alt Hacker NewsHow much of that is true, and how much of that is to cover and protect the actual humans on the ground feeding most of the intelligence?
I doubt they'd let their secret leak so soon into the conflict if it was even half as useful as the articles I read claim. Now on the other hand, if I wanted the Iranian counterintelligence to waste time investigating and even taking the cameras offline ...
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49421 • yesterday at 9:08 PM
Probably all of it: Cameras are hacked, they got the real info from a human and they want them to be shut down now.
Remember that you can burn human intelligence but you can also burn technical capacity. Israel has shown itself willing to burn technical capacities to strike (see also: the pager attacks).
I would also submit that forcing Iranian traffic engineers to investigate their camera system is probably not a very high priority at Mossad. What is much more valuable is forcing other countries to change over their traffic control system to a new vendor that has been compromised by the Israelis. That is exactly how they achieved the pager compromise that they did— they fomented a crisis which forced adversaries to change their networks to a network that the Israelis controlled. This is more effective if it is not a bluff.
Finally, the intelligence that they describe is most easily explained by the capability that they burned. You cannot have a human intelligence source sit on a street corner like that 24 hours a day in a country like Iran without someone asking questions. You absolutely need someone sitting on that corner 24 hours a day in order to get the kinds of intelligence that they got. You simply cannot collect that with a human source. On the contrary, it is quite easy to imagine how that intelligence could be gathered given only a traffic camera.