Bipartisan Support for Stuxnet and Drone Leaks Crackdown
The U.S. House and Senate have handed in a joint, bipartisan request to the White House to investigate how news outlets learned about the U.S. drone strike program and about a computer worm that President Barack Obama authorized for release against a uranium enrichment facility in Iran. Before the publication of a New York Times article about the worm, Stuxnet, the U.S. had never admitted to using cyberweapons.
The joint statement says, in part:
These disclosures have seriously interfered with ongoing intelligence programs and have put at jeopardy our intelligence capability to act in the future. Each disclosure puts American lives at risk, makes it more difficult to recruit assets, strains the trust of our partners, and threatens imminent and irreparable damage to our national security in the face of urgent and rapidly adapting threats worldwide.
In a follow-up analysis in the New York Times, a government secrecy researcher from the Federation of American Scientists argues that on the contrary, the government should talk more openly about its drone and cyberwarfare programs because the new technologies represent a new frontier in U.S. national security. They bring up new legal and moral questions that would benefit from open discussion, Times writer Scott Shane writes.
After the Times and the American Civil Liberties Union filed Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, the Obama Administration must say by June 20 how much it will tell the public about its drone-driven assassinations in Pakistan.
How the U.S chooses to use new technology, as well as what it chooses to keep secret, will set precedents for other nations around the world, the Times concluded.
Source: New York Times
