Did Qatar pay a billion dollar ransom? | Hacker News Reader

Did Qatar pay a billion dollar ransom?

bbc.co.uk

108 pointsrhu8652 comments

So did they or didn't they? Are they asking the readers? Is this our homework assignment that we are supposed to answer and turn in to the bbc?

Can the news start reporting on facts?

Read the article only to find out that we don't know who the kidnappers are, if and how much they got, how much cash qatar sent to iraq, etc.

Whenever I read articles like this, it leaves me angry and wanting to never read anything from the BBC again. What's even more frustrating is that the BBC is government funded and not dependent on advertisers and they have no reason to clickbait.

It would be irresponsible of BBC to simply relay the viewpoint of a hostile state intelligence service without skepticism or framing, or giving the Qataris a chance to have their say.

Sorry, understanding the world requires engagement and judgment. Sometimes there's a lot of evidence pointing one way, but it's been manipulated and the other side is actually correct. When news organizations try to boil down the complexity to simple answers it doesn't go well (see: Iraqi WMDs).

In this case, the Qatari story is pretty ridiculous. They say they talked to terrorists about a ransom, then flew a large sum of cash into Iraq in secret, and then that large sum of cash was taken by some people in black masks, and then they got their hostages back. But it wasn't a hostage payment and terrorists didn't get it, it's being held in an Iraqi bank for development or something. This is a pretty far-fetched story and they probably did pay a large ransom, perhaps $1 billion or perhaps something smaller or larger, but in the same ballpark.

It's an interesting story. The only reason the information is out because a government hostile to the parties released the information.

How do you even authenticate the info if it's from a hostile government?

Qatar not denying it is half way to authenticating it.

Audio recordings get you 90% of the way.

Carefully checking transcripts and metadata for errors gets you further still.

Managing to get the same transcripts from the intelligence agencies of another country (either legitimately by asking, or covertly through "journalistic contacts") takes you to 99%...

You can never be 100% sure, but presumably the above met the BBC's standards for reporting.

Where did they get the txt screenshots from? Looks like these Arabs communicate in perfect English among themselves.

This story reminds me of a book that I read a few months ago called "Never Split the Difference". It's a negotiation book by a former FBI hostage negotiator. I think the context of that book offers some color to this story, and I'd highly recommend it.

EDIT: I think the contextual question that arises from that book is: How does the idea of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" play out in multi-sided negotiations with such high stakes?

Could you provide a short summary? I've never heard of it.

It lays out many of the basic principles by which the FBI negotiates with kidnappers. The author writes that the book is meant to first lay out the foundations, and then build on them to give the reader a toolbox (arsenal?) of negotiation strategies. An argument in the book is that these strategies work in business as well - I find this argument compelling. The title of the book is in reference to the fact that you can't split humans. The job of a hostage negotiator isn't to get half a human back by compromising. The negotiator has to get 100% of what they want, or the mission is failed.

But I'm vaguely remembering several occasions where hostage negotiators do take less than 100% of their goal. Examples are where they initially secure the release of "weaker" hostages, such as those in need of medical attention, elderly, etc... In those cases, I'm guessing that's an easy win for the negotiators, since I doubt a hostage-taker necessarily wants a hostage that can't readily move, or dies on them unexpectedly, without having gained anything from a release/bargain. (grim topic...)

I assume the hostage negotiators aren't saying "ok, release the elderly and go ahead and kill everyone else", but "ok, let's start by releasing two hostages and then I'll get you a pizza" or something like that.

That's more to start the release and get the idea of releasing hostages into the kidnappers heads. Once they have released one it sets the stage they can release them.

yes, good points (along with user zck). My point is that it's a bit misleading to say these types of negotiations are all or nothing. There are incremental steps that work towards the ultimate 100% goal, which are valuable on their own, without reaching 100% goal. Clearly achieving 100% of their goal is always the objective, but I don't see "splitting the difference" as being contrary to that.

Example:

FBI: release all the injured hostages, and as a good faith measure we'll turn the water back on.

HOSTAGE TAKER: I'll only release 3 critically injured if you turn the water on now.

(some back and forth, where the hostage taker offers the 3 critically injured + 1 child, and doesn't seem willing to move their position any further, and precious time is being lost for the critically injured)

FBI: Ok, the water is back-on, we're waiting to receive the 3 critically injured + 1 child.

I'm no expert, so possibly that's not how it would go. Would the negotiator only take their initial offer while risking the lives of injured hostages? But the "all or nothing" label belies that there surely must be some back-and-forth with compromises along the way.

Of course you're never splitting humans, but you are splitting groups of humans, and perhaps plenty of other differences.

The winner takes it all strategy has short-comings though.

Much of the time "winner takes all" is a fallacy. What people say they want and what they actually want are different things. People taking hostages claim they want money; what they actually want is the stuff that money will get them. If you keep digging, often there may be even deeper motivations. Don't split the difference; find out what people actually want

> These were obtained by a government hostile to Qatar and passed to the BBC.

How long until governments with access to required backdoors just start openly blackmailing citizens of “hostile” countries?

Without a doubt it’s already happening. Resist all back doors.

Bet that government was the UK, as part of the Five Eyes program, which has significant surveillance hardware in the middle east.

Almost certainly the USA used that equipment and grabbed those transcripts to give to close ally Saudi Arabia, who used them to turn states against Qatar.

The first world war was caused by the killing of a duke, the third world war will be caused by a clumsily worded text message from a president to his wife, misinterpreted by another powerful nation state.

There must never be a third world war, it would imperil human civilization itself. There can never even be a total war between two major powers anymore. Our weapons are just too awful.

Unfortunately I'm not sure that our politicians self-preservation instincts, strong as they may be, trump their egos (sorry for the pun.)

I'm of the belief that a world war today, which immediately launched all existing weapons to cause as much damage as possible, probably wouldn't wipe out the human race.

As soon as you launch that many weapons, and kill such a high percentage of people, you eliminate the possibility of manufacturing new weapons, so the war would be instantly over.

And I believe that despite others simulations to the contrary, there will be small groups of people who will stay underground for years, surviving on tinned etc. food. After 5-10 years, radiation levels will still very high, but most dust will have settled, and the skies clear enough to start to grow crops and rebuild.

Humans, as well as many other creatures, will become more radiation hardened over generations, and given the bountiful supplies of tech and resources left over from our civilization, will be able to quickly repopulate the world.

I agree fully, it's absurd to think of wiping out the human race. There is basically no disaster that would leave the Earth intact but wipe us out. We're the most adaptable species the world has ever known and we're everywhere.

I said civilization would collapse in a dire nuclear war scenario, which is not the same thing. Advanced civilization itself may actually be quite fragile - we see glimmers of that fragility now and again when government / order / utilities break down for prolonged periods.

"Connections - Episode 1: The Trigger Effect"

https://www".dailymotion.com/video/x4e30ki

The punchline is at 29minutes

You don't need survival instincts when you're insulated, and, in many cases, easily isolated (see: elite class buying bunkers).

All of the gulf nation states make use of ZTE, Huawei and other Chinese phone system 'core' equipment for SS7, SMS, and for their mobile carriers' LTE networks. The "lawful intercept" abilities built into these systems, being designed for sale both domestically in China and to authoritarian governments around the world, are quite thorough.

Not that the intercept abilities in Alcatel/Lucent/Nokia/Ericsson equipment is much less robust, it's just not as commonly used in these environments.

Here's a really old but reasonably well documented instance of the same type of event:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens-affair

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2...

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/greek_wiretap...

In the case originally referenced, I would be totally unsurprised that some other nation-state has inserted an advanced persistent threat into the SMS core infrastructure of Qatar's telecoms. One of the reasons why proper end to end crypto (Signal, etc) is so important. At least if you can be reasonably assured of the security and OS of the endpoint devices, you don't have to trust the network in between them.

> These were obtained by a government hostile to Qatar and passed to the BBC.

Israel?

> Shortly after the money was flown to Baghdad, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt began their economic blockade of Qatar. They still accuse Qatar of having a "long history" of financing "terrorism".

saudis?

Emiratis ?

How did Hezbollah AND fundamentalist Salafi groups end up with the money? In my limited understanding those two groups don't like each other. Or is that enough money for them to put aside their differences?

If Qatar wanted to support terrorism, it's plausible the terrorists could pretend to kidnap those people. The hostages would suffer voluntarily due to religious reasons to make it look legit.

There's a lot of underhanded ways to fund terrorism that don't involve having your family kidnapped, like the US did with the Taliban by calling them freedom fighters or something against Russia - see also Rambo. It's easy for rich people or even a country to 'lose' money.

I stopped reading at this bit:

"These were obtained by a government hostile to Qatar and passed to the BBC."

Uhuh. So... how did you verify them?

Uhh RTFA?

“Qatari officials accept that the texts and voicemails are genuine, though they believe they have been edited "very selectively" to give a misleading impression.”

This is why government by royal families doesn't work. When the state and the family are the same thing, the inevitable family crisis become a national crisis. A billion-dollar ransom that then sparks a trade war? This is a group of families fighting a petty grudge match against a background of slight religious differences, reminiscent of the worst of the Tudors.

I think it only matters what type of people are in charge. Democracy won't protect your country, only whether those who have taken an oath to defend the rule of law, their country, and their vote, actually do. See recent events.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-replaces-natio...

While the type of person unavoidably makes some difference, it’s exaggeration to say it’s the only thing which matters. The structure of a government can require consensus. To use a named rather than implied current example, this is why the UK government spent the last two years paralysed over which Brexit to choose, either “hard” or “soft” — no consensus; and also why the process started at all despite the lack of specificity — 498/114 supermajority consensus in favour of some form of Brexit.

> Democracy won't protect your country,

It may, but democracy goes beyond mere voting.

Good systems are resilient to bad leaders. See the Roman Empire or England for example, neither has any shortage of bad emperors/kings and both avoided violent regime changes or subjugation by a foreign power for many hundreds of years (and counting in England's case)

> See the Roman Empire or England for example, neither has any shortage of bad emperors/kings and both avoided violent regime changes or subjugation by a foreign power for many hundreds of years

Violent regime change was quite common in the Roman Empire as most people use that term, and even in ~thousand years of Byzantine history after the final East/West partition of the Empire it's hard to find a period of more than a couple hundred years without violent regime change; I'm also having trouble finding “many hundreds of years” consecutively without violent regime change in England. I mean “3” is typically the minimum value meant by “a few” and doesn't qualify as “many”, and the last change of government of the UK by armed invasions was 330 years ago, and that seems to be the longest stretch England or the UK seems to have had without violent regime change.

I meant "violent" like "there was a war and plenty of destruction" not "the ruler got stabbed to death".

I'll go further and say that if there is a system, it's precisely to be resilient to bad leaders. If leaders can effectively lead, why have a system over them ? e.g. a system that works when everyone acts out of good will is redundant.

> If leaders can effectively lead, why have a system over them ?

Do you mean, 'if the leader is perfect, why not give them absolute power?' The problems with that question seem obvious to me.

Which is why the OP proposed that (rhetorical) question... we have systems in place because we can't expect perfection, nor should the system require all actors to be acting in good faith to function.

So far I haven't seen any evidence that this has not been the case in the US (that the system of controls has failed or has been circumvented). Unless of course you take rhetoric at face value over measuring real-life actions and realistic outcomes, as is popular in partisan politics these days.

Well there's also the question of knowledge transfer.

> I think it only matters what type of people are in charge. Democracy won't protect your country, only whether those who have taken an oath to defend the rule of law, their country, and their vote, actually do.

I think that citizens in a democracy have the power to protect themselves by voting and taking other political actions. The tools of democracy, unused, are insufficient.

At the same time there seems to be a very high correlation between the system of government and the quality of leaders. Trump is a problem but he stands out as an exception in U.S. history. The leaders of mature democracies seem much higher quality than those of other forms of governments, especially over time.

Also, institutions have a large effect. Their power isn't absolute, but the institutions in the US government are well-established and support the rule of law; they can't be changed overnight. Those institutions are protecting Americans from much worse (though they are also failing to do all they need to).

> The leaders of mature democracies seem much higher quality than those of other forms of governments, especially over time.

The quality of leaders you must have for a mature (and thus taken for granted) democracy to survive as a democracy increases with maturity, so this is arguably simple survivorship bias: democracies that get poor leaders when the people have lost the immediate visceral understanding of the fragility and specialness of democratic institutions tend very strongly to stop being democracies.

> Also, institutions have a large effect. Their power isn't absolute, but the institutions in the US government are well-established and support the rule of law.

Do they? There are certainly many executive branch institutions that support the rule of the way things have traditionally been done in those institutions (which, particularly within the national security apparatus, may not reflect the law even when it also does not reflect the whim of the current chief executive. And even where they might (as I think a good argument can be made for the professional core, and even much of the subcabinet political leadership, of the DoJ and FBI) support the rule of law, they are extremely subject to disruption by the President via directed personnel change.

It's certainly not clear that legislative branch institutions support the rule of law at the present time; arguably, the legislative majority (at least in the House) has been openly aligned with the President against those institutions interested in the rule of law.

The judiciary is what's left, but this President has been making appointments there at a much higher rate than most recent ones (there's been attention to his second Supreme Court pick recently, but the pace of lower court appointments has been quite high.)

Could you cite some examples, especially of the first paragraph? I don't recall many (any?) mature democracies that changed to another system of government.

petty grudge ... slight religious differences

Understatements of the century.

>of the century.

How many more recursive understatements before we hit a base case?

Are they launching another world cup bid?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com