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Comment by petertodd | Hacker News Reader

> Taking Gaza completely off the grid while launching an unprecedented bombardment campaign only means something atrocious is about to happen.

A war is happening of course. Communications are critical to military operations, and Hamas has been happy to use civilian infrastructure for military purposes. Of course Israel is going to destroy it all.

Sure, Hamas can still use older tech like radios. But that's a huge win for Israel's signal intelligence units: radios are much easier to intercept than internet connections, especially fiber.

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If Hamas really relied on internet then they wouldn't have succeeded in the first place.

What this will achieve:

- information supremacy re. what goes out of Gaza

- makes it harder for reporters to do their job

- makes it impossible for the people who happen to live there to stay in touch with the rest of the world

If Hamas is getting info from Iran, it's possible there's a benefit here.

That's true, it may stop arms or targeting information from coming into Gaza.

Targetting info for their unguided rockets?

FYI: Unguided rockets still need to be targeted, you do this by aiming them and adjusting your aim after you make a shot can be done more reliably if you know where your rocket landed. That still requires your rockets to be of reasonably consistent build quality (which I have no data on) but it's been the same ever since artillery was first invented.

They just don't need Iran's intelligence to tell them where the existing targets are (that you can see announced on social media from time to time, eg. "we targeted Tel-Aviv as reprisal for killing civilians") and landing sites are also quite often reported all over TV and social media.

I've seen some speculation about the intelligence failure in not predicting the attack being related to Hamas avoiding the Internet for planning, and even deliberately sending false info on channels they knew were compromised.

...or Hamas just used modern encryption, which does work when implemented and used correctly. Merely using Signal consistently and correctly could very well be enough. There isn't an unlimited supply of over-the-air zero-day exploits.

That would still give a lot of meta data to analyze.

Signal’s devs recommend that it be installed from the Play Store, and that is what the vast majority of people do. There has been heavy speculation that certain state actors are able to push a compromised Play Store update to users of interest. Moreover, the Signal board has been overhauled recently, Moxie left, and at least one new member has a US government background. It’s possible that the organization itself has been somehow compromised.

(While Signal still offers an .apk for download from its website, the organization does not recommend it. Moreover, that APK comes with its own update functionality where the same risks may exist as with the Play Store.)

Tucker Carlson claims he was contacted by US intelligence asking him to call off a planned interview with Putin that he had only discussed over Signal, although that could presumably have been achieved by a keylogger or spyware without compromising Signal itself.

It's far more likely the US government has spies inside Carlson's production looking over his shoulder while doing his makeup.

Spies, or even just sources, in the Russian government are probably somewhat more likely.

> There has been heavy speculation that certain state actors are able to push a compromised Play Store update to users of interest.

I'm sure Hamas could figure out how to install Signal from clean APKs, or use something else entirely. They may be barbarians. But they're not stupid.

People forget that Gaza isn't a particularly poor country. It's GDP per capita is on par with neighboring Egypt, and only a little less than Ukraine. The supermajority of Gazan's have internet access too.

> I'm sure Hamas could figure out how to install Signal from clean APKs

I think you are overestimating how technically savvy guerrilla fighters – or armies in general – typically are. Even if a handful of elites were savvy, the vast majority are going to have less knowledge and show terrible opsec. And considering that even many security researchers complain how difficult it is to ensure a secure setup for Signal or any other smartphone-based system, I wouldn’t expect Hamas to be any better.

Of course Gaza wasn’t a particularly poor country. It even has its own dev community attracting outsourcing work. But that doesn’t make opsec in this area any easier or them any more qualified than the average.

"When implemented and used correctly" is key though. The thing with these things is that all it takes is one short lapse and you can be 100% compromised (not just that one message). People get sleepy, are in a hurry, misunderstand something, can be fooled, or are just plain idiots. And you're never quite sure what the capabilities of your enemy are.

Person-to-person on the other hand is simple, easy to understand, and while not entirely foolproof (or idiot-proof), it's a lot harder to screw up and when you do, the damage capabilities are more likely to be more limited. I'm also going to guess that Israel has a rather hard time recruiting supergrasses among Hamas/Gaza population after the last 15 years (which is different from the IRA, which was thoroughly infiltrated).

When we're talking about a state-level actor (and one supposed to be quite good at this), I think you'd have to to worry about more than that. 0-days in the operating system, supply chain attacks, and even one party in the conversation being compromised.

I read they had a wire network of telephones in the tunnels under Gaza.

Israel has the cell phones complete penetrated by their intelligence. Hamas wasn't using that technology. This is why Israel missed the warning signs of the October 7th attack. This unfortunately is mostly to keep the media from covering what is going down.

There is no war going on. Wars happen between nations and between armies.

Whatever this is it is not a war.

Here’s an historical corollary:

“ The ethnic cleansing of Zamojszczyzna by Nazi Germany (German: Aktion Zamosc,[4] also: Operation Himmlerstadt)[5] during World War II was carried out as part of a greater plan of forcible removal of the entire Polish populations from targeted regions of occupied Poland in preparation for the state-sponsored settlement of the ethnic German Volksdeutsche.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing_of_Zamojszc...

Right, so Germany declared war on Poland, and during their occupation of Poland during that war, they conducted genocidal activities.

I don't see how your comment refutes anything.

Genocidal activities with the goal of removing the ethnic people entirely from a region. I didn’t wish to “refute anything”, not sure what you are commenting on.

You are not wrong but the point I was making was that framing this as a war is incorrect.

Wars have armies on both sides.

Wars aren’t fought between an army and a bunch of trapped civilians who can’t escape between people with the latest high tech military equipment and another group who have some small arms, ancient equipment and rocks.

What you're referring to is called "Collective Punishment" and it's a literal war crime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_punishment

The Hamas tunnels have landlines.

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