The War Against Iran Has Already Started

By Trevor Butterworth
Sep. 21 2010 - 3:28 pm
Courtesy Of  "Forbes Magazine"

There is little doubt that the fine gradations of history will give cyber war an earlier start. But just as television news was transformed by technology before the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and politics was transformed by social networking before it appeared that Twitter would bring about a second Iranian Revolution, process and progress need crystallizing events, where the political and cultural significance of technological innovation becomes indisputable.

Such a moment came in July with the discovery of a worm known as Stuxnet, which sought out a particular version of the Siemens’ SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems that control power grids and industrial plants. According to Ralph Langner, an expert in industrial control systems who published a study of the worm last week, Stuxnet was capable of taking over SCADA controls in order to deliver a kinetic attack by causing critical systems to physically malfunction. The systems infected weren’t randomly targeted: a majority are in Iran.

Computer World magazine recently pronounced Stuxnet, “a piece of malware so devious in its use of unpatched vulnerabilities, so sophisticated in its multipronged approach, that the security researchers who tore it apart believe it may be the work of state-backed professionals.” And according to the latest article in the magazine, speculation is rife that Israel may have been behind the worm – and that it was designed to sabotage or even take control of the operating systems for Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor.

Whether that is what really happened is beside the point. The reality of Stuxnet (and more to the point, its next incarnation) is that critical state infrastructure can be commandeered and destroyed without anyone firing a shot. The very prospect that Israel – or whomever – could shut down Iran by destroying its electrical grid through causing every generator to overload in a matter of minutes is a powerful signal: the signal that cyber war has physical consequences that make conventional air strikes look quaint and maladroit, so 20th century.

This evolutionary stage is a game-changer. Previously, as with Russia’s invasion of South Ossetia in Georgia, cyber attacks focused on basic communications systems (through denial of service attacks, where a network of computers floods a target computer with requests to slow or shut it down), and sophomoric propaganda warfare (pasting an image of Adolf Hitler next to Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website). Even if Iran successfully cocooned its nuclear control systems, the fact that most critical infrastructure is embedded in the civilian world give rival state and non-state actors myriad pathways to unleash havoc.

It is, perhaps, one of the odder coincidences of history that Iran should again be a crucible for technological transformation. The revolution in 1979 may have had more than a whiff of neo-medievalism, but it was the first major instantaneous media event, due to the use of new portable VCR cameras, the availability of affordable satellite transmission, and the spread of satellite ground stations, largely as a consequence of televising the 1978 world cup.

As Mike Mosettig and Henry Griggs Jr noted in “TV at the Front,” an article for Foreign Policy in 1980, the new Iranian regime – unlike North Vietnam – was able to communicate through broadcast networks in real time, and to a massive international audience, without yielding any corresponding access. Such speed, magnified by competition between networks, threatened to oversimplify complex or ambiguous events turning the news media into an unwitting, malleable force in international affairs, rather than a restrained spectator and careful explicator of events.

“The networks,” they concluded, “will run into more problems with governments and revolutionaries who try to turn correspondents and producers into diplomats, message carriers, propagandists, and even targets of murder. The networks will have to match their technology, speed, and aggressiveness with sensitivity and sophistication. Meanwhile, the hardest task of all will be reporting the news.”

Twitter’s emergence as samizdat media tool in Iran’s “Green Revolution” seemed, for a while, to signal that “crowd reporting” – for the want of a phrase” – could undermine a closed state mediated by top-down control through bottom-up collective communication. But Twitter didn’t fail as an organizational tool; it failed because there wasn’t a critical threshold of samizdat culture in Iran to use it to advance emancipatory politics. The medium was very much the message and the message was confusion.

Nevertheless, as Jared Keller noted in the Atlantic, “the Green movement remains the first major world event broadcast worldwide almost entirely via social media” – and as such, stands as a transformational event with consequences as potentially significant for politics, international affairs, and the role of communications as those brought by the shift from film stock to video cassette.

Stuxnet is an even more dramatic transformational event: warfare is never going to be the same, at least while the underlying protocols governing the Internet create these kinds of systemic vulnerabilities. But even if there was agreement to rewrite these protocols starting tomorrow, such a project would take a decade. So, let the damage assessment begin. Who knows? By demonstrating how Iran could so very easily experience a Chernobyl-like catastrophe, or the entire destruction of its conventional energy grid, the first round of the “war” may have already been won.