5 ms·

The Hezbollah Connection

73 points by bootload 12y ago

bootload 12y ago
source: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/05/an_example_of_c.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/05/an_example_of...
- hbbio 12y ago
  No, Schneier's blog is not the source. Instead, it points to the NYT article as the source.
  - bootload 12y ago
    read this post by @sama: 'New Hacker News Guideline' ~ http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-hacker-news-guideline http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-hacker-news-guideline "Avoid gratuitous negativity." Ask yourself what motivates you post this? Schneier pointing out this post, makes it news worthy. The NYT simply published it.
tomtoise 12y ago
Very, very long read. I've just finished it and I guess it shows how phone metadata can be used constructively to forensically implicate criminals in this way. One thing, what does the article mean when it says "Hezbollah has already stopped using public cell networks in favor of closed ones"? Any ideas?
- 616c 12y ago
  It is well-known fact in Lebanon they have their own. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2008/05/200861423405548723.html http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2008/05/20086142340... I hate this because it only validates USG reasons for the belief in strictly regulated communications, but this means Hezbollah runs a block whole network they cannot easily tap or monitor at the border of its interaction with regulated national companies. Keep in mind the Internet in Lebanon is also a joke, known as WaitNet (Unter-Net in Arabic), and everyone uses 2G and 3G phones at crazy prices to do anything of value, compounded with afternoon power outages every day (especially in Beirut and major cities). So, cell phones are the best way of doing business, and Hezbollah can run its own network with impunity. Or it gets pissy and shuts down an airport with a shit fit. Read my other post in this thread.
  - cgh 12y ago
    Interesting, I was thinking something like OpenBTS but if internet access in Lebanon is really that slow then I guess not.
    - 616c 12y ago
      Well, this is second-hand. I never did anything beyond quick cafe internet access. But I cannot find the joke ISP page that used to exist. But even the BBC has articles dating to 2011 about this. http://www.bbc.com/news/business-15266851 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-15266851 Even Egypt (EGYPT!) has had better stories than this, largely based to the early 2000's Zaki technocrat regime, so there is a great deal of resentment at how these telco regimes have fucked it up.
  - mauricemir 12y ago
    I recall working for a Lebanease company in London whist the Civil war was on even getting a phone line to connect was a lottery. When we did mange to get one the Directors PA used to keep the line open so that every one who needed to talk to head office could use the line.
- EthanHeilman 12y ago
  Hezbollah owns some cell networks in S. Lebanon, they use these networks to both provide services to the public and for wartime communications. They apparently offer better prices and service than other corporate players in Lebanon, which has angered the government since many of these competing companies are owned by family members of the government officials. In addition Hezbollah has a fairly advanced fibre backbone and decent information security protections. There is a bunch of information on Hezbollah communication networks and COMSEC on wikileaks: >"This is a secondary communication system to be used in the event of war and to guide officials, commanders and partisans to their point of duty, which Hizbullah does not determine in advance." - https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/91/91224_-insight-insight-lebanon-hezbollah-communication-network-.html https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/91/91224_-insight-insight... >"The government has no real means of dismantling Hezbollah's communication network, which is critical to the group's defense. Much of Hezbollah's communication network is strategically intertwined with Lebanon's national networks. It heavily exploits the existing infrastructure of fiber-optic cables and standard telephone wires. Simultaneously, the organization maintains its own independent networks. The most important of these is it mobile phone network which was instrumental in its combat operations against Israeli forces in the summer of 2006." - https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/91/911136_lebanon-violence-spreads-during-hezbollah-protests-.html https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/91/911136_lebanon-violenc... See also word doc: "Hezbollah’s Tactical Communications Network" at https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/16/167079_final-draft-.html https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/16/167079_final-draft-.ht...
discardorama 12y ago
Argh! Paywalled. Click here: https://www.google.com/search?q=the+hezbollah+connection https://www.google.com/search?q=the+hezbollah+connection and then on to the first link.
- Thriptic 12y ago
  No script defeats a lot of paywalls btw
gadders 12y ago
This is a really fascinating article. I highly recommend giving it a read.
616c 12y ago
Hezbollah is fascinating group of psychos, and worth studying as like the Facebook of terrorism startups. Laugh at my simile, but I have seen these nuts from a distance for a while, like others, and getting to know Lebanese people and their stories of these wackos does not bode well for anyone who does not like them too much. They run their own secret cellphone network. It is so important to them, when Sunni-aligned, anti-Shia intelligence services shut it down, Hezbollah blocked the road to the airport for a week with armed militias. This messed up travel plans for some co-workers. They made a video game about the Israeli war in 2006 (not a single person will by it for me, since I want to inspect it for malware and other fun goodies), and the proudly admit they invented the IED, slughtly before the Iraq War, and with showmanship destroyed very powerful Israeli (not American bought, the Israeli-built ones, forget the name) which were previously a pebble in their tactical shoes. These are not the stereotyped cave-dwelling terrorists. These are educated nutbag technocrats who put a crazy amount of detail into their operations. And the racial hate of the Israeli Army cannot surpress them. So you know they are willing to throw down for a fight. These tiny anecdotes I compile show a dangerous pattern of very sophisticated loons who believe their own agenda. If you read around, they say will say they are sticking around to fight the Israelis bc they are a true enemy and the Lebanese Armed Forces are cuckolded by Western influences to not engage. Now, you will notice there has been no discussion of disarmament or rhetoric about the stage where they vanquish them, and have to allow the State of Lebanon to function less like the state of Lebanon (see that capitalization joke I did there? Lebanon is not a failed state, but an awesome place where this bullshit drags everyone and everything down). They are a self-justifying state within a state and they a lot of influence that cannot be curtailed. Current Western counter-terrorist need to study people like this in depth, becuase ISIS and newer groups of the Sunni persuasion clearly are edging towards this new level of hyper-organized, society within society operations that no one has successfully stopped yet. Good help us when ISIS a-holes learn to Node (allow a joke, no one has a sense of humor anymore). http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/islamic-state-files-show-structure-of-islamist-terror-group-a-1029274.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/islamic-state-file... And if anti-Hezbollah Lebanese, of which I know many, cannot stop them on their own turf to save their own people from sideways bigots (I do not want to get into wholesale, but needless to say all these groups repulse me), USG and friends in Iraq and Syria are utterly fucked. As I said, we need to leave yesterday.
task_queue 12y ago
Wow, if only we used this much time (10+ years) and resources (Half a billion x the expected 100x) to bring real war criminals to justice. People have made a career off of this decade long witch hunt with their international kangaroo court trying people in absentia. FTA: "The trial judges — an Australian, an Italian, a Jamaican and two Lebanese — are distinguished by the red vests they wear over their gowns, which themselves have red sleeves. The Australian, David Re, is the presiding judge and a veteran of the special international tribunals for Bosnia and Herzegovina and the former Yugoslavia. Like Re, many of the other judges and lawyers involved in the case have made a career of serving in such international tribunals. The tribunal’s budget makes it possible for lawyers to present their graphic exhibits in the clearest possible manner. During some hearings, prosecutors place impressively accurate before-and-after models of the scene of the bombing on an enormous table at the center of the room. The model makers, who spent weeks constructing them, put special emphasis on precisely reproducing the destruction, even the damage to trees. The proceedings are conducted in Arabic, English or French, and transcriptions are produced in all three languages. I have read thousands of pages of these records and found only two typos. The process in The Hague is also likely to establish new precedents in murder convictions on the basis of circumstantial evidence. For all the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the investigation, the prosecution has produced no direct evidence, let alone secured cooperation from any of the defendants or their potential accomplices. Its case is largely based on the records of dozens of cellphones that it claims were used by the assassins, among them the five defendants." No direct evidence, no defendants but a nice chunk of change to sit around and pervert justice for their personal gain.
- classicsnoot 12y ago
  Adorable. These religious fanatics pride themselves on murdering people to prop up a tiny faction of a backwards religion,a handful of people have the balls to attempt to hold them accountable, and you think it is marsupial jurisprudence. Rule of Law works best within the confines of precedent and that is what this whole case is really about. The defendants are butchers hiding in a joke of a country. The evidence is as direct as DNA evidence was in the OJ Simpson trial. The only perversion that i detect are a bunch of humans that think their interpretation of a made up space daddy gives them license to vaporize people.
616c 12y ago
And my final comment for the day: Shia'a militant and/or political movements are not the creation of Asad. This is more orientalist bullshit. > Assad, an Alawite Muslim, took a different and somewhat surprising tack: He withdrew his opposition to a plan, proposed by clerics loyal to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran, to establish a Shiite political party in Lebanon. I know at least one PhD writing his thesis on the formation of political Shi'ism, starting with organized groups like Amal[1] immiedately prior and going as far back as possible with first and second hand sources in Lebanon, which many would argue was the socio-political movements demanding better representation and rights for the Shi'a started. They might not have been militants or terrorists, but keep in mind Hezbollah do not seem themselves as anything more than a political movement. We are speaking to their foundations. I am tired of Western fly-by-night MENA researchers: to give all the credit to Asad for Hezbollah is akin in the computer industry for saying Microsoft invented DOS and the personal computer. Just stop it already. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amal_Movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amal_Movement
- classicsnoot 12y ago
  >He withdrew his opposition to a plan, proposed by clerics loyal to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran, to establish a Shiite political party in Lebanon. In the minuscule piece of the article you quoted (as well as the preceding paragraph left unquoted) the OG author states that religious leaders in Iran, not Syria, spearheaded the effort that later became Hezbollah. So where is your gripe, specifically? Or do you feel it is in poor test for people of country [X] to write/discuss country [Y] under any circumstance? I myself grow weary of poorly researched articles about the Levant, the Gulf Countries, Northern Africa, etc as they IMO foster more misunderstanding, but this article is not one of them. I love polisci and historical articles, but i was wondering the relevance of it being posted to HN. Then i got to the section documenting Wissam Eid's analysis of the cell network used to carry out the intel and implementation of the assassination documented herein. Fucking awesome. I only wish this young man had been able to escape the religion regulated shithole that is the Levant and come to North America so he could have played with network analysis and other nerd stuff instead of being smeared across the pavement by monotheist psychos.
krylon 12y ago
Very interesting article. Very long, too, but well worth the time. (Also, I find it very well written in that it presents a pretty large and complex amount of information in a way that is easy to follow.) The impression I get away with is that the political/religious/economical landscape in the middle east is way more complex than most media reports lead one to think. The part about cellphone metadata was highly interesting, too. It shows how this metadata can be used for investigating crimes, but it does not take much creativity to imagine how an oppressive government can use such data for building profiles of opposition movements.
cyphunk 11y ago
Does this narrative not justify NSA's bulk metadata collection? Seems anyone who says "no" is either disputing the tone and narrative (emphases on metadata) or assuming the circumstances warrant it in Lebanon but not elsewhere I'm a firm believer of universal civil liberties and if we justify or ban warrantless bulk metadata collection anywhere it must apply (either ban or justification) everywhere.

73 points by bootload 12y ago

source: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/05/an_example_of_c.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/05/an_example_of...

hbbio 12y ago
No, Schneier's blog is not the source. Instead, it points to the NYT article as the source.
- bootload 12y ago
  read this post by @sama: 'New Hacker News Guideline' ~ http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-hacker-news-guideline http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-hacker-news-guideline "Avoid gratuitous negativity." Ask yourself what motivates you post this? Schneier pointing out this post, makes it news worthy. The NYT simply published it.

tomtoise 12y ago

Very, very long read. I've just finished it and I guess it shows how phone metadata can be used constructively to forensically implicate criminals in this way. One thing, what does the article mean when it says "Hezbollah has already stopped using public cell networks in favor of closed ones"? Any ideas?

616c 12y ago
It is well-known fact in Lebanon they have their own. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2008/05/200861423405548723.html http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2008/05/20086142340... I hate this because it only validates USG reasons for the belief in strictly regulated communications, but this means Hezbollah runs a block whole network they cannot easily tap or monitor at the border of its interaction with regulated national companies. Keep in mind the Internet in Lebanon is also a joke, known as WaitNet (Unter-Net in Arabic), and everyone uses 2G and 3G phones at crazy prices to do anything of value, compounded with afternoon power outages every day (especially in Beirut and major cities). So, cell phones are the best way of doing business, and Hezbollah can run its own network with impunity. Or it gets pissy and shuts down an airport with a shit fit. Read my other post in this thread.
- cgh 12y ago
  Interesting, I was thinking something like OpenBTS but if internet access in Lebanon is really that slow then I guess not.
  - 616c 12y ago
    Well, this is second-hand. I never did anything beyond quick cafe internet access. But I cannot find the joke ISP page that used to exist. But even the BBC has articles dating to 2011 about this. http://www.bbc.com/news/business-15266851 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-15266851 Even Egypt (EGYPT!) has had better stories than this, largely based to the early 2000's Zaki technocrat regime, so there is a great deal of resentment at how these telco regimes have fucked it up.
- mauricemir 12y ago
  I recall working for a Lebanease company in London whist the Civil war was on even getting a phone line to connect was a lottery. When we did mange to get one the Directors PA used to keep the line open so that every one who needed to talk to head office could use the line.
EthanHeilman 12y ago
Hezbollah owns some cell networks in S. Lebanon, they use these networks to both provide services to the public and for wartime communications. They apparently offer better prices and service than other corporate players in Lebanon, which has angered the government since many of these competing companies are owned by family members of the government officials. In addition Hezbollah has a fairly advanced fibre backbone and decent information security protections. There is a bunch of information on Hezbollah communication networks and COMSEC on wikileaks: >"This is a secondary communication system to be used in the event of war and to guide officials, commanders and partisans to their point of duty, which Hizbullah does not determine in advance." - https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/91/91224_-insight-insight-lebanon-hezbollah-communication-network-.html https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/91/91224_-insight-insight... >"The government has no real means of dismantling Hezbollah's communication network, which is critical to the group's defense. Much of Hezbollah's communication network is strategically intertwined with Lebanon's national networks. It heavily exploits the existing infrastructure of fiber-optic cables and standard telephone wires. Simultaneously, the organization maintains its own independent networks. The most important of these is it mobile phone network which was instrumental in its combat operations against Israeli forces in the summer of 2006." - https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/91/911136_lebanon-violence-spreads-during-hezbollah-protests-.html https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/91/911136_lebanon-violenc... See also word doc: "Hezbollah’s Tactical Communications Network" at https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/16/167079_final-draft-.html https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/16/167079_final-draft-.ht...

discardorama 12y ago

Argh! Paywalled. Click here: https://www.google.com/search?q=the+hezbollah+connection https://www.google.com/search?q=the+hezbollah+connection and then on to the first link.

Thriptic 12y ago
No script defeats a lot of paywalls btw

gadders 12y ago

This is a really fascinating article. I highly recommend giving it a read.

616c 12y ago

Hezbollah is fascinating group of psychos, and worth studying as like the Facebook of terrorism startups. Laugh at my simile, but I have seen these nuts from a distance for a while, like others, and getting to know Lebanese people and their stories of these wackos does not bode well for anyone who does not like them too much. They run their own secret cellphone network. It is so important to them, when Sunni-aligned, anti-Shia intelligence services shut it down, Hezbollah blocked the road to the airport for a week with armed militias. This messed up travel plans for some co-workers. They made a video game about the Israeli war in 2006 (not a single person will by it for me, since I want to inspect it for malware and other fun goodies), and the proudly admit they invented the IED, slughtly before the Iraq War, and with showmanship destroyed very powerful Israeli (not American bought, the Israeli-built ones, forget the name) which were previously a pebble in their tactical shoes. These are not the stereotyped cave-dwelling terrorists. These are educated nutbag technocrats who put a crazy amount of detail into their operations. And the racial hate of the Israeli Army cannot surpress them. So you know they are willing to throw down for a fight. These tiny anecdotes I compile show a dangerous pattern of very sophisticated loons who believe their own agenda. If you read around, they say will say they are sticking around to fight the Israelis bc they are a true enemy and the Lebanese Armed Forces are cuckolded by Western influences to not engage. Now, you will notice there has been no discussion of disarmament or rhetoric about the stage where they vanquish them, and have to allow the State of Lebanon to function less like the state of Lebanon (see that capitalization joke I did there? Lebanon is not a failed state, but an awesome place where this bullshit drags everyone and everything down). They are a self-justifying state within a state and they a lot of influence that cannot be curtailed. Current Western counter-terrorist need to study people like this in depth, becuase ISIS and newer groups of the Sunni persuasion clearly are edging towards this new level of hyper-organized, society within society operations that no one has successfully stopped yet. Good help us when ISIS a-holes learn to Node (allow a joke, no one has a sense of humor anymore). http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/islamic-state-files-show-structure-of-islamist-terror-group-a-1029274.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/islamic-state-file... And if anti-Hezbollah Lebanese, of which I know many, cannot stop them on their own turf to save their own people from sideways bigots (I do not want to get into wholesale, but needless to say all these groups repulse me), USG and friends in Iraq and Syria are utterly fucked. As I said, we need to leave yesterday.

task_queue 12y ago

Wow, if only we used this much time (10+ years) and resources (Half a billion x the expected 100x) to bring real war criminals to justice. People have made a career off of this decade long witch hunt with their international kangaroo court trying people in absentia. FTA: "The trial judges — an Australian, an Italian, a Jamaican and two Lebanese — are distinguished by the red vests they wear over their gowns, which themselves have red sleeves. The Australian, David Re, is the presiding judge and a veteran of the special international tribunals for Bosnia and Herzegovina and the former Yugoslavia. Like Re, many of the other judges and lawyers involved in the case have made a career of serving in such international tribunals. The tribunal’s budget makes it possible for lawyers to present their graphic exhibits in the clearest possible manner. During some hearings, prosecutors place impressively accurate before-and-after models of the scene of the bombing on an enormous table at the center of the room. The model makers, who spent weeks constructing them, put special emphasis on precisely reproducing the destruction, even the damage to trees. The proceedings are conducted in Arabic, English or French, and transcriptions are produced in all three languages. I have read thousands of pages of these records and found only two typos. The process in The Hague is also likely to establish new precedents in murder convictions on the basis of circumstantial evidence. For all the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the investigation, the prosecution has produced no direct evidence, let alone secured cooperation from any of the defendants or their potential accomplices. Its case is largely based on the records of dozens of cellphones that it claims were used by the assassins, among them the five defendants." No direct evidence, no defendants but a nice chunk of change to sit around and pervert justice for their personal gain.

classicsnoot 12y ago
Adorable. These religious fanatics pride themselves on murdering people to prop up a tiny faction of a backwards religion,a handful of people have the balls to attempt to hold them accountable, and you think it is marsupial jurisprudence. Rule of Law works best within the confines of precedent and that is what this whole case is really about. The defendants are butchers hiding in a joke of a country. The evidence is as direct as DNA evidence was in the OJ Simpson trial. The only perversion that i detect are a bunch of humans that think their interpretation of a made up space daddy gives them license to vaporize people.

616c 12y ago

And my final comment for the day: Shia'a militant and/or political movements are not the creation of Asad. This is more orientalist bullshit. > Assad, an Alawite Muslim, took a different and somewhat surprising tack: He withdrew his opposition to a plan, proposed by clerics loyal to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran, to establish a Shiite political party in Lebanon. I know at least one PhD writing his thesis on the formation of political Shi'ism, starting with organized groups like Amal[1] immiedately prior and going as far back as possible with first and second hand sources in Lebanon, which many would argue was the socio-political movements demanding better representation and rights for the Shi'a started. They might not have been militants or terrorists, but keep in mind Hezbollah do not seem themselves as anything more than a political movement. We are speaking to their foundations. I am tired of Western fly-by-night MENA researchers: to give all the credit to Asad for Hezbollah is akin in the computer industry for saying Microsoft invented DOS and the personal computer. Just stop it already. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amal_Movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amal_Movement

classicsnoot 12y ago
>He withdrew his opposition to a plan, proposed by clerics loyal to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran, to establish a Shiite political party in Lebanon. In the minuscule piece of the article you quoted (as well as the preceding paragraph left unquoted) the OG author states that religious leaders in Iran, not Syria, spearheaded the effort that later became Hezbollah. So where is your gripe, specifically? Or do you feel it is in poor test for people of country [X] to write/discuss country [Y] under any circumstance? I myself grow weary of poorly researched articles about the Levant, the Gulf Countries, Northern Africa, etc as they IMO foster more misunderstanding, but this article is not one of them. I love polisci and historical articles, but i was wondering the relevance of it being posted to HN. Then i got to the section documenting Wissam Eid's analysis of the cell network used to carry out the intel and implementation of the assassination documented herein. Fucking awesome. I only wish this young man had been able to escape the religion regulated shithole that is the Levant and come to North America so he could have played with network analysis and other nerd stuff instead of being smeared across the pavement by monotheist psychos.

krylon 12y ago

Very interesting article. Very long, too, but well worth the time. (Also, I find it very well written in that it presents a pretty large and complex amount of information in a way that is easy to follow.) The impression I get away with is that the political/religious/economical landscape in the middle east is way more complex than most media reports lead one to think. The part about cellphone metadata was highly interesting, too. It shows how this metadata can be used for investigating crimes, but it does not take much creativity to imagine how an oppressive government can use such data for building profiles of opposition movements.

cyphunk 11y ago

Does this narrative not justify NSA's bulk metadata collection? Seems anyone who says "no" is either disputing the tone and narrative (emphases on metadata) or assuming the circumstances warrant it in Lebanon but not elsewhere I'm a firm believer of universal civil liberties and if we justify or ban warrantless bulk metadata collection anywhere it must apply (either ban or justification) everywhere.