades ago. Everything bad that happens to you is never your fault. Now you think you've found someone new to blame simply because the truth is: You really don't know how it happened, or who really did it, so you bluster about throwing mud and hoping that something will stick. As the saying goes, when you speak a thousand words then maybe one of them is true. Consider that you earned this insult and, like I said, be glad that it was a computer worm rather than cruise missiles and JDAMs.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."