Stakeholder #1

Iran

Raymond, Nicolas. "Iran Grunge Flag" 4/9/2012 via flickr. Attribution 2.0 Generic

     The Stakeholder

The nation of Iran is a country in the Middle East. After a turbulent time of political and social unrest, Iran has been striving to improve its economy. Currently its economy relies on oil and agriculture. The president at the time of this controversy was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Recently Iran has also been improving relations with some other nations, but it still has issues with many with others. Currently, the United Nations has placed strict sanctions on Iran after they failed to comply with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran refused to allow inspectors into their nuclear facilities. These sanctions have significantly hurt Iran’s economy.

Many western nations view Iran as a nation that may easily turn hostile to it surrounding neighbors. However, many nations would be willing to limit the sanctions placed on Iran if Iran would limit its nuclear research program. 

In 2010, one of their plants was attacked by the Stuxnet Worm in an attempt to set back their Nuclear Research Program. This is were this controversy really kicks of

  

Specific Claims

     The first they made which is probably one of the most important ones of the whole controversy was that they were researching the enrichment of uranium for atomic energy. Iran stated that they had no intention of developing nuclear weapons. Iranian officials stated that their actions ere "permitted by the Nonproliferation Treaty, which allows signers to have peaceful nuclear programs as long as they agree to monitoring."

By the looks of it, Iran is acting very suspicious. They say that they do not want to develop nuclear arms, yet they had kept their nuclear research labs secret for various years. Secondly, they were told to wait until further investigations were conducted by they didn't. They seem to have been very difficult to work with. 

Another claim that was made was that the United States and Israel were behind the development of Stuxnet, the virus that reeked havoc on one of their nuclear research plants. Iran says that their experts have information that shows "that Stuxnet originated from the U.S. state of Texas and Israel."

This claim is more plausible but it appears as Iran really does not have hard evidence to support it. It seems as they are basing this on what they have heard from cyber corporations and on who would have a reason to launch such an attack. 

A third claim by Iran was that the German manufacture, Siemens, assisted the U.S. in this attack. Siemens manufactured the specific piece of hardware that Stuxnet was looking for. Iran's civil defense chief said "Siemens should explain why and how it provided the enemies with the information about the codes of the SCADA software and prepared the ground for a cyber attack against us. " 

So as far as this claim goes, it is also somewhat possible because some knowledge of the hardware in the plant was required to launch such a specific attack. However, this is were the ingenuity of Stuxnet comes into play. Stuxnet was actually able to record and send back information to it's creaters before it was fully cooked up to launch its attack. 

For the first claim, everyone seems to go against Iran. Most nations believe that they are developing nuclear weapons. With second claim, everyone almost agrees on it but the U.S. government has not officially confirmed it. Finally, for the third claim, it seems like Stuxnet was responsible for the leaked codes, but then again, Siemens has refused to comment on the attack.