The devil is in the details - doubly so for terrorists

 

Most of us know the idiom "The devil is in the details".  Hezbollah terrorists now know it as a pretty accurate assessment of why so many of them are dying.  The Financial Times reports:

The war in Syria ... created a fountain of data, much of it publicly available for Israel’s spies — and their algorithms — to digest. Obituaries, in the form of the “Martyr Posters” regularly used by Hizbollah, were one of them, peppered with little nuggets of information, including which town the fighter was from, where he was killed, and his circle of friends posting the news on social media. Funerals were even more revealing, sometimes drawing senior leaders out of the shadows, even if briefly.

A former high-ranking Lebanese politician in Beirut said the penetration of Hizbollah by Israeli or US intelligence was “the price of their support for Assad”.

“They had to reveal themselves in Syria,” he said, where the secretive group suddenly had to stay in touch and share information with the notoriously corrupt Syrian intelligence service, or with Russian intelligence services, who were regularly monitored by the Americans.

“They went from being highly disciplined and purists to someone who [when defending Assad] let in a lot more people than they should have,” said Yezid​​​​ Sayigh, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center. “The complacency and arrogance was accompanied by a shift in its membership — they started to become flabby.”

. . .

Israel’s broadened focus on Hizbollah in the region was accompanied by a growing, and eventually insurmountable technical advantage — spy satellites, sophisticated drones and cyber-hacking capabilities that turn mobile phones into listening devices.

It collects so much data that it has a dedicated group, Unit 9900, which writes algorithms that sift through terabytes of visual images to find the slightest changes, hoping to identify an improvised explosive device by a roadside, a vent over a tunnel or the sudden addition of a concrete reinforcement, hinting at a bunker.

Once a Hizbollah operative is identified, his daily patterns of movements are fed into a vast database of information, siphoned off from devices that could include his wife’s cell phone, his smart car’s odometer, or his location. These can be identified from sources as disparate as a drone flying overhead, from a hacked CCTV camera feed that he happens to pass by and even from his voice captured on the microphone of a modern TV’s remote control, according to several Israeli officials.

Any break from that routine becomes an alert for an intelligence officer to sift through, a technique that allowed Israel to identify the mid-level commanders of the anti-tank squads of two or three fighters that have harassed IDF troops from across the border. At one point, Israel monitored the schedules of individual commanders to see if they had suddenly been recalled in anticipation of an attack, one of the officials said.

But each one of these processes required time and patience to develop. Over years, Israeli intelligence was able to populate such a vast target bank that in the first three days of its air campaign, its warplanes tried to take out at least 3,000 suspected Hizbollah targets, according to the IDF’s public statements.

There's more at the link.

That's a pretty impressive effort by Israel (made easier, of course, by modern computer power and the very low cost of data storage, allowing it to keep track of so many minutiae at once).  However, it's also a salutary reminder to all of us to be careful about our own privacy.  We complain about credit monitoring companies and others who keep track of every penny we spend, and where we spend it, and on what - but it's precisely that level of intrusive monitoring, across every aspect of society, that allowed Israel to attack Hezbollah so effectively.

That level of monitoring will do the same to all of us should an autocratic, controlling government want to force its citizens to behave in a certain way, and punish them if they don't obey.

That's a scary thought . . . but it's the reality in which we live right now.  It's why I, and many who feel as I do, prefer to pay cash for most of my purchases, and leave my cellphone at home on random, unpredictable occasions, and purchase privately rather than through big corporate vendors whenever possible.  It may not help much, but any sand I can throw in the gears of Big Brother is a worthwhile effort, IMHO.  I wish everyone would do the same.

Peter