Obama's Cyberwars

Dear Mr. President,

Ironic that the Iranians captured that ScanEagle drone on Tuesday, exactly one year to the day they captured that RQ-170 Sentinel drone, one of our “invisible” stealth drones the CIA claims came down due to technical problems—or maybe crashed. (If it crashed it was the smoothest crash in the history of aviation, not a ding or nick on it). “Nope, no drones missing,” according to the Navy and the CIA as usual, is mum, but the Dec. 5 NY Times says the NSA also flies drones over Iran. What the heck is the NSA doing there? And if all these drones are so invisible and sophisticated that backward Islamist nations like Iran couldn’t possibly have the smarts to hack and hijack them, how did they end up with 2 intact on the same date a year apart? (Is this going to be an annual event like the Ohio State-Michigan game?) Further down in that Times article it states that a September GAO report warned that “some drones were sensitive to jamming and spoofing,” i.e., their GPS systems use unencrypted data. (Your military and tech people need to get their stories straight.) I guess this is all part of your undeclared cyberwar against Iran, the Stuxnet worm, the Flame malware, and also against Lebanon—the viruses we infected Lebanon’s banking systems with, but at least no one gets killed or wounded. (Didn’t Panetta say a cyber attack against the U.S. would be a declaration of war? If that’s the case then I guess we declared war on Iran and Lebanon, right?) But overall, Mr. President, it seems like your hi-tech generals aren’t any better than your battlefield generals (who can’t defeat 25,000 sandal-clad Kalashnikov-toting Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan and couldn’t conquer Iraq), since Iran’s fighting us to a draw on the cyberwar front. And why do we have such a hard-on for Iran anyway? Sure they did a bad by refusing UN inspectors access to their nuclear facility, but Israel’s been refusing access to theirs for decades and we’re not infecting their centrifuges or embargoing them or threatening them or flying drones over them and they’re much worse than Iran in the Human Rights violations department but we continue to give them $3+ billion a year so they can buy more weapons and build more illegal settlements on Palestinian land in violation of human rights and treaties and international law. None of this makes any sense and we’re burning through a lot of money doing it. You, Mr. Nobel Peace Prize winner, need to start making peace and stop making war.