It’s official. The United States of America was the first to use an atomic bomb against an enemy and now the United States is the first to have acknowledged using a cyber weapon against another country.
We are now certified bad guys to the rest of the world. We are the first nation-state to admit to having used a cyberweapon on another nation-state.
As Dr. Bruce Averill so aptly states:
"Once again the US has admitted to being the first to unleash a technological genie from the bottle onto the international community. Although Stuxnet per se can by no means be called a “weapon of mass destruction”, one must wonder whether, in years to come, we will look back on this event as a turning point similar in impact to the first use of an atomic weapon."
To whoever leaked the information from the Obama administration, for whatever purpose, you have now doomed the United States to a terrible legacy forever. Now the United States will forever lose the war of ideas when it comes to innocence.
The United States killed hundreds of thousands (90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki according to Wikipedia). The United States was the first to acknowledge, albeit through an unnamed source relating to David E. Sanger of the NY Times, that Stuxnet was a US project.
Warfare in cyberspace has always been clean, antiseptic and basically victimless and as long as nobody admitted it, attribution was almost impossible. But now we have a bad guy and it is us.
Forevermore, once cyberweapons become sophisticated enough to cause widespread tangible damage, the United States will be blamed for starting it all.
To David Sanger’s unnamed source: Damn you. Damn you to hell.
Cross-posted from To Inform is to Influence