DOSSIER
Why Cyber Intervention is Just Not Enough Leyla MUTIU talks about the high stakes of this emerging form of intervention and the threats of cyberwarfare on today’s political scene
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yberwarfare is the new hot topic of the day, sometimes regarded as a new form of war, sometimes as a form of intervention that does not involve the responsability of the perpetrator. Without any clear juridical frame and escaping the jurisdiction of any criminal court, cyber interventions are a new comfortable way for those that wish to interfere in the affairs of another state covertly, without entering the logistics of war. If hostile actions can be carried out under circumstances that do not involve armed conflict, then how does this form of sabotage differentiate itself from the Clausewitzian characteristics of a war? Also, does changing the nature of the conflict from conventional to unconventional also mean that cyber interventions can prevent physical wars by postponing them? In order to answer these questions, this article will analyse the case of the US intervention in the Iranian nuclear program through the Olympic Games cyber operation, as well as examine the Russian cyber attacks on Estonia and the more recent accusation against the phone producer Huawei of covering for Chinese espionage on American soil. These case studies will help the reader understand how cyber interventions and wars interact in the absence of a declared war (in which case the use of cyber technology is already obvious). Next, the author of this article will analyse the similarities and differences between Clausewitz’s point of view on wars and todays’ cyberwarfares and will try to decide on whether cyber intervention is only a different form of war or its modern herald. The Olympic Games cyber attack is perhaps the most known, large-scale cyber covert operation directed by one state against another one in the aim of postpon-
26 InFocus
ing or avoiding military conflict. It was started in the United States during the Bush years, but reached maturity and efficiency only later on, under the leadership of president Obama. According to David Sanger, the New York Times columnist, president Bush has insisted that Obama keep this program operational, alongside the development of drones. The operation involved provoking the centrifuges from the Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz to crash repeatedly and suddenly for no apparent reason. Ideally,
these centrifuges would race out of control, blow apart, and force the Iranian to shut down the entire plant in order to find out what went wrong, a process which could take weeks. “The thinking was that the Iranians would blame bad parts, or bad engineering, or just incompetence,” one of the makers of the programme told Sanger. The cover was very plausible since the Iranians bought the parts from A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani who presented himself as the father of the Pakistani bomb. Even though the chances of actually blowing up the nuclear facility itself were slim, the sole idea of having the abil-
ity to slow down the uranium enrichment process by a few weeks, various times, was sufficiently attractive to the US. As the US realized that it could not act alone in such a complex operation, Israel joined the program shortly after. The expertise of the Mossad, with its already in-depth knowledge of the facility and of the reality on the ground, came to complete with the superior cyber abilities of the US operators. It also aimed at creating a bridge of confidence between the overwhelmingly paranoid Israeli government, worried about the threat of a Iranian nuclear attack on Israel, and the American side. The US government was seeking to assure Israel of its backing- to show Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, that the US was doing something to stop the Iranians from acquiring the nuclear bomb and, at the same time, preventing Israel from acting alone against Iran, thus inevitably dragging the US into a military conflict it did not wish to have. From this perspective, the cyber operation was not meant to be a weapon of unconventional war, but a tool for the preservation of peace. If the Olympic Games were meant to prevent a war, then at the other pole lays the Russian attack against Estonia, meant to intimidate the Baltic state with the threat of war. After the Estonian government decided to change the location of a war memorial dating from the Soviet occupation, 85.000 Estonian computers found themselves under attack for three weeks in April 2007. The attack peaked on May 9th, when 58 web pages were brought down alongside the online services of the largest Estonian bank. This operation led to the creation of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Talinn. If the Estonian Foreign