6 ms·

Hamas Got Around Israel's Surveillance Prowess by Going Dark

23 points by johntfella 3y ago

LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
This is what frustrates me so much about the deepening surveillance state: it just doesn’t work the way that its architects believe it will. It makes sense that a high-tech barrier is relatively sparsely manned on a given day if the idea is to automate as much of the defense apparatus as possible. And it would be doubly embarrassing if the reports that Israel was warned of a potential attack were true.
- YeBanKo 3y ago
  They did not configure PagerDuty or VictorOps escalation policy properly. Low man power can only be justified by operation excellence in monitoring.
- catlover76 3y ago
  > This is what frustrates me so much about the deepening surveillance state: it just doesn’t work the way that its architects believe it will. Surely though the actual surveillance part is worse lol
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
YeBanKo 3y ago
Hamas got around Israel’s surveillance, because Israeli government led by Bibi got complacent and was busy doing geopolitics and selling surveillance tech to various regimes to spy on opposition and journalist. Now there will be information leaking that it’s Iran and Russia helped, and new type of warfare, new tech, etc, which is true. But this is basically them saying “it’s not we who missed it, it’s that the enemy became more advanced” to deflect blame externally. When you rely on a breach sensor from a border fence, a camera feed and a remote machine gun, if it gets broken you need to repair it right way, and deploy a team immediately. DevOps reacts faster to a server outage than IDF reacted to a breach of security. IDF probably thought that if anything serious breqed in Gaza, Shabak would know. And Shabak probably thought, that in worst case scenario, they had sensors and remote machine gun at the border. This reasoning might upset many Israeli, but it’s a case of complacency and the political elite loosing perspective of what is important.
- ars 3y ago
  > Hamas got around Israel’s surveillance, because Israeli government led by Bibi got complacent Correct. > and was busy doing geopolitics and selling surveillance tech to various regimes to spy on opposition and journalist. OK, that's just foolish. It's not the same people doing those thing. Israel got complacent because it thought Hamas was more interested in improving things in Gaza than it was in attacking Israel. For example the border was more open just before the attack than it had been in many years. So Israel relied to passive tech to warn them, and reduced its security posture. Hamas took advantage of that by going dark and not doing thing that tech would notice.
  - YeBanKo 3y ago
    Hamas leadership’s sons and daughters live in NY and Qatar and drive bugattis or whatever is trendy now. Netanyahu dances around Putin, while Lavrov cozies up with Iran and Hamas. And with all this if one still thinks that hamas is improving lives in Gaza all of a sudden and not thinking about some terrorist attack, one is a idiot or too deep in the political game. > So Israel relied to passive tech to warn them, and reduced its security posture. Hamas took advantage of that by going dark and not doing thing that tech would notice. There is no such thing as a passive security tech. Their whole doctrine is preventive strikes and fast response time. They failed at both. A motorcade driving to the fence and blowing it up is literally what their whole system was designed to handle. This is why there are multiple lines and buffer zones. When the first gets breached, then get alerted, by the time the second one is reached, they should be looking at the intruder through the scope. Someone at the border with a bolt cutter or explosive trying to sneak in is what hamas has been doing for years. And sending some flying shit over the border has been going for years as well, whether its rockers, burning kites or drones. The fact that they were able to drop some explosives on towers with drones is just ridiculous. This application of low tech drones has been on display at scale since the beginning of Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was only a matter of time until it was applied by hamas.
    - tguvot 3y ago
      >There is no such thing as a passive security tech. Their whole doctrine is preventive strikes and fast response time. They failed at both. A motorcade driving to the fence and blowing it up is literally what their whole system was designed to handle they first bombed from drones observation cameras, remote controlled gun turrets and bombed some communication hub. so when everything made boom at same time in control center they simply lost picture and next thing they knew it's mortars falling on them and gates/walls been blown up. there are also some guesses that some of the explosives could be placed on the fence during the protests in weeks before. de jure nobody supposed to be there. de fact if IDF shoots at legs, after few warnings, it makes appearance on all news publications >This application of low tech drones has been on display at scale since the beginning of Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was only a matter of time until it was applied by hamas yeap. this is why merkavas now have "grills" on top. blowing up drones weren't sent over the border there.
kytazo 3y ago
Yes, similar to how they caught them by surprise in the first place. Not buying most of it.
londons_explore 3y ago
[flagged]
- optimiz3 3y ago
  Ridiculous. It's unthinkable a modern democratic nation would subject its citizens to rape, beheading, and torture to justify military action.
  - brutusborn 3y ago
    Why is it unthinkable? There are lots of examples of governments using false flag operations to begin wars. https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/america-the-false-flag-empire,12822 https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/america-t...
    - optimiz3 3y ago
      None of those are in anyway equivalent (and some are also a real stretch to call false flags) to what OP is implying was allowed to deliberately happen to Israeli civilians.
      - brutusborn 3y ago
        I know they aren't equivalent, I just think they show that actions that most people would consider unthinkable (the state lying to justify a war) are in fact relatively common. Israel sacrificing the few for the many is only unthinkable if you think states are generally just and care about their citizens.
  - Jotra7 3y ago
    [dead]
- brutusborn 3y ago
  This theory gains credence when you consider the reports of Egyptian intelligence’s warnings of possible attacks falling on deaf ears.
ufmace 3y ago
This is really not a good article, and probably not likely to lead to a good discussion, due to the lack of hard information. It's all just speculation by supposedly well connected people on how they might have done it. I don't think it's likely we can have a productive discussion until some more hard information comes out on exactly what happened regarding counter-surveillance tactics actually used. It's just gonna be more speculation and partisan bickering. Hence, I flagged it, and I suggest others do so as well.
k310 3y ago
Axios says that "judicial overhaul" and the resulting turmoil helped weaken Israel's military. Axios reports https://www.axios.com/2023/10/07/hamas-attack-invasion-israel-death-toll-netanyahu https://www.axios.com/2023/10/07/hamas-attack-invasion-israe... The big picture: The attack comes amid a deep political crisis in Israel over the Netanyahu government's judicial overhaul, which has weakened the country's military, economy and society. Links to: https://www.axios.com/2023/07/24/israel-judicial-overhaul-reform-explained# https://www.axios.com/2023/07/24/israel-judicial-overhaul-re... Why it matters: The plan, which will weaken the Supreme Court and other democratic institutions, has faced opposition from some of Israel's closest allies, including the Biden administration, and it has already destabilized the country's economy and military. ---- Of course, "helps" is a weasel word, but it must be a contributing factor. Turmoil never helps.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tguvot 3y ago
  >Axios says that "judicial overhaul" and the resulting turmoil helped weaken Israel's military. it weakened not army but outside perception of army strength and deterrence as result of this. and this was well known
ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
https://archive.li/qV3pW https://archive.li/qV3pW
solatic 3y ago
Most takes on this matter have little appreciation for the underlying complexity. The border fence was a $1 billion capital investment with sensors, automated machine guns, cameras, etc. that allowed the military to reduce the manpower needed to patrol the border. This is a good thing - patrol duty is mind-numbingly boring work that hurts morale, and there are always associated risks of getting hit by a sniper. There are reports that Israel was warned. Sure - a handful of signals in an ocean of noise. Finding those signals (and wrangling apart conflicting signals) is why intelligence is necessarily an imprecise art and not a science, and why no defensive posture relies solely on intelligence. Much ado has been made about judicial reform infighting weakening the Israeli security establishment, but all the public reporting points to issues with reservist volunteers, who are not essential for peacetime operations. The far more banal explanation is that there was no dead-man's-switch monitoring on the border fence. The New York Times reported rumors that the attack started by Hamas knocking out the cell towers that were used by the remote sensors on the border fence to send monitoring data back to operators. Losing connectivity to so many parts of the fence at once should have immediately triggered high-severity alarms. It sounds like that didn't happen. Why didn't that happen? Maybe a gross oversight on the part of the architects and contractors of the border fence. Maybe that alarm had fired once-too-many times in the past as a flaky-false-positive and it was disconnected instead of fixed. Maybe the dead-man's-switch component itself was broken somehow. Maybe someone took something offline for maintenance at what turned out to be the worst possible time, and alternative mechanisms (i.e. manned patrols) were not deployed during the maintenance, or maybe it simply didn't get turned back on, and nobody noticed because it's functionality is not used by operators on a day-to-day basis. When so many people die, everyone wants to look for a scapegoat. But perhaps we should just, I dunno, build better systems instead?
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  Anything but working towards lasting peace.
  - ars 3y ago
    This is getting quite offtopic, but if Palestinians weren't going to accept the Olmert Peace plan (map visible here: http://www.passia.org/maps/view/78 http://www.passia.org/maps/view/78 ) then there's nothing they would accept.
Woodi 3y ago
> grew too confident, in part because its technological sophistication lulled it into a false sense of security Yeah, constant monitoring of plain communications of plain civilians do just that - detect gov-himself-induced unhappines and nothing of importance... In the meantime EU tries to implement spy-tek on all civilians. Which just got even less sensible... But what actually Hamas wanted to achieve ? Got media attention ?? What for ?? Or someone wanted to use stupid low level Hamas, dead now, soldiers into pushing Israel (and US) into accepting imperial territory gain ?
- candiodari 3y ago
  Hamas is a business model. Dead Palestinian civilians for money. So, first, of course, all Palestinians are civilian. And every Palestinian corpse is at least 10 dead people. Also there are no fighters. Of course, this is lying, but is perhaps the least problematic of their behaviors. That's the business model: dead civilians for money from extremists and states. So right now they're doing everything they possibly can, from firing rockets at an overwhelming military force, in an attempt to anger them, to force Palestinian civilians to stay in locations being bombed, to killing Palestinians themselves. As a result: Hamas is not very popular in Palestine ... of course. I get that everyone claims the opposite, but most people are sane. If you try to kill them or try to force them to die ... you're going to lose a bit of popularity. They came to power with a massacre. Yes, they won elections, but that didn't mean the Palestinian Authority gave them all control. It just gave them seats in the legislative council. They immediately killed people until they were the only one left, which Fatah tried to prevent. Needless to say, this is NOT what Palestinians voted for. Since then it hasn't really been any different, ever. There's movies of Hamas throwing civil servants of buildings. It's very likely that even after Last week's attacks Hamas has still killed more Palestinians than Israeli. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatah%E2%80%93Hamas_conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatah%E2%80%93Hamas_conflict https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28896346 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28896346 https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-condemns-6-informants-for-israel-to-death-by-hanging/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-condemns-6-informants-fo...

23 points by johntfella 3y ago

This is what frustrates me so much about the deepening surveillance state: it just doesn’t work the way that its architects believe it will. It makes sense that a high-tech barrier is relatively sparsely manned on a given day if the idea is to automate as much of the defense apparatus as possible. And it would be doubly embarrassing if the reports that Israel was warned of a potential attack were true.

YeBanKo 3y ago
They did not configure PagerDuty or VictorOps escalation policy properly. Low man power can only be justified by operation excellence in monitoring.
catlover76 3y ago
> This is what frustrates me so much about the deepening surveillance state: it just doesn’t work the way that its architects believe it will. Surely though the actual surveillance part is worse lol
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

YeBanKo 3y ago

Hamas got around Israel’s surveillance, because Israeli government led by Bibi got complacent and was busy doing geopolitics and selling surveillance tech to various regimes to spy on opposition and journalist. Now there will be information leaking that it’s Iran and Russia helped, and new type of warfare, new tech, etc, which is true. But this is basically them saying “it’s not we who missed it, it’s that the enemy became more advanced” to deflect blame externally. When you rely on a breach sensor from a border fence, a camera feed and a remote machine gun, if it gets broken you need to repair it right way, and deploy a team immediately. DevOps reacts faster to a server outage than IDF reacted to a breach of security. IDF probably thought that if anything serious breqed in Gaza, Shabak would know. And Shabak probably thought, that in worst case scenario, they had sensors and remote machine gun at the border. This reasoning might upset many Israeli, but it’s a case of complacency and the political elite loosing perspective of what is important.

ars 3y ago
> Hamas got around Israel’s surveillance, because Israeli government led by Bibi got complacent Correct. > and was busy doing geopolitics and selling surveillance tech to various regimes to spy on opposition and journalist. OK, that's just foolish. It's not the same people doing those thing. Israel got complacent because it thought Hamas was more interested in improving things in Gaza than it was in attacking Israel. For example the border was more open just before the attack than it had been in many years. So Israel relied to passive tech to warn them, and reduced its security posture. Hamas took advantage of that by going dark and not doing thing that tech would notice.
- YeBanKo 3y ago
  Hamas leadership’s sons and daughters live in NY and Qatar and drive bugattis or whatever is trendy now. Netanyahu dances around Putin, while Lavrov cozies up with Iran and Hamas. And with all this if one still thinks that hamas is improving lives in Gaza all of a sudden and not thinking about some terrorist attack, one is a idiot or too deep in the political game. > So Israel relied to passive tech to warn them, and reduced its security posture. Hamas took advantage of that by going dark and not doing thing that tech would notice. There is no such thing as a passive security tech. Their whole doctrine is preventive strikes and fast response time. They failed at both. A motorcade driving to the fence and blowing it up is literally what their whole system was designed to handle. This is why there are multiple lines and buffer zones. When the first gets breached, then get alerted, by the time the second one is reached, they should be looking at the intruder through the scope. Someone at the border with a bolt cutter or explosive trying to sneak in is what hamas has been doing for years. And sending some flying shit over the border has been going for years as well, whether its rockers, burning kites or drones. The fact that they were able to drop some explosives on towers with drones is just ridiculous. This application of low tech drones has been on display at scale since the beginning of Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was only a matter of time until it was applied by hamas.
  - tguvot 3y ago
    >There is no such thing as a passive security tech. Their whole doctrine is preventive strikes and fast response time. They failed at both. A motorcade driving to the fence and blowing it up is literally what their whole system was designed to handle they first bombed from drones observation cameras, remote controlled gun turrets and bombed some communication hub. so when everything made boom at same time in control center they simply lost picture and next thing they knew it's mortars falling on them and gates/walls been blown up. there are also some guesses that some of the explosives could be placed on the fence during the protests in weeks before. de jure nobody supposed to be there. de fact if IDF shoots at legs, after few warnings, it makes appearance on all news publications >This application of low tech drones has been on display at scale since the beginning of Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was only a matter of time until it was applied by hamas yeap. this is why merkavas now have "grills" on top. blowing up drones weren't sent over the border there.

kytazo 3y ago

Yes, similar to how they caught them by surprise in the first place. Not buying most of it.

londons_explore 3y ago

[flagged]

optimiz3 3y ago
Ridiculous. It's unthinkable a modern democratic nation would subject its citizens to rape, beheading, and torture to justify military action.
- brutusborn 3y ago
  Why is it unthinkable? There are lots of examples of governments using false flag operations to begin wars. https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/america-the-false-flag-empire,12822 https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/america-t...
  - optimiz3 3y ago
    None of those are in anyway equivalent (and some are also a real stretch to call false flags) to what OP is implying was allowed to deliberately happen to Israeli civilians.
    - brutusborn 3y ago
      I know they aren't equivalent, I just think they show that actions that most people would consider unthinkable (the state lying to justify a war) are in fact relatively common. Israel sacrificing the few for the many is only unthinkable if you think states are generally just and care about their citizens.
- Jotra7 3y ago
  [dead]
brutusborn 3y ago
This theory gains credence when you consider the reports of Egyptian intelligence’s warnings of possible attacks falling on deaf ears.

ufmace 3y ago

This is really not a good article, and probably not likely to lead to a good discussion, due to the lack of hard information. It's all just speculation by supposedly well connected people on how they might have done it. I don't think it's likely we can have a productive discussion until some more hard information comes out on exactly what happened regarding counter-surveillance tactics actually used. It's just gonna be more speculation and partisan bickering. Hence, I flagged it, and I suggest others do so as well.

k310 3y ago

Axios says that "judicial overhaul" and the resulting turmoil helped weaken Israel's military. Axios reports https://www.axios.com/2023/10/07/hamas-attack-invasion-israel-death-toll-netanyahu https://www.axios.com/2023/10/07/hamas-attack-invasion-israe... The big picture: The attack comes amid a deep political crisis in Israel over the Netanyahu government's judicial overhaul, which has weakened the country's military, economy and society. Links to: https://www.axios.com/2023/07/24/israel-judicial-overhaul-reform-explained# https://www.axios.com/2023/07/24/israel-judicial-overhaul-re... Why it matters: The plan, which will weaken the Supreme Court and other democratic institutions, has faced opposition from some of Israel's closest allies, including the Biden administration, and it has already destabilized the country's economy and military. ---- Of course, "helps" is a weasel word, but it must be a contributing factor. Turmoil never helps.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tguvot 3y ago
>Axios says that "judicial overhaul" and the resulting turmoil helped weaken Israel's military. it weakened not army but outside perception of army strength and deterrence as result of this. and this was well known

ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago

https://archive.li/qV3pW https://archive.li/qV3pW

solatic 3y ago

Most takes on this matter have little appreciation for the underlying complexity. The border fence was a $1 billion capital investment with sensors, automated machine guns, cameras, etc. that allowed the military to reduce the manpower needed to patrol the border. This is a good thing - patrol duty is mind-numbingly boring work that hurts morale, and there are always associated risks of getting hit by a sniper. There are reports that Israel was warned. Sure - a handful of signals in an ocean of noise. Finding those signals (and wrangling apart conflicting signals) is why intelligence is necessarily an imprecise art and not a science, and why no defensive posture relies solely on intelligence. Much ado has been made about judicial reform infighting weakening the Israeli security establishment, but all the public reporting points to issues with reservist volunteers, who are not essential for peacetime operations. The far more banal explanation is that there was no dead-man's-switch monitoring on the border fence. The New York Times reported rumors that the attack started by Hamas knocking out the cell towers that were used by the remote sensors on the border fence to send monitoring data back to operators. Losing connectivity to so many parts of the fence at once should have immediately triggered high-severity alarms. It sounds like that didn't happen. Why didn't that happen? Maybe a gross oversight on the part of the architects and contractors of the border fence. Maybe that alarm had fired once-too-many times in the past as a flaky-false-positive and it was disconnected instead of fixed. Maybe the dead-man's-switch component itself was broken somehow. Maybe someone took something offline for maintenance at what turned out to be the worst possible time, and alternative mechanisms (i.e. manned patrols) were not deployed during the maintenance, or maybe it simply didn't get turned back on, and nobody noticed because it's functionality is not used by operators on a day-to-day basis. When so many people die, everyone wants to look for a scapegoat. But perhaps we should just, I dunno, build better systems instead?

karmakurtisaani 3y ago
Anything but working towards lasting peace.
- ars 3y ago
  This is getting quite offtopic, but if Palestinians weren't going to accept the Olmert Peace plan (map visible here: http://www.passia.org/maps/view/78 http://www.passia.org/maps/view/78 ) then there's nothing they would accept.

Woodi 3y ago

> grew too confident, in part because its technological sophistication lulled it into a false sense of security Yeah, constant monitoring of plain communications of plain civilians do just that - detect gov-himself-induced unhappines and nothing of importance... In the meantime EU tries to implement spy-tek on all civilians. Which just got even less sensible... But what actually Hamas wanted to achieve ? Got media attention ?? What for ?? Or someone wanted to use stupid low level Hamas, dead now, soldiers into pushing Israel (and US) into accepting imperial territory gain ?

candiodari 3y ago
Hamas is a business model. Dead Palestinian civilians for money. So, first, of course, all Palestinians are civilian. And every Palestinian corpse is at least 10 dead people. Also there are no fighters. Of course, this is lying, but is perhaps the least problematic of their behaviors. That's the business model: dead civilians for money from extremists and states. So right now they're doing everything they possibly can, from firing rockets at an overwhelming military force, in an attempt to anger them, to force Palestinian civilians to stay in locations being bombed, to killing Palestinians themselves. As a result: Hamas is not very popular in Palestine ... of course. I get that everyone claims the opposite, but most people are sane. If you try to kill them or try to force them to die ... you're going to lose a bit of popularity. They came to power with a massacre. Yes, they won elections, but that didn't mean the Palestinian Authority gave them all control. It just gave them seats in the legislative council. They immediately killed people until they were the only one left, which Fatah tried to prevent. Needless to say, this is NOT what Palestinians voted for. Since then it hasn't really been any different, ever. There's movies of Hamas throwing civil servants of buildings. It's very likely that even after Last week's attacks Hamas has still killed more Palestinians than Israeli. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatah%E2%80%93Hamas_conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatah%E2%80%93Hamas_conflict https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28896346 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28896346 https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-condemns-6-informants-for-israel-to-death-by-hanging/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-condemns-6-informants-fo...