 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Professor Ajaz Ahmad and we will discuss the recent issues that have come out with the disclosure about kill list, cyber war against Iran and other issues that really come out of it. Ajaz, the recent flame virus also substantiated that is an ongoing cyber war against Iran. The earliest two steps was used, there was a dooku virus, both of them have now been traced not only to the United States and Israel but explicitly President Obama actually conducting weekly review of what the cyber war was all about and now the results show. Analysis by Kasparovsky labs show that the current flame virus also shares code, certain part of the code with the stooks nets so it seems to be a continuation of the cyber war against Iran. Now what does it mean in terms of international law? Well in the larger context there are two things I would start with saying. You know since the Vietnam War the United States has been developing what they then called the automated battlefield. Now after about 40 years we are seeing some very very advanced expressions of that where the entire battlefield is being automated and to use the whole spectrum of technologies that they have. This is drone wars or on one side cyber war is on the other it's part of that whole thing. As for sovereignty the United States has a position that the United States has issues of its own sovereignty in the national space of other countries. Their defense secretary Leon Panetta said as much in Delhi with respect to Fatah in Pakistan that this is an issue of our sovereignty. They have a sovereign right to attack through their cyber weapons and so on. Only two years ago or less Mr. Obama said using cyberspace for disruption of technologies in other countries are act of war. United States is a formal position that if you attack our for instance our grid to cyber weapons. That's an act of war. That's an act of war and we have the right to put the missile missile down your smoke. Absolutely. It's the exact words used. Yes thank you very much for reminding me of those words yes absolutely. It's an act of war we have a right to retaliate in any way we want but they have the right to use the exactly the same means against you. And it doesn't give Iran a right to retaliate obviously. That's right that's right. So what you actually have is a very later on I want to talk about this a very new kind of development of the idea of an imperial sovereignty in which only the United States which is an exceptional power which has exceptional responsibilities to defend the free world which is now the entire world is now exempted from very many kinds of constraints that it requires from other countries. Now coming back to the issue of cyber war you know general view of cyber war is a relatively benign one in public space because it's sort of seem to be tantamount with some viruses which infect your machines and so on but the fact that cyber war can be targeted to the extent of actually destruction of equipment in this case centrifuges it's one of the examples and that's really physical damage no different from any other physical attack. The bigger issue is that the collateral damage it can cause it infected 5000 machines in India and about I think about 15-16000 machines in Indonesia also other machines all over the world. These are really also programmable logic controllers which could be conceivably controlling hazardous equipment and if that stops functioning untargeted collateral damage it could cause an almost havoc. It seems that the United States is really not bothered about any of these aspects at all. What is very interesting is that neither India nor Indonesia made any big issue of it. This is the recognition of imperial sovereignty on the part of major countries like India who are themselves trying to make breakthroughs into fields of higher technology. They did not object didn't make any big noise they accept that these are collateral damages. There is an argument some people have given that Fukushima may have been also caused by partially because Siemens equipment might have been there failed which I don't think is really true but the point is really that I think people are completely underestimating the nature of this war and the fact that you don't have to have to be a big power in order to wage it that you can actually wage it even as a small power provided you willing to put some resources into it. You know the hundred million dollars was supposed to have been what it needs to create a virus like this. Big money not small change not very big money when it comes to nation states. Quite quite you see the United States has taken a wager that it will keep 10 steps ahead of others in this kind of war technology. By the time you have developed something they have developed something much bigger. Secondly that all of these little wars that they're waging are actually experiments in on the spot use of the weaponry that they have that unless you go out of the lab and actually use it in the field you do not know what the repercussions of it are. So now that they have done it and they know that these other things can happen and so on now they will say well we are going to fix this and this this is not going to happen. Interestingly enough Gaddafi having given up his nuclear program is one of the reasons why this particular virus succeeded because Gaddafi had given the A.Q. Khan's delivered centrifuges to Americans and they therefore had a base on which to experiment and that was what they had done before they attacked the Iranian centrifuges. Coming back to the drone wars which we had talked about earlier. Now you know drone wars is also exactly the same kind of logic that you're talking about that imperial sovereignty. I have the right to kill anybody anywhere and this does not require the sanction of the country in which it is being waged. Yemen of course is partially agreed to this. Pakistan had tacitly agreed formally not now is protesting but apparently there are about 40 odd countries where US today is targeting with drones and has quote unquote the right of the military to decode people and are apparently taking them out. Yemen Somalia Pakistan we know about. Yes these are the most prominent. Well first of all I want to come to the whole issue of agreement. You know you put a gun to somebody's head and get an agreement. You put a gun to Yemen's head Pakistan's head and get an overt or covert agreement. Pakistanis have known all along how much damage it would do them in the areas where this is being done. So that agreement is again you know that what I have been just mentioning earlier about the exercise for imperial sovereignty and forcing others to accept it. So that agreement is really sort of you know coercive agreement coercively. One of the things that you find in American thinking today is that there is in the United States a sharply declining consent to paying any price for fighting wars price in blood in American blood. So you must fight wars that do not cost American blood and so long as there is no American blood. The only country where opinion matters is American opinion. You know that's a very important point. Hula massacre created an entire you know outrage across the world because children were killed number of you know innocent women and children were killed and so on. Now on the drones number of women children have been killed. Any able-bodied male who dies in a drone attack officially United States considers them to be militants irrespective terrorists irrespective of who they are. So even by that numb that by that philosophy the number of women and children have been recently killed both in Yemen and in Pakistan Fata in which one wedding family wedding was attacked and about 10 children died doesn't seem to have created any ripple of protest anywhere in the world. They're said to be you know they're said to be over 2,500 documented civilian killings in Fata alone through drone attacks. Not a sound of protest anywhere in the world. It it's not even registered that this is happening. There are two or three other things I wanted to say about these this drone business. One is the level at which it is the the rapidity with with which this is now increasing. United States had less than 50 drones deployed in 2001. By now the US Air Force alone has 7500 and that that is not the CIA that is not the Navy and so on. That that's one sort of thing the speed at which it is going. Second factor which is bound to occur is very fast proliferation because this technology that any number of states can replicate and will want to have for precisely the reasons and very often for use inside their territory and that is the third thing I want to come to. Drones will be used inside the United States for surveillance. Already the police is asking for it. The police is asking for it. American universities now are introducing one university after the other is introducing courses to train pilots for these drones which are unmanned things. Pilots are the ones who sit in some lab somewhere and so on. For American universities there is a new field in which to offer courses and make money. You know coming to an earlier issue the drones are now being deployed against what are called signature strikes. Now earlier we were told there is a skill list which President Obama is to do weekly reviews Tuesday supposed to be the day on which the skill decisions are taken and specific baseball cards specific people are identified and killed but at the same time there is public information official information for instance in Yemen as well as in Fata that signature strikes are allowed. Signature strikes means if you see something on the ground which makes people believe that you are behaving suspiciously gathering together in some place of some men whether it's to play football or something it doesn't matter. These are considered signature strikes. No identification required strikes are done and a lot of the strikes in Yemen and Fata signatures. And the next stage of technology which is already there it's getting deployed. Now the next generation of drones will in fact need no pilots. They will be robotic and those robots will decide where to strike and where. Well I would really be not so sanguine about these robots because at the moment I think the human robots who are piloting are as good or as bad. Got it. What that actually means is that the signature strike can actually be launched by a robotic drone without any authorization from anywhere and any account of why it happened.