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I guess they are taking a victory lap around yesterday's major embarrassment. I never thought that you could dismantle a terrorist organization so surgically by
by mmastrac 2y ago
I guess they are taking a victory lap around yesterday's major embarrassment. I never thought that you could dismantle a terrorist organization so surgically by just booby-trapping comms devices.
This will certainly be made into a blockbuster movie in ten years.
I'll re-iterate my previous comment on this matter: this is an impressive supply-chain hack with absolutely oversized results, and you gotta hand it to them for pulling it off.
I think this will go down as being significantly more impressive than Stuxnet.
- tptacek 2y agoIt's not a victory lap; this operation by itself is one of the largest and most intricate operations Israeli intelligence has ever executed, and would have been planned months in advance. Repeating from elsewhere on the thread: the reporting is that this is happening now because Hezbollah was on the verge of discovering the operation. I think it's likely both sets of devices came from the same manufacturer or distributor.
- bri3k 2y agoAgree. If one device was booby-trapped the first thing I would be doing is disassembling all my others devices for the same.
- exe34 2y agodisassemble? that would be too brave for me. I'd be burying them very quickly.
- ineedasername 2y agoNah, send in the new recruits to do it.
- mmastrac 2y agoI agree -- "victory lap" is just a figure of speech. Yesterday's results were probably far outsized impact on their own, and today's are (apologies for another figure of speech) "icing on the cake". I would imagine that they've been feeding these booby-trapped devices to the supply chain for at least a few months and showing that multiple devices are potentially bombs is just an even more powerful psychological victory. What devices can they even trust now? Will they need to go back to sneakernet?
- astroid 2y ago[flagged]
- vorpalhex 2y ago8 senior Hezbollah officers are dead. So far the only clear indication of a non-Hezbollah injury is from a Hezbollah officers daughter. Sounds successful and well targeted. If you don't want your electronics to explode randomly, don't attack Jews.
- Zironic 2y agoNow that the pandoras box of mass booby trapping electronic devices has been opened, who is to say we won't see tit for tat retaliations with other supply chain attacks? Will every teddy bear now need to be scanned for explosives before entering the country?
- vorpalhex 2y agoThey already are. We aggressively scan packages for drugs, explosives, certain precursors, etc. And forms of this attack have already happened in the past, including intentional food tainting and anthrax. Yes, you should scan your mail, physical or digital.
- mmastrac 2y agoWrong on all three: 1) The victims of yesterday's attack were overwhelmingly terrorist soldiers and mid-level management which fits the definition of surgical. If the results of this operation are as good as suggested by all the early reports, they just carved a major hole in the upper ranks of the organization (not even including the major damage they've caused over the last six months with surgical strikes on leaders). 2) We don't have confirmation that's it's them (but it likely is), and we know far more than that: we know that it incapacitated thousands of members of a designated terrorist organization with minimal impact outside of them. 3) Well, that's just your opinion, man.
- 2y ago
- racl101 2y agoTen Years? Netflix is probably having a meeting about it tomorrow. /s
- ivan_gammel 2y agoIt doesn’t look very surgical to me given the civilian casualties and general disregard of what can happen to innocent people. If anything this looks more like a state-sponsored terrorist attack than covert ops with collateral damage.
- xenospn 2y agoAnything more surgical than this is actual surgery.
- gruez 2y agoAgreed. Stuxnet was "surgical". Causing hundreds of explosions in proximity of civilians is not.
- mmastrac 2y agoGiven the videos showing explosions next to civilians (< 1m in one case) that walk away unharmed afterwards, I'd say that this is pretty surgical.
- spondylosaurus 2y agoAnd very possibly in violation of the Geneva Convention's prohibition of "indiscriminate" attacks: Rule 12. Indiscriminate attacks are those: (a) which are not directed at a specific military objective; (b) which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or (c) which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by international humanitarian law; and consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.
- bell-cot 2y agoNo, definitely not a victory lap. Having completely blown cover on the explosive new feature they added to the pagers, the timer was ticking on Hezbollah checking all their other gadgets for similar extras. It was "use it or lose it".
- lola-hart 2y ago[flagged]
- exe34 2y ago[flagged]
- lola-hart 2y ago[flagged]
- ineedasername 2y ago>return the land to whom it rightfully belongs History puts pretty much everyone in the world living on land that was taken from someone else at some point in time. And if we all did our best to move to where our parents/GPs/GGPs came from we'd again face the issue of that land having been taken previously. This line of thinking is turtles all the way down and in no way a helpful path towards getting two peoples who believe in opposing views to stop killing each other.
- anigbrowl 2y agoThe thing is, 'at some point in time' happens to be 'right now, today' in places like the West Bank. 'This sort of thing has always happened in history' is an incredibly poor argument to deflect responsibility for ongoing oppression. Jewish critics of Zionism have repeatedly pointed out how these very arguments have been employed against Jews in the not-so-distant past. Why would anyone reasonly expect Palestinians to be any less committed to their own collective existence?
- ineedasername 2y agoI'm not aware of wide scale mass displacement happening to Palestinians in the West Bank. A few thousand people are displaced each year, and it does look like a lot of these are unjustly kicked out of their homes, but it’s out of 3,000,000 Palestinians there and I do not otherwise see anything that looks like a mass forced relocation. I'm sure there are "thin end of the wedge" arguments that could be made here but that's poor soil on which to plant a war. Is there an alternative view that better supports a belief of Israel trying to take it all away from Palestinians?
- olalonde 2y ago> This will certainly be made into a blockbuster movie in ten years. If this didn't happen in real life, I would think that the scenario was too far-fetched and unrealistic. That's some seriously impressive attack.
- meepmorp 2y agoUnlike reality, fiction needs to be believable.
- frankie_t 2y agoDo we know the percentage of the total devices used by Hezbollah that got attacked? I guess even if all of them were destroyed, it hardly does any dismantling. But I would expect this operation to open a window of possibility to do some other actions.
- ineedasername 2y agoIndependent estimates peg Hezbollah membership in Lebanon to a wide range, 20k to 50k. Reporting says the pager shipment was 5000 units and so far ~3000 known targets. Figure some devices broke, hadn't been activated yet, didn't trigger correctly, etc. Figure not every member needed or had a pager, call it 50% to be safe but it might be reasonable to think only the equivalent of a team leader would have one. Either way this is a significant fraction of their contact capabilities.
- exe34 2y agoit also puts the fear of god in them. if they can't trust any modern tech not to blow up, their ability to wage a modern war is compromised.