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Comment by PeterStuer | Hacker News Reader

'They couldn't even stop Hamas from attacking Israel with all the illegal surveillance states in the world'

I've yet to hear an at least plausible story of how a massive prep operation could not just have been missed by the world's most advanced embedded spy agencies in what is possibly the most surveiled group in the world, but then not just effectively executed but lingered on without direct response at again, maybe with exception of Korea, the most heavily secured high tech guarded border in the world.

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Yeah. Fucked up, isn't it? Israel is home to literal corporations providing cyber weapons and digital espionage as a service and they couldn't protect their citizens from this attack. These politicians totally "need" to break our encryption though. For our safety.

Yeah, you see, it's a different kind of threat. Hamas is just the usual terrorists, from time to time they grow and get organized, and then we look surprised and outraged when they attack, and stump them out or use them in some proxy war. Don't worry, we have that under control.

With encryption, it's a whole another story. The danger is much greater. People may read hate speech or Putin's propaganda, and spread it on the Internet. This is a threat to democracy. Or even worse, they may communicate freely and share independent unsanctioned news. We don't yet have a tool for that, so we're working hard on it.

I suspect Hamas aren't stupid and probably used old fashioned methods of getting plans around for this like messengers and paper and pencil. Gaza is a pretty small place and easy to slip into the crowd.

As long as we are guessing: how many Israeli and USA 3 letter agents are deep undercover in Hamas?

I suspect they allowed it to happen to justify genociding all of them or something of the sort. There's no way they can be that incompetent. I refuse to believe it. They spy on everyone, crack every computer, infiltrate and compromise every organization, plant assets everywhere, we non-government people are forced to live in constant paranoia because of these assholes. And they get surprised by a bunch of terrorists? Might as well just close down those useless agencies, they're good for nothing, total waste of money. We're living in this cyberpunk hellscape because of them and it's all for nothing.

Even master of carpentry cut himself from time to time. Fails happen, Yom Kippur 50 years ago was a shock as well. It does not seem likely that this was intentional failure because there are many independent people with integrity even in a hierarchical government structure. What seems more likely is that somebody high enough fucked up and did not sound alarm loud enough. Some Israeli state representatives already admitted guilt.

I think you're partially right that policies of the right-wing governments in Israel (apartheid, normalizing relations with Arab countries while ignoring Palestinians) likely helped the Palestinian crazies grow and thus in effect those people in power are partially responsible for this attack on Israel people, whether they realize it or not. I'm not condoning the attack in any way. But responsibility for the atrocities can be shared between actors on many sides.

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