If your adversary is the mossad (2014) [pdf]
usenix.org185 points by xeonmc 6 hours ago
185 points by xeonmc 6 hours ago
Both Assange and Snowden are apparently alive and well, despite Mossad-like agencies wishing otherwise, largely thanks to Tor; and Hamas, whose adversary was in fact the Mossad, apparently still exists. Hizbullah has hopefully taught us all a good lesson about supply-chain attacks.
Debian is probably the only example of a successful public public-key infrastructure, but SSH keys are a perfectly serviceable form of public-key infrastructure in everyday life. At least for developers.
Mickens's skepticism about security labels is, however, justified; the problems he identifies are why object-capability models seem more successful in practice.
I do agree that better passwords are a good idea, and, prior to the widespread deployment of malicious microphones, were adequate authentication for many purposes—if you can avoid being phished. My own secure password generator is http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/bitwords...., and some of its modes are memorable correct-horse-battery-staple-type passwords. It's arguably slightly blasphemous, so you may be offended if you are an observant Hindu.
> ...Assange and Snowden...
I'd argue that for every Assange and Snowden, there are 100 (1k? 100k?) people using Tor for illegal, immoral, and otherwise terrible things. If you're OK with that, then sure, fine point.
> SSH keys
Heartbleed and Terrapin were both pretty brutal attacks on common PKI infra. It's definitely serviceable and very good, but vulnerabilities can go for forever without being noticed, and when they are found they're devastating.
> prior to the widespread deployment of malicious microphones, were adequate authentication for many purposes
Can you elaborate on this? I don't understand the context for malicious microphones and how that affects secure passwords.
Oh, well, it turns out that keyboard sounds leak enough entropy to make it easy to attack even very strong passwords.
Microphones on devices such as Ring doorbell cameras are explicitly exfiltrating audio data out of your control whenever they're activated. Features like Alexa and Siri require, in some sense, 24/7 microphone activation, although normally that data isn't transmitted off-device except on explicit (vocal) user request. But that control is imposed by non-user-auditable device firmware that can be remotely updated at any time.
Finally, for a variety of reasons, it's becoming increasingly common to have a microphone active and transmitting data intentionally, often to public contexts like livestreaming video.
With the proliferation of such potentially vulnerable microphones in our daily lives, we should not rely too heavily on the secrecy of short strings that can easily leak through the audio channel.
Why did you choose random’s SystemRandom rather than secrets?
What?
Oh, you mean PEP 506. I wrote this program in 02012, and PEP 506 wasn't written until 02015, didn't ship in a released Python until 3.6 in 02016, and even then was only available in Python 3, which I didn't use because it basically didn't work at the time.
PEP 506 is just 22 lines of code wrapping SystemRandom. There's no advantage over just using SystemRandom directly.
what is 02012 and why write it so strange?
They want to feel like they matter in over 10k years from now, where a 4-digit year would start to wrap.
Never agreed with this logic. For a lot of people (anyone that does political activism of some sort for example) the threat model can be a lot more nuanced. It might not be Mossad or the CIA gunning for you, specifically, but it might police searching you and your friend's laptops or phones. It might be burglars targetting the office of the small organization you have and the small servers you have running there.
You did not write what you actually disagree with....
the maximalist false dillema of "all or nothing": either it's a super-poweful super-human agency and you can't do anything, else any half-measure is fine
The false dichotomy
The dichotomy between what average people(including political activists) can actually handle and stuff proposed by security researchers is real.
The idea that average people can't handle incremental improvements like a password manager, MFA, full disk encryption, etc is unhealthy infantilization of people who are entirely capable of understanding the concepts, the benefits, the risks they address, and appreciating the benefits of them.
Most people just don't care enough until after they're hacked, at which point they care just enough to wish they'd done something more previously, which is just shy of enough to start doing something differently going forward.
It's not that normies are too stupid figure this out, it's that they make risk accept decisions on risks they don't thoroughly understand or care enough about to want to understand. My personal observation is that the concept of even thinking about potential future technology risks at all (let alone considering changing behavior to mitigate those risks) seems to represent an almost an almost pathological level of proactive preparation to normies, the same way that preppers building bunkers with years of food and water storage look to the rest of us.
I do understand the concepts and exactly because of that I doubt I myself would be able of airtight opsec against any determined adversary, not even state-level one. I think it's humility, you think I infantilize myself lol.
I do use password manager and disk encryption, just for case of theft. Still feels like one stupid sleepy misclick away from losing stuff and no amount of MFAs or whatever is going to save me, they actually feel like added complexity which leads to mistakes.
I'm pretty sure his point was that security labels are a dead end.
(Have you ever attended an academic security conference like Usenix Security?)
Yep. While there might be some use cases for his ultra-simplistic "Mossad/not-Mossad duality" - say, convincing Bob Jones that "b0bj0nes" is not a great password - it's 99% fairy tale.
And even if the CIA/Mossad/NSA/whoever is "interested" in you - this is the era of mass surveillance. The chances that you're worth a Stuxnet level of effort is 0.000000001%. Vs. 99.999% chance that they'll happily hoover up your data, if you make it pretty easy for their automated systems to do that.
Also worth noting that Mossad/CIA/etc. are not monoliths. Maybe you got a top agent assigned to you, but maybe your file is on the desk of the Mossad's version of Hitchcock and Scully from Brooklyn 99.
This will always be my favourite Mikens essay (The Slow Winter): https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1309_14-17_mickens.pdf
If people want to read all six, here they are! https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens
My favorite is The Night Watch.
Mine as well.
I have a fond memory of being at a party where someone had the idea to do dramatic readings of various Mickens Usenix papers. Even just doing partial readings, it was slow going, lots of pauses to recover from overwhelming laughter. When the reading of The Slow Winter got to "THE MAGMA PEOPLE ARE WAITING FOR OUR MISTAKES", we had to stop because someone had laughed so hard they threw up. Not in an awful way, but enough to give us a pause in the action, and to decide we couldn't go on.
Good times.
Bit of an aside, but I'm wondering in what city this was in.
I'm going to be job hunting soon and I was planning to prioritize the Bay Area because that's the only place I've encountered a decent density of people like this, but maybe I'm setting my sights too short.
Sounds like you found nerd heaven. I couldn't imagine a situation like yours in my world! :)
> [...] it’s pretty clear that compilers are a thing of the past, and the next generation of processors will run English-level pseudocode directly.
hilarious AND scary levels of prescient writing...
Despite his somewhat annoying style, that article has many good points about the aloofness of security researchers. However, I will disagree on two points which the article contains:
1. Tor is (rightly) used by anyone who has a good reason for remaining anonymous. (See [REALNAMES] for who this can be.) Anyone trying to smear Tor as only used by drug dealers and other unsavory types are themselves suspect of having an agenda of discouraging Tor use for anyone lest they be suspected. This can only lead to an installation of Tor being viewed as a suspicious thing in itself; who would want that?
2. His threat model of Mossad or not-Mossad leaves out one important actor, which we can call the NSA. They, and others like them, unlike Mossad, are not after you personally in that they don't want to do anything to you. Not immediately. Not now. They simply want to get to know you better. They are gathering information. All the information. What you do, what you buy, how you vote, what you think. And they want to do this to everybody, all the time. This might or not bite you in the future. He seems to imply that since nothing immediately bad is happening by using slightly bad security, then it’s OK and we shouldn’t worry about it, since Mossad is not after us. I think that we should have a slightly longer view of what allowing NSA (et al.) to know everything about everybody would mean, and who NSA could some day give this information to, and what those people could do with the information. You have to think a few steps ahead to realize the danger.
[REALNAMES] Who is harmed by a "Real Names" policy? <https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22R...>
(Repost of <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23572778>)
Remember, you don't have to be unhackable, just sufficiently unimportant to not be worth burning any novel capability on
I think people don't understand what this means either. the nation-state "agencies" that can and will get into your network/devices can do so because they would employ tactics like kidnapping and blackmailing a local telco field technician. or if it's your own government, they can show up with some police and tell them to do whatever and most will comply without even receiving a proper court order.
so unless you're worth all that trouble, you're really just trying to avoid being "low hanging fruit" compromised by some batch script probing known (and usually very old) vulnerabilities
So the advice would be for an activist to choose extremely boring forms of activism? ;)
I like the "gray man" concept, but can't predict when you end up on the radar or why. As a young graduate student, I once wrote an article that rebuffed the government's "Total Information Awareness" trial balloon and suddenly found myself embroiled in much unexpected controversy, including some big name journalists e-mailing me and asking questions. You just never know when you stumble into something that you're not supposed to know about and what might happen.
I think the more important maxim to follow is this: if you didn't manufacture your own sillicon, you are infinitely more hackable than if you did.
Alas, no matter how hard we try to trust our compilers, we must also adopt methods to trust our foundries.
Oh, we don't have our own foundries?
Yeah, thats the real problem. Who owns the foundries?
When has anybody ever been hacked via a foundry?
While having your own foundry is undoubtedly a good thing from the perspective of supply chain resiliency, if hacking is what you're worried about there are probably easier ways to mitigate (e.g. a bit more rigor in QC).
Roughly everybody you've ever met, 100% of the time.
There's a reason the NSA can get Intel CPUs without IME and you can't. Given the incentives and competence of the people involved, it's probably an intentional vulnerability that you can't escape because you don't fab your own chips. There's strong circumstantial evidence that Huawei got banned from selling their products in the US for doing the same thing. And the Crypto AG backdoor (in hardware but probably not in silicon) was probably central to a lot of 20th-century international relations, though that wasn't publicly known until much later.
And this is before we get into penny-ante malicious hardware like laser printer toner cartridges, carrier-locked cellphones, and HDMI copy protection.
No amount of QC is going to remove malicious hardware; at best, it can tell you it's there.
Not exactly what you're asking, but multiple CVEs have been found in Intel's Management Engine (ME) which have been used in spyware.
It might not be an intentional backdoor, but it very much seems designed with out-of-band access in mind, with the AMT remote management features and the fact that the network controller has DMA (this enables packet interception).
"When" is what we will likely never know, given the subterranean depth of trust and visibility there. Probably never...
Do you know what "your" CPU is doing? Do you really?
I always figured the spy crap was programmed right in to the chips themselves and the BIOS.
That's right, just keep your head down, smile and nod, do your job and nothing will ever go wrong. /s
A more charitable view would be to act like a zebra in a herd of zebra rather than a zebra in a herd of horses.
Charitable, but also privileged. Many people only have the option of looking like a cow in a cattle yard.
I don't think that's the interpretation, but make your computer systems disconnected from what you do.
If relevant adversaries don't know which computer to burn the exploit on, then they won't burn it on the right one.
You /s but this is actually valid advice for someone who just wants to get by in life and is content.
>someone who just wants to get by in life and is content
"It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does."
That's stupid. It's not all an illusion. The scale definitely matters. If you are buying stocks you can make a profit as a little guy that if the big guys tried to do it they would quickly become the "market maker" and the strategy would not scale up. It's the same with criminal activity or insurgency--small mosquitoes are ignored while the major threats get swatted hard.
Do the bombs dropping in war zones avoid apolitical people? If not, when is the appropriate time to get sufficiently political to avoid having a bomb dropped on one's head?
"Keeping your head down" means not doing anything that would cause a government (especially your own) to want to disappear you.
If you vocally oppose your tyrannical government, you won't avoid a bomb on your head. In the best case you'll get a bullet through your head. Worst case, you spend a lifetime in a prison.
Very few individuals can influence whether or not bombs drop. The best way to avoid having bombs dropped on your head is moving to a place where fewer bombs are dropped.
But many people together, although none of them individually influencial enough, certainly can influence where bombs get dropped.
When you start successfully reaching many people you can be sure that security agencies will start watching you.
True enough. I'm content as long as I don't hear the news anywhere. Recently had my dad over and he can't go 5 minutes without the news on in the background. Really hard to be content then.
Downvoted, but so much evil is caused by people due to their distorted yet sincerely believed moral virtues. Not due to an absence of morality but because of it. Whatever you have in your mind as the image of quintessential evil is probably caused by those people's sincerely held moral system, a moral system they believed in as strongly as you do yours. So people who just live their lives and do not grasp on external change are fine by me.
are you saying that you've downvoted me, or just pointing out that I've been downvoted? If the former, why?
I've always enjoyed Mikens' writing. He has a great sense of humor.
I like his using Mossad as the extreme. I guess "Mossad'd" is now a verb.
I enjoyed "The Night Watch" a lot:
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatc...
> A systems programmer will know what to do when society breaks down, because the systems programmer already lives in a world without law.
The point about the lay person not needing massive parallelism was very true, until it was not :D
That's a fun take, similar to the classic XKCD 538: Security. https://xkcd.com/538/
The 4096 bits just stops it being so easy to surveil you that it is hyper-automated. So there is some use. The $5 wrench needs a million dollar operation to get that guy to your house.
Depends how strong the protections of your civil society is, but it doesn't cost $1m to send a goon with a crowbar or shotgun. Sure that doesn't scale, but if you are a target you're screwed
The $1m is the stuff they did to the point where they knew where to send the goon.
If you are a target you are screwed. But clever crypto isn't useless.
Probably used to average over $1m. Nowadays, those operations (polonium, novachuk, expending expensive KGB resources) send a signal. Otherwise, swatting your home while they drain your wallets; or threatening to swat; quite inexpensive.
Oh come on, that's way over budget! Every time I managed such an operation, we'd just rent a van and... uh, I mean, um, I heard it costs less.
<NO CARRIER>
Its a million dollars to the defense contractor who lobbies for more wrench attacks.
this is why you need a fake password that provides access to fake content that looks like the real content
I see this on reddit a lot in self hosting context.
The range of things people do on security is wild. Everything from publicly expose everything and pray the apps login function some random threw together is solid to elaborate intrusion detection systems.
It's hilarious, but the hilarity gets in the way of recognizing how much insight there is also there. It makes serious points. This part about the Mossad is especially astonishing given the pager attack:
> If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ https://. If the Mossad wants your data, they’re going to use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that’s shaped like a cellphone
It's like a Mossad agent read this paper and thought hey that's actually not a bad idea.
But the core rant is about dubious assumptions in academic cryptography papers. I was also reading a lot of academic crypto papers in 2014, and the assumptions got old real fast. Mickens mocks these ideas:
• "There are heroes and villains with fantastic (yet oddly constrained) powers". Totally standard way to get a paper published. Especially annoying were the mathematical proofs that sound rigorous to outsiders but quietly assume that the adversary just can't/won't solve a certain kind of equation, because it would be inconvenient to prove the scheme secure if they did. Or the "exploits" that only worked if nobody had upgraded their software stack for five years. Or the systems that assume a perfect implementation with no way to recover if anything goes wrong.
• "you could enlist a well-known technology company to [run a PKI], but this would offend the refined aesthetics of the vaguely Marxist but comfortably bourgeoisie hacker community who wants everything to be decentralized", lol. This got really tiresome when I worked on Bitcoin. Lots of semi-technical people who had never run any large system constantly attacking every plausible design of implementable complexity because it wasn't decentralized enough for their tastes, sometimes not even proposing anything better.
• "These [social networks] are not the best people in the history of people, yet somehow, I am supposed to stitch these clowns into a rich cryptographic tapestry that supports key revocation and verifiable audit trails" - another variant of believing decentralized cryptography and PKI is easy.
He also talks about security labels like in SELinux but I never read those papers. I think Mickens used humor to try and get people talking about some of the bad patterns in academic cryptography, but if you want a more serious paper that makes some similar points there's one here:
> Lots of semi-technical people who had never run any large system constantly attacking every plausible design of implementable complexity because it wasn't decentralized enough for their tastes, sometimes not even proposing anything better.
And for added fun, that same radical decentralization crowd, finally settling on the extremely centralized Lightning crutch, which is not only centralized but also computationally over complicated and buggy.
It is kinda funny, but cost and benefit analysis is not foreign even to Mossad. Mossad would prefer quite a few people's data stolen, but they are not going to carry out a black abroad for most of them.
> you could enlist a well-known technology company to [run a PKI],
If you have a single company, then that's easy enough for a group like Mossad to infiltrate. Probably easier than a distributed system.
The best known PKI (webtrust) is many companies, not a single company. So it's distributed but that makes it easier to hack not harder because you have many possible targets instead of just one.
I think the central premise is a "wrong". The "point" of science isn't really to do useful things. Framing things from that angle is in subtle ways dangerous bc that shouldnt be part of the incentive structure.
you dont understand the mating behaviors of naked mole rats bc of some sense of "usefulness". Its just an investigation of nature and how things work. The usefulness comes out unexpectedly. Like you find out naked mole are actually maybe biologically immortal
You should just find interesting phenomena and invetigate. Capitalism figures out the usefulness side of things
Yeah, Science shouldn't be concerned with usefulness, just like Art. It's the application of those fields which should concern itself with usefulness i.e. applied science, engineering, design etc. I'm not saying that scientific research shouldn't be carried out by companies with specific goals in mind, just that it shouldn't be the expected default.
Mickens essays are always a good read
Not sure what audience he is talking to. Experts deal with a lot more issues that sit between choosing a good password + not falling for phishing and "giving up because mossad". The terminology that he sprinkles about suggests the audience is experts.
The article actually addresses this -- that all these extra issues are not manageable for mere mortals anyway and/or perfectly spherical cows are involved.
Security is a problem caused by ownership of some usefulness. Sometimes solution can be around addressing these two causes.
Another example of power resides where men believe it resides.
Americans are just very scared of Mossad. Tons of money goes into Holywood to make them appear invincible to the world. Fun fact, they aren't.
Intelligence agencies have great capabilities no doubt they get billions of $$$ and have utter immunity to do whatever they want in the name of national security. Why is only Mossad scary? I'd be more scared of the CIA and KGB than of Mossad.
US has never been in existential threat like Israel has been, if it were I wouldn't want to stand in their way.
> Americans are just very scared of Mossad. Tons of money goes into Holywood to make them appear invincible to the world.
I don't believe I've ever seen Mossad depicted in a Hollywood movie? I guess there was Munich. Are there specific movies/TV shows that you're thinking of?
Americans, by and large, don't even think about Mossad. Certainly not the way they're aware of the CIA and KGB - which no one should be scared of at the moment since it hasn't existed since 1991, though obviously there are modern successors.
> Are there specific movies/TV shows that you're thinking of?
Not GP, but NCIS is the big one offhand. Of course that show has simply gotten more and more ridiculous on general over the years
Ah, very Germanic tactics against some Mediterranean foe. Us, Southern Mediterranean/half Atlantic guys, we have it easier. We would just put fake data, hints and traces untl they get mad and paranoid between themselves, we are experts on that since forever.
Also, the Southern part of the country (which I am pretty much not related culturally at least on folklore and tons of customs) managed to bribe even the Russian mafias. They were that crazy, it's like a force of nature. OFC don't try backstabbing back these kind of people, some 'folklorical' people are pretty much clan/family based (even more than the Southern Italians) and they will kick your ass back in the most unexpected, random and non-spectacular way ever, pretty much the opposite of the Mexican cartels where they love to do showoff and displays. No, the Southern Iberians are something else, mixed along Atlantics and Mediterranean people since millenia and they know all the tricks, either from the Brits/Germanics to Levantine Semitic foes...
You won't expect it. You are like some Mossad random Levi, roaming around, and you just met some nice middle aged woman on a stereotyped familiar bar where the alleged ties to some clan must be nearly zero, and the day after some crazy Islamic terrorist wacko with ties to drug cartels will try to stab you some Sunday in the morning and he might try to succeed with the dumbest and cheapest way ever.
No, is not an exaggeration. We might not be Italy, but don't try to mess up with some kind of people. My country is not Mafia-bound, but criminal cartels, mafias and OFC some terror groups from the Magreb (and these bound to the Middle East ones) have deals with each other because of, you know, weapons and money. And Marbella it's pretty much a hub.
Very true, unfortunately there's no password strong enough to stop Malaysian Airlines ground crew from loading a pallet full of Mossad-rigged walkie talkies on my flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing via conveniently-placed-NATO-AWACS-infested airspace.
2FA isn't going to protect me from cruising altitude walkie talkie detonation and having the debris scattered over an impossibly wide area.
I guess the best thing to do is not take an airline of a country that has recently showed public support for Gaza specifically during a humanitarian visit in the months prior to my flight.
Thankfully none of this is true and everything the mainstream media and governments tell us are true - imagine if things weren't as they seemed?.. Craziness... Back to my password manager!
"If your adversary is Hamas (2023)"
The Mossad part is a very silly element of the text. Many organizations have to defend against US intelligence, Israeli intelligence etc., and I'm sure, that they, with the exception of some very terrible countries with a lot of incompetence or full of disloyal people likely to become infiltrators, are quite successful.
Actual security is possible even against the most powerful and determined adversaries, and it's possible even for you.
I think fighting Israel is kind of a glimpse into what trying to fight a malevolent AGI will be like.
Expect to lose in highly surprising ways.
I don't know, driving a big truck into AWS' us-east-1 power supply section sounds more than enough to take down internet for a while.
Of course, but that's the point. Actual AGI wouldn't need to limit itself pointlessly in ways that would make it obvious to every internet rando how to hit it. Just as you cannot kill an intelligence agency with a single strike, it could distribute itself over many secret locations.
I would hope that data centre has multiple power supplies from multiple locations - as well as UPS and on site generators, certainly mine do.
However given AWS is so complex (which is required because they want to be a gatekeeping platform) leading the uptime to struggle to match a decent home setup, I'm not sure. I'm sure there's no 6 figure bonus for checking the generators are working, but a rounded corner on a button on an admin page?
this guy's stuff reads like word salad and people lap it up. I've never understood why.
He wrote quirky internet humor before it was mainstream, in fact he's a victim of his own success - when this article came out this would've been considered funny and quirky writing, but has become tired and derivative enough today to provoke a negative reaction.
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Just because you don't like the reputation that the Mossad has both gotten and created for itself, doesn't mean that playing on that reputation is in any way antisemitic. It's fair perhaps to consider it anti-Israel, given that the Mossad is am agency of the state.
And the Mossad really has a terrible reputation, both for efficiency and for being relatively bloody. The assassinations of the nazi officials who had fled to South America are a founding myth (and a positive one, of course - no one should cry for spilled literal nazi regime blood). For a more recent example, you have the campaign of booby-trapped Hezbollah devices that killed or injured quite a few Lebanese civilians along with various militia members, which the Mossad and Israeli government more generally gleefully talked about.
You'll find far fewer similar stories about the CIA or even GRU - at least from any current events (e.g. the CIA's most heinous actions were usually only talked about years later, like their campaigns of terror in Latin America). The GRU's operations are also less talked about, no doubt to a great extent because it is an adversary, and we don't want to talk about how good our adversaries are.
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Interesting we get these sudden 2 to 3 month old accounts with no comment history popping into these threads to start stirring the pot.
Be careful, you commenting here is exactly the starting point for how the Mossad gets a highly radioactive uranium cell phone into your back pocket. I'm sorry I was too late for you.
>> For a more recent example, you have the campaign of booby-trapped Hezbollah devices that killed or injured quite a few Lebanese civilians along with various militia members,
It was quite possibly the most well targeted large scale military attack on a militia group in history, not to mention nonlethal to 99.5%, including Hezbollah members. What alternative military approaches do you suggest? While collateral damage is always tragic, it was almost inconceivably clean for what it managed to accomplish
That's irrelevant to the point I was making, that the Mossad is seen, based on evidence, as both an efficient and a ruthless organization.
If you want to discuss the merits of the operation, though: for one thing, Israel is not at war with Lebanon, so any attack on Lebanese people, even Hezbollah soldiers, is immoral (as are Hezbollah's attacks on Israel, even the ones that kill Israeli soldiers, are immoral). Secondly, even accepting that Hezbollah militia members are a legitimate war target, that doesn't make all members of Hezbollah legitimate targets. Even in war, attacking troops who are at home on leave, or attacking auxiliary personnel such as military doctors, is not considered a legitimate military target. How many of those killed were active duty military personnel, and how many were not? I would bet that the numbers are much worse than the 99.5% propaganda.
> Israel is not at war with Lebanon
So why do all those rockets keep getting launched from Lebanon into Israel? Lebanon is either de-facto at war with Israel or is a failed state that has lost the ability to keep third party (Iranian Hezbollah) military from violating its ostensible neutrality.
We can and should condemn both Israel for indiscriminate violence against civilians, and Iran for escalating this conflict. It feels very weird to say "I don't think there's been enough international condemnation of Iran lately", given how much they've been condemned justly or unjustly my entire lifetime, but they really are both provoking a war whose consequences fall on Lebanese and Palestinians (and Israelis!), while also being a key supplier to Russia in their "illegal" war on Ukraine.
You don't get to have it both ways. You can't say, on one hand, that Hezbollah are an illegitimate militia that shouldn't be conflated with Lebanon and also that there is some clean distinction between on and off-duty as if they were a real legitimate military.
And especially not when we're literally talking about the pagers carried on their person. Basically by definition, if you are a Hezbollah member carrying a Hezbollah-issued pager on your person, and you get a message, and you actively pick up the device and look at the message - at that very moment you are acting in Hezbollah capacity.
> assassinates via uranium phones and then gloats at press conferences with "IT WAS DEFINITELY US" t-shirts?
This would be an easier complaint to make if Israeli intelligence hadn't assassinated a bunch of people by exploding pagers and then publicly taken credit for it.
I'm sure the thousand exploding pagers miraculously only managed to target Hamas members, and that no children or innocent civilians were maimed or injured.
Mossad got this reputation from back in the day with "Operation Wrath Of God", where in retaliation for the horrific Black September attack on the Israeli Olympic team they carried out a series of extra-territorial murders. History might forgive them that until they murdered a Morrocan waiter in Lillehammer by mistake.
(no excuse for generalized anti-semetism, though. People should stick to criticisms of things that Israel has actually done, not make them up)
I don't see antisemitic here, the implication is that Mossad is highly competent at hacking compared to NSA / GRU. And this was 2014, back before antisemitism became rather fashionable among people who should know better.
> Portraying Israeli intelligence as this omnipotent, cartoonishly evil entity that assassinates via uranium phones
https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-hezbollah-was-fooled-into-...
> and then gloats at press conferences with "IT WAS DEFINITELY US" t-shirts
https://www.timesofisrael.com/pms-office-confirms-netanyahu-...
It is not antisemitic, just daily news.
Uranium phones no. Pager bombs sure. If you dont want to be labeled as cartoonishly evil then stop doing cartoonishly evil things.
Look at the Pegasus spyware. Shit was sold by Israel to the Saudi's so they could track a journalist and chop him up.
While not the uranium phones and tee shirts, in the real world just last year we got Operation Grim Beeper, where Mossad remotely detonated thousands of custom made pagers with a few grams of plastic explosive, followed by two way radios the next day. AFAIK they didn’t make tee shirts but they did go on 60 minutes, in disguise, to brag about the operation. Just saying, it seems pretty on brand.
> Portraying Israeli intelligence as this omnipotent, cartoonishly evil entity that assassinates via uranium phones
Uses term "cartoonishly evil" to describe a scenario scarily close to a recent actual example.
The only way I can fathom this comment on HN is that it's masterful irony. And if that's the case, I applaud it.
If not: smh.
Edited to add two things:
1. It seems like the opposite of punching down, more like fearful respect of their capability.
2. I struggle to draw a line between criticising the efficiency with which an agency kills people and anti-semitism.
I would think that most people that consider themselves jewish, or a true believer of any religion, or just a well-adjusted non-denominational human (as rare as they are) for that matter, would respect the sanctity of life, and see the pursuit of murder, for any reason, as antithetical to their beliefs.
Ethnostates and Theocracies are shit. If an intelligence agency is representative of a single race or religion, its bad. Quit your job.
Then how it's possible Mossad didn't know about what had happened on 7 October 2023?
The same way the US didn't know about 9/11. Intelligence failures.
(Portions of the US intelligence apparatus knew, but that knowledge didn't transition into action)
Israel's intelligence services (not Mossad) did collect valid signals, such as sim cards in Gaza being swapped out for Israel sim cards, but it was ignored as another false positive. What the public don't see are all the false positives (like many drills for an attack that don't materialize) that drown out valid signals when the attack is actually going to happen. There's also hesitancy to act on signals because drills are used to expose intelligence.
It's one of the many asymmetries that changes when you are the defender versus the attacker. As the defender, you have to be right 100% of the time. As the attacker, you have the luxury of being right only 30% of the time. The law of large numbers is on the side of the attacker. This applies to missile offense/defense and to usage of intelligence.
This information asymmetry is also one of the key drivers of the security dilemma, which in turn causes arms races and conflict. The defender knows they can't be perfect all the time, so they have an incentive to preemptively attack if the probability of future problems based on their assessment of current information is high enough.
In the case of Gaza there was also an assessment that Hamas were deterred, which were the tinted glasses through which signals were assessed. Israel also assumed a certain shape of an attack, and the minimal mobilisation of Hamas did not fit that expected template. So the intelligence failure was also a failure in security doctrine and institutional culture. The following principles need to be reinforced: (i) don't assume the best, (ii) don't expect rationality and assume a rival is deterred even if they should be, (iii) intention causes action, believe a rival when they say they want to do X instead of projecting your own worldview onto them, (iv) don't become fixated on a particular scenario, keep the distribution (scenario analyses) broad
Avoiding a car accident has a low cost, you just have to take it slowly and be 1 min late to your meeting or whatever, but deciding wether you should attack first based on a small suspicion, that a hell of a problem, because if you're wrong, you're seen as the bad guy. And maybe even if you're right and can't prove it.
> because if you're wrong, you're seen as the bad guy. And maybe even if you're right and can't prove it.
An example of this is France cutting off all support after Israel's initiation of the Six Day War, which followed signals such as Egypt massing troops on the border. The problem for Israel was the lack of strategic depth combined with the geographical low ground, which creates these hair trigger scenarios with no room for error, reducing the threshold to act preemptively. The more abstract problem was the absence of a regional hegemon in the late 20th century in that region, which is a necessary condition for resolving the security dilemma.
Actually Gaza and the West Bank are handled by the "Shabak" agency which is the equivalent of the FBI while the "Mossad" agency is only for foreign operations and is equivalent to the CIA
And asking how did they miss something is like asking how come AWS has downtime. But I'm sure you could come to this conclusion on your own if you didn't really want the answer to be something else.
And the article is a huge rant about why security people are stupid for worrying about the most clearly implausible shit ever.
a. I am too lazy to search but they probably did, the problem was what was done with the information. Same with 8200 the all mighty signal intelligence corps
b. The Mossad is the equivalent of the CIA, they are not meant to act inside Israel
> b. The Mossad is the equivalent of the CIA, they are not meant to act inside Israel
For that purpose is Gaza inside or not inside Israel?
Shin Bet (Israeli internal security service) have an Arab desk that covers the West Bank & Gaza.
Israel would probably dispute it, but for most of the world Gaza in relation to Israel is "abroad" and not "domestic".
This is exactly the type of comment that will get you mossad'd.
ok I'll keep you updated, but I don't own any real estate they could "de-Hamasify"
Maybe they did but it was permitted to happen to provide the pretext to expand those Greater Israel borders.
They didn't know about the pretense they wanted to spend the following 2+ years making unlimited fallacious justifications for committing a live-streamed holocaust of children? Who told you that?
If your adversary is a state intelligence agency, you're probably a high ranking politician and a boomer who is clueless about computers, and has demonstrably terrible opsec, either through government incompetence of your own agencies, or not following the terribly cumbersome opsec procedures, either because of inconvenience, the policies being terrible or sheer incompetence.
The amount of examples we've seen of this is staggering.
That sounds like an elected legislator, not like the kind of person with close access to compartmentalized info. And its the form of a leak of policy or some covert program; details which could also be bought; so it’s called “retail” compared with systematic.
I think saying that people like Hillary Clinton, Trump, Biden or Bolton didn't have access to highly sensitive information is not a reasonable stance (and those are just the ones we know about).
It’s good that no one is arguing that. But your argument isn’t strong. You’re saying that numbers matter. Those kinds of people go in and out of SCIFs. If they belch a secret at lunch, maybe it has lobbying implications, but it wasn’t compartmentalized. It can even be disinfo.
The real ROI is to land a Jonathan Pollard. Not even a million Hegseths can leak enough info to collect into one Pollard.