If Your Adversary Is the Mossad (2014) [pdf]

You did not write what you actually disagree with....

Mine as well.

I have a fond memory of being at a party where someone had the idea to do dramatic readings of various Mickens Usenix papers. Even just doing partial readings, it was slow going, lots of pauses to recover from overwhelming laughter. When the reading of The Slow Winter got to "THE MAGMA PEOPLE ARE WAITING FOR OUR MISTAKES", we had to stop because someone had laughed so hard they threw up. Not in an awful way, but enough to give us a pause in the action, and to decide we couldn't go on.

Good times.

> Lots of semi-technical people who had never run any large system constantly attacking every plausible design of implementable complexity because it wasn't decentralized enough for their tastes, sometimes not even proposing anything better.

And for added fun, that same radical decentralization crowd, finally settling on the extremely centralized Lightning crutch, which is not only centralized but also computationally over complicated and buggy.

The same way the US didn't know about 9/11. Intelligence failures.

(Portions of the US intelligence apparatus knew, but that knowledge didn't transition into action)

This is exactly the type of comment that will get you mossad'd.

Domestic intel = Shin Bet, not Mossad

The 4096 bits just stops it being so easy to surveil you that it is hyper-automated. So there is some use. The $5 wrench needs a million dollar operation to get that guy to your house.

That's right, just keep your head down, smile and nod, do your job and nothing will ever go wrong. /s

The article actually addresses this -- that all these extra issues are not manageable for mere mortals anyway and/or perfectly spherical cows are involved.

I don't know, driving a big truck into AWS' us-east-1 power supply section sounds more than enough to take down internet for a while.

Just because you don't like the reputation that the Mossad has both gotten and created for itself, doesn't mean that playing on that reputation is in any way antisemitic. It's fair perhaps to consider it anti-Israel, given that the Mossad is am agency of the state.

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.

> assassinates via uranium phones and then gloats at press conferences with "IT WAS DEFINITELY US" t-shirts?

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)

I don't see antisemitic here, the implication is that Mossad is highly competent at hacking compared to NSA / GRU. And this was 2014, back before antisemitism became rather fashionable among people who should know better.

Uranium phones no. Pager bombs sure. If you dont want to be labeled as cartoonishly evil then stop doing cartoonishly evil things.

Look at the Pegasus spyware. Shit was sold by Israel to the Saudi's so they could track a journalist and chop him up.

> Portraying Israeli intelligence as this omnipotent, cartoonishly evil entity that assassinates via uranium phones

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.

Bought a pager recently?

While not the uranium phones and tee shirts, in the real world just last year we got Operation Grim Beeper, where Mossad remotely detonated thousands of custom made pagers with a few grams of plastic explosive, followed by two way radios the next day. AFAIK they didn’t make tee shirts but they did go on 60 minutes, in disguise, to brag about the operation. Just saying, it seems pretty on brand.

Nice ChatGPT bait, Mossad agent.