Posted by xeonmc 2 days ago
Actual security is possible even against the most powerful and determined adversaries, and it's possible even for you.
There's so many cock-ups etc. that you can read about Wikipedia that I don't understand why people hold these people highly and imagine them to be so able. They simply aren't.
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.
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.
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
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.
We are not as divided as Italy, as Spain has powerhouses in the South as Airbus and the like, but, yes, there's a 'climatological gap' between the different 'Spains' across the mountains.
Not Ethnics, but kinda like what would happen in Italy if the North wasn't as developed (the North of Spain isn't bad but you can't compare it against the Franco-German-Austrian-Italian industrial hub) and the South had their Mafias shut down in the 19th century and if they were more developed than they are compared to the Southern Spain.
The South here isn't a shithole as Napoli and the like but some Andalusian coastal places can be far more dangerous than the Basque Country/Navarre in the 80's (terror attacks) for a policeman.
OTOH, Belgium it's far closer to be a Narcostate than some microrregions in Spain such as Algeciras in Cádiz (Andalusia) were you can read about the Militarized Police fighting drug boats almost as a daily chore.
On Argentina, except for a die hard Ghetto like the '3000 viviendas' and Cañada Real, every Argentinian would love to stay in Spain even at the worst neighbourhood at their town. Iberia it's far more secure than Latin America by a huge margin. The most dangerous issue on any bad town would be either a pickpocket/non-violent rob of watching some low tier drug dealers doing their stuff and maybe some very late night rape issue over months if not years. Far less than anything you would get in Buenos Aires.
Unless, as I said, you really want to mess up your like with some sketchy people, the ones you would spot from meters away, especially in remote/nearly hidden taverns/pubs where drug dealing it's widely known. For example, if some pub it's accesed by walking down some stairs into a basement, (where you can't see anything from the outside without going down); even if it looks good, clean, modern, maintained... run away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... lists Argentina at 4.31 murders per 100k population per year, a bit lower than the US's 5.76, while Spain is way down at 0.69, so I think that's sort of true. 6× is sort of "a huge margin". I'm pretty sure there are neighborhoods in Argentina that are lower than 0.69, though, and neighborhoods in Spain that are over 4.31.
On the other hand, 4.31 is already low enough that I don't know anybody who's gotten murdered, although when I volunteered in the die-hard ghettos I met people whose children had been murdered before I met them. In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_mortality... we can see that Argentina's crude death rate is 728 deaths per 100k population per year, so 99.4% of deaths are from non-murder causes. If you somehow acquired immunity to all causes of deaths other than murder, and you lived in 02025 Argentina until someone murdered you (through some kind of time-travel Groundhog Day thing, I guess) your life expectancy would be 23000 years. Real-life people who get heart disease and cancer don't really need to worry about getting murdered in Argentina unless they start dating a machista.
Consequently, murder is not a major reason that people leave Argentina. (Contrast Honduras at 31.4 murders; Belize with 27.8; South Africa with 45.5; Memphis, Tennessee, with 48.0; or St. Louis, Missouri, with 87.8.)
No, the reason every Argentinian would love to stay in Spain is that Spain has an economy.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Look at the Pegasus spyware. Shit was sold by Israel to the Saudi's so they could track a journalist and chop him up.
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.
The amount of examples we've seen of this is staggering.
The real ROI is to land a Jonathan Pollard. Not even a million Hegseths can leak enough info to collect into one Pollard.
(Portions of the US intelligence apparatus knew, but that knowledge didn't transition into action)
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
Interesting number you suggested. That's a pretty normal success rate for a carnivore attacking prey.
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 hegemon in the late 20th century that had security control over West Asia, which is a necessary and sufficient condition for resolving the security dilemma.
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.
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?
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!