By Walter Pincus, Published: July 18
House Republicans might want to pause a moment in their rush to link the Obama White House to the original leak about computer viruses that the United States and Israel reportedly developed years ago to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.
It appears that the initial leak about the viruses — known under the names Stuxnet and Flame — came in early January 2009 while President George W. Bush was still in the White House and that some sources were active and former officials of that administration.
At a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing July 11, Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) asked whether “the Espionage Act would not properly come into play with the alleged revelation of our [U.S.] participation, if true, in the Stuxnet virus or the Flame virus?”
He was talking about a story written by New York Times reporter David Sanger, which was published June 1.
It began, “From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.”
Sanger quickly added that Obama was accelerating a program “begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games.”
How did Sanger know that?
via House GOP shouldn’t rush to judgment on cyberweapon ‘leaks’ – The Washington Post.
