US dodges the question of whether its military built Stuxnet

AS ANY POLITICIAN KNOWS, sometimes the best way to not answer a question is to completely skirt around it, but sometimes being evasive can say more than a thousand words.

In an interview on CNBC's cyberwar documentary show CodeWars: America's Cyber Threat, US deputy defence secretary William Lynn was caught in a trap of his own making. As Wired picked up, Lynn had some difficulty answering this straightforward sounding question: "Was the US involved in any way in the development of Stuxnet?"

Lynn responded with this confused sentence that didn't really say anything, replying, "The challenges of Stuxnet, as I said, what it shows you is the difficulty of any, any attribution and it's something that we're still looking at, it's hard to get into any kind of comment on that until we've finished our examination."

Interviewer Melissa Lee pressed, "But sir, I'm not asking you if you think another country was involved. I'm asking you if the U.S. was involved. If the Department of Defense was involved." To which Lynn replied, "And this is not something that we're going to be able to answer at this point."

Make up your own mind about it, but there is a belief among security experts that Stuxnet was built as a joint effort between Israel and the US aimed at inflicting damage on Iran's nuclear fuel refining programme.

In a recent interview with The INQUIRER, F-Secure chief security researcher Mikko Hypponen went as far as stating his own belief that US president George W Bush signed off on developing Stuxnet in 2008. µ