Hamas Got Around Israel's Surveillance Prowess by Going Dark

Hamas got around Israel’s surveillance, because Israeli government led by Bibi got complacent and was busy doing geopolitics and selling surveillance tech to various regimes to spy on opposition and journalist.

Now there will be information leaking that it’s Iran and Russia helped, and new type of warfare, new tech, etc, which is true. But this is basically them saying “it’s not we who missed it, it’s that the enemy became more advanced” to deflect blame externally. When you rely on a breach sensor from a border fence, a camera feed and a remote machine gun, if it gets broken you need to repair it right way, and deploy a team immediately. DevOps reacts faster to a server outage than IDF reacted to a breach of security. IDF probably thought that if anything serious breqed in Gaza, Shabak would know. And Shabak probably thought, that in worst case scenario, they had sensors and remote machine gun at the border. This reasoning might upset many Israeli, but it’s a case of complacency and the political elite loosing perspective of what is important.

This is what frustrates me so much about the deepening surveillance state: it just doesn’t work the way that its architects believe it will.

It makes sense that a high-tech barrier is relatively sparsely manned on a given day if the idea is to automate as much of the defense apparatus as possible. And it would be doubly embarrassing if the reports that Israel was warned of a potential attack were true.

Most takes on this matter have little appreciation for the underlying complexity.

The border fence was a $1 billion capital investment with sensors, automated machine guns, cameras, etc. that allowed the military to reduce the manpower needed to patrol the border. This is a good thing - patrol duty is mind-numbingly boring work that hurts morale, and there are always associated risks of getting hit by a sniper.

There are reports that Israel was warned. Sure - a handful of signals in an ocean of noise. Finding those signals (and wrangling apart conflicting signals) is why intelligence is necessarily an imprecise art and not a science, and why no defensive posture relies solely on intelligence.

Much ado has been made about judicial reform infighting weakening the Israeli security establishment, but all the public reporting points to issues with reservist volunteers, who are not essential for peacetime operations.

The far more banal explanation is that there was no dead-man's-switch monitoring on the border fence. The New York Times reported rumors that the attack started by Hamas knocking out the cell towers that were used by the remote sensors on the border fence to send monitoring data back to operators. Losing connectivity to so many parts of the fence at once should have immediately triggered high-severity alarms. It sounds like that didn't happen.

Why didn't that happen? Maybe a gross oversight on the part of the architects and contractors of the border fence. Maybe that alarm had fired once-too-many times in the past as a flaky-false-positive and it was disconnected instead of fixed. Maybe the dead-man's-switch component itself was broken somehow. Maybe someone took something offline for maintenance at what turned out to be the worst possible time, and alternative mechanisms (i.e. manned patrols) were not deployed during the maintenance, or maybe it simply didn't get turned back on, and nobody noticed because it's functionality is not used by operators on a day-to-day basis.

When so many people die, everyone wants to look for a scapegoat. But perhaps we should just, I dunno, build better systems instead?

> grew too confident, in part because its technological sophistication lulled it into a false sense of security

Yeah, constant monitoring of plain communications of plain civilians do just that - detect gov-himself-induced unhappines and nothing of importance...

In the meantime EU tries to implement spy-tek on all civilians. Which just got even less sensible...

But what actually Hamas wanted to achieve ? Got media attention ?? What for ?? Or someone wanted to use stupid low level Hamas, dead now, soldiers into pushing Israel (and US) into accepting imperial territory gain ?

This is really not a good article, and probably not likely to lead to a good discussion, due to the lack of hard information. It's all just speculation by supposedly well connected people on how they might have done it. I don't think it's likely we can have a productive discussion until some more hard information comes out on exactly what happened regarding counter-surveillance tactics actually used. It's just gonna be more speculation and partisan bickering. Hence, I flagged it, and I suggest others do so as well.

Axios says that "judicial overhaul" and the resulting turmoil helped weaken Israel's military.

Axios reports

https://www.axios.com/2023/10/07/hamas-attack-invasion-israe...

The big picture:

The attack comes amid a deep political crisis in Israel over the Netanyahu government's judicial overhaul, which has weakened the country's military, economy and society.

Links to:

https://www.axios.com/2023/07/24/israel-judicial-overhaul-re...

Why it matters:

The plan, which will weaken the Supreme Court and other democratic institutions, has faced opposition from some of Israel's closest allies, including the Biden administration, and it has already destabilized the country's economy and military.

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Of course, "helps" is a weasel word, but it must be a contributing factor.

Turmoil never helps.

Yes, similar to how they caught them by surprise in the first place. Not buying most of it.