Intelligence officials have determined that the president of the United States has the power to launch a pre-emptive strike if a major cyber attack is imminent, according to the New York Times.
The decision is part of a "secret legal review," the Times said, and will ultimately be included in a package of rules that - for the first time - will outline how the military should handle cyber attacks. Conceivably, the president would be allowed to "attack adversaries by injecting them with destructive code even if there is no declared war."
President George W. Bush and President Obama have allegedly embraced this logic in the past. The Stuxnet virus that emerged in 2010 was a cyber weapon jointly developed by U.S. and Israeli officials in an effort to shut down the development of Iran's nuclear program, the Times reported last year. Stuxnet, an effort known as Olympic Games among U.S. intelligence officials, started in the Bush administration and continued after President Obama took office. It was intended to only affect the Natanz plant in Iran, but was mistakenly unleashed on the global Web.
Current rules officially allow the military to carry out counterrorism campaigns in countries where the rules of war apply, like Afghanistan. But drone strikes are permitted in regions like Pakistan and Yemen, a controversial policy.
The final rules will be highly classified, so don't expect to find them posted on whitehouse.gov. One official told the Times that "cyberweapons were so powerful that like nuclear weapons they should be unleashed only on the direct orders of the commander in chief."
The military would not get involved in "ordinary" attacks on companies - like those carried out recently against the Times or Twitter. They could intervene in cases of a "major" cyber attack in the U.S., but officials are not revealing what exactly would constitute a major event.
In related news, the Energy Department was reportedly the victim of a hack that compromised the personal information of several hundred employees. An Energy Department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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