Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade. Those forensic investigations into the inner workings of the code, while picking apart how it worked, came to no conclusions about who was responsible. The code itself is 50 times as big as the typical computer worm, Carey Nachenberg, a vice president of Symantec, one of the many groups that have dissected the code, said at a symposium at Stanford University in April. It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives. The United States government only recently acknowledged developing cyberweapons, and it has never admitted using them. The last of that series of attacks, a few weeks after Stuxnet was detected around the world, temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium. In the following weeks, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another after that. Obama decided that the cyberattacks should proceed. Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, Mr. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks - begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games - even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. WASHINGTON - 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. Similarly, in some of the texts used in the case studies, the facts may not always be proven nevertheless, they have been selected because they highlight interesting IHL issues and are thus published for didactic purposes. ![]() They are nevertheless worthy of discussion, if only to raise a challenge to display more humanity in armed conflicts. As per the disclaimer, neither the ICRC nor the authors can be identified with the opinions expressed in the Cases and Documents. Some cases even come to solutions that clearly violate IHL. Yvette Issar, research assistant, both at the University of Geneva. ![]() Margherita D’Ascanio, LL.M., student at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, under the supervision of Professor Marco Sassòli and Ms.
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