President Obama Ordered a Cyberattack Last Year? Air Force Documents Prove So

Did Edward Snowden leak this bit of information recently?

No need - the U.S. Air Force did the deed itself by declassifying a 15-page policy directive the previous week, Mashable said.

It appeared that the eagle-eyed members of nonprofit group Federation of American Scientists (FAS) are to be commended for this discovery, as only "a single sentence" connected President Barack Obama to a cyberattack. He reportedly "ordered the military to carry out an aggressive operation in cyberspace." However, other details about this document remain classified.

"Classified processes governing [command and control] of [Air Force] offensive and defensive cyberspace operations conducted by [Air Force] Cyber Mission Forces are addressed in a classified [Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff] Execute Order (title classified) issued on 21 Jun 13," read a portion of the said document released on March 5.

While the rest of us may scratch our heads with befuddlement at the jargon, the FAS was mercifully able to break this paragraph down for us lay people to easily understand.

"First is the word 'offensive.' This means whatever the U.S. was doing during this operation, it involved more than defending the country from cyberattacks," Mashable pointed out.

"The second is the phrase 'execute order.' An execute order, according to the Department of Defense, is 'an order issued by the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, at the direction of the secretary of defense, to implement a decision by the president (PDF) to initiate military operations.' The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff is America's highest-ranking military officer," the online news source added.

In short, the President has requested the Pentagon to accomplish a military operation in the vast fields of the World Wide Web.

We wonder: what sort of cyberattack exactly was it? And what was the main aim for that?

More revelations may follow once other portions of the document become declassified.