America's attack -- which, Sanger reports, the government nicknamed "Olympic Games" -- is probably the most significant covert manipulation of the electromagnetic spectrum since World War II, when cryptanalysts broke the Enigma cipher that allowed access to Nazi codes. Many historians believe that the U.S./U.K. code-breaking efforts shortened that war by several years, helped stop the Japanese at Midway, facilitated the death of Admiral Tojo, and immeasurably helped the Soviets hold out in Stalingrad.

Olympic Games seems to have set back the Iranian nuclear program by several years. The U.S.-Israeli intelligence cooperative that collaborated on the cyber weapon may one day be credited with preventing a wider war in the Middle East. Most notably, the United States and Israel delayed Iran's nuclear development without resorting to the use of nuclear weapons. There may be no better contemporary example of how covert action and intelligence can provide policymakers with their most precious resource: more time.

But now that the secret is out, the calculus changes. Sanger and his sources have been flayed by some critics for betraying a precious national security equity. The coding for Olympic Games became public (albeit with its code-writers unknown) a few years ago, when it was leaked to the outside world under the name Stuxnet. Most analysts fingered the U.S. and Israel, with different theories as to who had taken the lead. The governments of China and Russia, two major investors in cyber weapons, probably based their own calculations on the idea that the U.S. authored Stuxnet.

But there is a difference between assuming something and knowing it. Privately, U.S. officials insist that China has been aggressively attacking U.S. systems for years. But China's penetrations have been almost all passive -- whatever bots the Chinese are able to plant inside American computer networks seem to be just sitting there, collecting data (maybe) or waiting until they are given a signal to do whatever they are supposed to do. In short, China is gathering intelligence, not waging warfare. Although it is extremely difficult to create analogies between the cyber domain and the world of bombs and bullets, there is a self-evident line between a computer program that sits and does nothing and one that actively disrupts another country's strategic assets.

Further, attempts to draw boundaries around the global cyber commons may become next to impossible. That is not to say that there won't be cooperation. There are more than a dozen international organizations that already, in a way, regulate, parts of the Internet. Countries actively cooperate on cyber crime -- even the U.S. and China quietly partner to deter copyright violators.

But from the standpoint of each country's political economy, there is little incentive to participate in treaties that constrain action if the prime mover of those treaties may already have violated the sovereignty of another country. (International laws, both formal and customarily, obviously allow a country to protect itself using its military, but there is a real argument about whether it allows preemptive attacks.)

