How Hamas duped Israel

wing2000 said:

It seems Israel stopped listening:

Their judgment that night might have been different had they been listening to traffic on the hand-held radios of Hamas militants. But Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, had stopped eavesdropping on those networks a year earlier because they saw it as a waste of effort.

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Top Israeli spy chief exposes his true identity in online security lapse​

Exclusive: Yossi Sariel unmasked as head of Unit 8200 and architect of AI strategy after book written under pen name reveals his Google account

The embarrassing security lapse is linked to a book he published on Amazon, which left a digital trail to a private Google account created in his name, along with his unique ID and links to the account’s maps and calendar profiles.

Later on Friday, in a statement to the Israeli media, the IDF described the book’s exposure of Sariel’s personal details as “a mistake”, adding: “The issue will be examined to prevent the recurrence of similar cases in the future.”

The security blunder is likely to place further pressure on Sariel, who is said to “live and breathe” intelligence but whose tenure running the IDF’s elite cyber intelligence division has become mired in controversy.

Since the Hamas-led attacks, there have been accusations that Unit 8200’s “technological hubris” came at the expense of more conventional intelligence-gathering techniques.

RDKirk said:

When you fail to discover something that you had clear capability to discover, that is a bona fide intelligence failure.

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Israeli military intelligence head resigns over Oct. 7 Hamas attack​

Israel’s top military intelligence chief said Monday he would step down and retire because of his department’s failure to anticipate Hamas’s Oct. 7 surprise attack on Israeli towns along the Gaza border.

Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva is the highest ranking leader to resign over the assault, the deadliest one-day attack in Israel’s history.

Hamas planned for the highly coordinated assault for more than a year, building its battle plans from open source materials and repeatedly drilling its troops, Israeli investigators said in November. Israeli intelligence failed to detect those preparations and didn’t heed warning signs that emerged in the hours before the attack, early reviews found.

essentialsaltes said:

Hamas planned for the highly coordinated assault for more than a year, building its battle plans from open source materials and repeatedly drilling its troops, Israeli investigators said in November. Israeli intelligence failed to detect those preparations and didn’t heed warning signs that emerged in the hours before the attack, early reviews found.

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My sources show that a Hamas person during a Russian newscast boasted how Hamas had softened Israeli suspicion by acting more civil in negotiations, for a while before the attack, so Israel would be less suspicious; plus they did a lot of fake mobilizations so Israeli intel would become fatigued with all the false alarms.

Also, I think of this > they might have done fake preparations without showing drone and hanglider activity so intel would be lulled into assuming any real attack would be only with foot soldiers and ground vehicles. May be they did not show any bulldozers, too, until they actually used at least one to break the fence barrier.

And, on TV, one woman was presented as being a soldier who did see indication of the coming attack. She is claimed to have notified higher people, but they did not take her seriously because she was so low in rank . . . according to the translation on TV. But I have not, since that one report, been told any more on that.

But it matches with how humans can do things.

Another item is what Condoleeza Rice testified during the televised 9/11 hearing. She testified that Al Qaeda was on U.S. soil for ten years preparing for the 9/11 attack. And American intel had enough info to stop the attack, but their infighting between agencies kept them from sharing pieces of the puzzle so they could have gotten the picture of what was going on.

So, in case that is correct, it matches with how human nature can have us doing things.

People of the world have the ability to be fooled, and to fool their own selves.

Why didn't the media spotlight how intel had become a dysfunctional family? Good investigative reporting could have exposed that in time for intel to get it together and stop Al Qaeda. But where was attention and time and resources going, not long before 9/11? Wasn't then when there was the Bill Clinton thing? Republicans and Democrats and the media were so busy with that. They were not dealing with how intel had become a national security threat, even though I would think both Republicans and Democrats would have been in any committee responsible for knowing what was going on in intel.

Both parties, then, possibly were partying their attention elsewhere!!

And why did the media not investigate all that and keep attention on it?

May be advertisers were not interested in news going on and on about intel soap. The general public might not want to watch all that; and so human nature of the general public could have indirectly helped to keep attention away from national security, since they'd rather keep an eye on Bill's stuff.

Which soap would you watch?

So, my point is humans do even arrange ways to help evil people to hurt them. Individuals do this; plus even whole countries can put their heads in the sand. So, it can be there is no need for a conspiracy, except to keep our attention away from where our attention belongs.

com7fy8 said:

Another item is what Condoleeza Rice testified during the televised 9/11 hearing. She testified that Al Qaeda was on U.S. soil for ten years preparing for the 9/11 attack. And American intel had enough info to stop the attack, but their infighting between agencies kept them from sharing pieces of the puzzle so they could have gotten the picture of what was going on.

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That wasn't infighting, that was public law passed by Congress. Congress erected what we call "The Wall" between the foreign and domestic intelligence agencies in the US, and that wall still exists.

Let's say an FBI intelligence analyst is tracking the background of a suspicious person, Mohammed Atef, and the info trail backward stops at the point he entered the country. That FBI analyst can't simply ring up a contact in the CIA or DIA to get further background information on Atef.

He has to draw up a formal requisition for cross-agency information.--something like a search warrant--and send it up the entire FBI chain of command, which will evaluate it for pertinence and relevancy with whatever else they're doing. It can't just be a hunch, it's got to have enough evidence to convince his own higher-ups that he's actually on to something significant. It's got to be a whole hypothesis with supporting background information. If so, it will be passed at a commensurably high level across to the top of the CIA chain of command, and they're going to repeat that vetting process down their chain. Everyone is trying to adhere to the law...nobody in the chain wants to be the one hauled in to testify before Congress. Eventually it may reach the right analyst who had been following Atef across the Middle East, or who may be able to trace him.

Presuming the CIA analyst has information, that's got to go back up his chain of command, then back across to the FBI senior levels, then back down the chain of command to the original FBI analyst.

It's not an easy process; Congress did not intend for it to be an easy process.

I had a boss back when I was at Pearl Harbor, Navy admiral Lowell Jacoby, a brilliant man who taught me much, who later became Director of the DIA. Since the early 90s, he'd had a vision of a secure, self-contained intelligence network like the Internet that would have newsgroups and chat rooms where desk analysts could discuss theories and share information. Alas, it could never be. That network is in place...but so, still, is The Wall.