The Ghostly Presence

It is there, quietly controlling.  Its presence undetected until its mission succeeded to some level of degree.  Its purpose one of malicious intent.  The minds that concentrate their engineering genius on perfecting a system of ghostly espionage no doubt revel in the challenge.  And they are brilliantly capable of overcoming obstacles, of designing a code that becomes efficiently capable of the mission it is assigned to.

It may be called malicious, but the malice exists only in proportion and perspective.  The perspective being that of resisting the potential of a rabidly militant, religiously triumphal state determined to wreak havoc on the world by its assumption of nuclear armaments.  The better to threaten those who criticize it, and who do dishonour, in their opinion, to Islam.

That is the true malice, the wish to do irrevocable and wretchedly horrible harm to others.  The proportion lies in the ability of the instrument devised to halt its malign progress, although the effect was merely temporary, barely impinging on the Republic of Iran's end-game.  Wounded by the effect of sanctions, fairly undisturbed by the deleterious effects on its population, it continues to forge ahead with its diabolical plans.

The malware and the program it fit neatly into, named Olympic Games,  must surely have made allusion to the butchery of Israeli Olympic athletes on 5 September 1972, in the Munich Olympic Village, when the world looked on in fascinated horror as terrorists slaughtered Israelis.  It cannot have seemed too horrible to many present, with the decision of the Olympic Committee to register its annoyance at the atrocity, but to continue with the games.

If the deaths could not be recognized for the dreadful assault against humanity that it represented at the time, then perhaps a program designed to halt further slaughter dedicated in their names might have seemed appropriate.  The cleverness of designing a computer code as a 'beacon' to be inserted into the Natanz enrichment plant computer system, enabling it to compose an working blueprint, and electronically reporting back is the stuff of legend.

Enabling the expert designers to then use the system blueprints to effectively design the following malware meant to attack the plant from within its own computer system, slowing down and impairing the enrichment of uranium to weapons-grade usefulness.  The cyber work controlled in essence by the Bush administration's National Security Agency, calling in an Israeli team of experts to design the program.

That bespeaks collaboration at a very workable level.  It effectively detained Israel from launching a pre-emptive strike, and enabled both countries to briefly relax their vigilance, turning their attention to other potential efforts that might prove useful in decelerating Iran's nuclear program.  Stuxnet was a success of quite impressive proportions.

Its recently-revealed predecessor, Flame, with its own, far more complex and rigorous code allowing the program to gather and send back information from devices which it had infected, seems by comparison a masterpiece of unparalleled precision engineering and imaginative design.  Flame's ability to turn on computer microphones and cameras for remote eavesdropping is, for the moment, as futuristic as cyber-spying can achieve toward.

The virus, especially designed to take a keen interest in Autocad files used familiarly by architects and scientists for blueprint planning, most particularly meaningful to the deterrence issue at hand.