Israel is learning the hard way about the perils of trans-border collaboration on national security matters.
A national scandal is brewing in Israel over security breaches in the country’s missile defense programs. In an expose featured in its February 13th edition, the influential Ma’ariv newspaper has revealed that the advanced Arrow Theater Missile Defense system, as well as other components of Israel’s “Homa” national missile defense architecture, could be infected with a potentially fatal “Trojan horse” virus. Apparently, recent work on the system by the IBM Corporation has included collaboration between software engineers in the company’s Tel Aviv and Cairo branches, giving Egyptian programmers critical access to the “Motif” software that runs Israeli missile defenses. Officials in Jerusalem are now scrambling to find and eliminate software “bugs” that might have been planted as part of this collaboration, the Israeli daily reports.Posted by Alan at February 23, 2004 05:14 PMVia the American Foreign Policy Council