What I'm reading: U.S. vs Iran in cyberspace?

By Fareed Zakaria

“Among the world’s potential interstate confrontations, one between the United States and Iran has the greatest potential for a significant cyber component,” writes Martin Libicki in Foreign Affairs.

“Indeed, Iran has already started to flex its muscles in cyberspace. In late 2012, cyberattackers linked to Iran penetrated the network of Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil and gas company, effectively trashing 30,000 computers. Rasgas, a Qatari corporation, faced similar treatment. This spring, anonymous U.S. officials claimed that Iranian hackers were able to gain access to control-system software that could allow them to manipulate U.S. oil and gas pipelines.”

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“Egypt's powerful military leadership may be offended by Obama's decision Thursday to cancel a biennial joint military training exercise that was scheduled to start next month to show his displeasure with the rising death toll, arbitrary arrests and virtual martial law,” argues Paul Richter in the Los Angeles Times. “But the generals who toppled the democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, on July 3 are not likely to suspend crucial counter-terrorism cooperation with Washington, halt oil tankers and other commercial shipping in the Suez Canal, or jettison the peace treaty with Israel that has formed a cornerstone of regional peace for three decades.”

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“The government’s fast-growing suite of tools to get around the security of communications represents a threat to privacy not in the modern sense of a litigable right, but in the old-fashioned sense of a general belief that one remains anonymous while moving through the world,” writes Stephen L. Carter for Bloomberg. “When Abraham Lincoln, in his search for Confederate spies, authorized the seizure of copies of all telegrams sent and received in the North, even his own supporters were outraged - not because he had violated their constitutional rights (there was no right to privacy), but because he had violated the unspoken compact between the government and the governed.”

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