Zero Days Page #6

Why can't we talk about it?

It's a covert operation.

Gibney:
Not anymore.

I mean, we know what happened,

we know who did it.

Well, maybe you don't know

as much as you think you know.

Gibney:
Well, I'm talking to you

because I want to

get the story right.

Well, that's the same reason

I'm talking to you.

Gibney:
Even though it's

a covert operation?

Look, this is not

a snowden kind of thing, okay?

I think what he did

was wrong.

He went too far.

He gave away too much.

Unlike snowden,

who was a contractor,

I was in NSA.

I believe in the agency,

so what I'm willing to give you

will be limited,

but we're talking

because everyone's getting

the story wrong

and we have to get it right.

We have to understand

these new weapons.

The stakes are too high.

Gibney:
What do you mean?

We did stuxnet.

It's a fact.

You know, we came

so f***ing close to disaster,

and we're still on the edge.

It was a huge multinational,

interagency operation.

In the U.S. it was CIA,

NSA, and the military

cyber command.

From britain, we used

Iran intel out of gchq,

but the main partner

was Israel.

Over there,

Mossad ran the show,

and the technical work

was done by unit 8200.

Israel is really the key

to the story.

Melman:
Oh, traffic in Israel

is so unpredictable.

Gibney:
Yossi, how did you get

into this whole stuxnet story?

I have been covering

the Israeli intelligence

in general, in the Mossad

in particular

for nearly 30 years.

In '82, I was a London-based

correspondent

and I covered a trial

of terrorists,

and I became more familiar

with this topic of terrorism,

and slowly but surely, I

started covering it as a beat.

Israel, we live in

a very rough neighborhood

where the...

The Democratic values,

western values, are very rare.

But Israel pretends

to be a free, Democratic,

westernized society,

posh neighborhoods,

rich people,

youngsters who are having

almost similar mind-set

to their American

or western European

counterparts.

On the other hand,

you see a lot of scenes

and events which resemble

the real middle east,

terror attacks, radicals,

fanatics, religious zealots.

I knew that Israel

is trying to slow down

Iran's nuclear program,

and therefore,

i came to the conclusion that

if there was a virus

infecting Iran's computers,

it's... it's one more element

in... in this larger picture

based on past precedents.

Yadlin:

1981 I was an f-16 pilot,

and we were told that,

unlike our dream

to do dogfights

and to kill migs,

we have to be prepared

for a long-range mission

to destroy a valuable target.

Nobody told us what is

this very valuable

strategic target.

It was 600 miles from Israel.

So we train our self

to do the job,

which was very difficult.

No air refueling at that time.

No satellites

for reconnaissance.

Fuel was on the limit.

Pilot:
What?

Whoa! Whoa!

Yadlin:
At the end of the day,

we accomplished

the mission.

Gibney:
Which was?

Yadlin:
To destroy

the Iraqi nuclear reactor

near Baghdad,

which was called osirak.

And Iraq never was able

to accomplish

its ambition to have

a nuclear bomb.

Melman:
Amos yadlin,

general yadlin,

he was the head

of the military intelligence.

The biggest unit

within that organization

was unit 8200.

They'd block telephones,

they'd block faxes,

they're breaking

into computers.

A decade ago,

when yadlin became

the chief of

military intelligence,

there was no

cyber warfare unit in 8200.

So they started recruiting

very talented people,

hackers either

from the military

or outside the military

that can contribute

to the project of building

a cyber warfare unit.

Yadlin:
In the 19th century,

there were only army and Navy.

In the 20th century,

we got air power

as a third dimension of war.

In the 21st century,

cyber will be

the fourth dimension of war.

It's another kind of weapon

and it is for unlimited range

in a very high speed

and in

a very low signature.

So this give you

a huge opportunity...

And the superpowers

have to change

the way we think

about warfare.

Finally we are transforming

our military

for a new kind of war

that we're fighting now...

And for wars of tomorrow.

We have made our military

better trained,

better equipped,

and better prepared

to meet the threats

facing America today

and tomorrow

and long in the future.

Sanger:
Back in the end

of the bush administration,

people within

the U.S. government

were just beginning

to convince president bush

to pour money into

offensive cyber weapons.

Stuxnet started off

in the defense department.

Then Robert gates,

secretary of defense,

reviewed this program

and he said,

"this program shouldn't be

in the defense department.

This should really be under

the covert authorities

over in

the intelligence world."

So the CIA was

very deeply involved

in this operation,

while much of

the coding work was done

by the

national security agency

and unit 8200,

its Israeli equivalent,

working together with a newly

created military position

called U.S. cyber command.

And interestingly, the director

of the national security agency

would also have

a second role

as the commander

of U.S. cyber command.

And U.S. cyber command

is located

at fort Meade in the

same building as the NSA.

Col. Gary d. Brown:

I was deployed for a year

giving advice on air operations

in Iraq and Afghanistan,

and when I was returning home

after that,

the assignment I was given

was to go

to U.S. cyber command.

Cyber command is a...

Is the military command

that's responsible for

essentially the conducting

of the nation's military affairs

in cyberspace.

The stated reason

the United States

decided it needed

a cyber command

was because of an event called

operation buckshot yankee.

Chris inglis:

In the fall of 2008,

we found some

adversaries inside

of our classified networks.

While it wasn't completely true

that we always assumed that

we were successful

at defending things

at the barrier,

at the... at the kind of

perimeter that we might have

between our networks

and the outside world,

there was a large confidence

that we'd been

mostly successful.

But that was a moment in time

when we came to

the quick conclusion that it...

It's not really ever secure.

That then accelerated

the department of defense's

progress towards

what ultimately

became cyber command.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Good morning, sir. Cyber has

one item for you today.

Earlier this week,

antok analysts

detected a foreign adversary

using known methods

to access the U.S.

military network.

We identified

the malicious activity

via data collected through

our information assurance

and signals from

intelligence authorities

and confirmed

it was a cyber adversary.

We provided data to our

cyber partners within the dod...

You think of NSA

as an institution

that essentially uses

its abilities in cyberspace

to help defend communications

in that space.

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