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Hezbollah Hacked Israeli Military Radio
florescent_beige writes, "Newsday is reporting that Hezbollah was able to monitor secure Israeli military communications, perhaps using technology supplied by Iran, during the recent Lebanon war. A former Israeli general, speaking anonymously, called the results 'disastrous' for Israel. The story reports that an anonymous Lebanese source said that Hezbollah might have taken advantage of Israeli soldiers' mistakes in following secure radio procedures. The radio gear uses frequency hopping and encryption." The article identifies the Israeli communications equipment as the US-designed Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System.
The real news is that this made it into the news. Not because it isn't news worthy but because it only makes sense to maintain a shroud of ignorance once you have actually cracked a channel of communication thus instilling your enemies with a false sense of security.
For instance during World War II, even after the allies had broken a German code or devised a method to figure out that day's cipher string, they would still go about their routine of acting like they didn't know what the Germans were going to do. Meaning that if a cargo ship was headed towards a line of submarines, they might find it best to sacrifice that cargo ship at the possibility of saving a warship later in the day. If they responded directly to communications, the Germans would continue to change the code or investigate ways to improve their encryption methods and upgrade Enigma. Necessity breeds innovation and you don't want your enemies feeling a strong necessity for better encryption. I'd like to cite my source but I don't believe Simon Singh's The Code Book is available online and that's where I read this.
How interesting that Hezbollah would have the shortsightedness to let this crucial knowledge publicly available. However, this can be expected when the primary morale boosting for troops and citizens is bragging about your capabilities. I highly doubt they consider the conflict over and suspect that Isreal will now heavily ramp up its encryption & security to the highest standards since I believe that's one of the few things the United States will not export to them (see Phil Zimmerman's FBI case file on exporting encryption programs to foreign soil).
As the department this summary is coming from reveals, guerilla warfare depends heavily on information like this. I'm surprised it's gone public that they had access to it.
My work here is dung.
Is there any reason to consider frequency hopping secure, or is that simply adding "security through difficulty"? I understand it has certain resistance to jamming, but couldn't a sophisticated outsider simply have a large set of receivers to monitor all possible hops?
John
Of course they'll say that they h4xx0r3d the Israeli radio. It's called PROPAGANDA. Unless confirmed, I'd call this FUD.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Maybe they haven't really cracked the code, they're just putting out false information to try to get the Israelis to switch to a different code. This would cause some confusion, thereby giving Hezbollah an edge.
If this is true then the US military is going to be throwing away a lot of expensive radio equipment over the next couple of months.
Probably a bad css upgrade I imagine. A bunch of the ads are sized/placed wrong as well.
perhaps using technology supplied by Iran
Ok, all together now: DUUUUUUUUUHHH!
That whole scuffle was Israel versus Iran-By-Proxy.
Personally, I love how the arabs can stand on the pile of rubble that used to be their infrastructure and shout "we won!"
Dumbest. Culture. Ever. And that's saying something on this silly planet.
And all the text shrunk! CTRL "+"!
They should have used the New Testament Bible Code, not the Old Testament Bible Code.
One is that you have to remember that though somewhat unified, groups like Hezbollah are not military and are essentially made up of a bunch of thugs. They don't have the kind of strict discipline that one might associate with a normal military. There can be factions that don't agree with the leadership and so on. For that matter there may be groups that call themselves Hezbollah that the actual Hezbollah doesn't think is affiliated with them.
The other thing you have to remember is that terrorist type groups have decided to play a PR war. Makes sense since they have no chance militarily. I mean Hezbollah could take every fighter they have, the best arms they have, and launch an assault on Israel. The net result would be no more Hezbollah. So they play a PR war game, which means trying to make your enemies look weak and stupid. Well this kind of thing would play in to that, they just perhaps didn't think of the implications.
Or maybe they knew that Israel knew that their communications had been compromised, so decided that they'd use it for propaganda value since the cat was already out of the bag.
Either way you can't apply more classical military logic to the situation because it's not two militaries facing off.
There is a cease fire currently. The conflict is effectively over. Therefore, Hizbula is trying to get extra mileage by revealing this. It is probably not the most wise move since they might end up fighting Israel again in the future, so maybe keeping it quiet would have been of benefit. But there is a certain logic to revealing this. Basically they are saying "see we are not as primitive as you think and Israel is not as advanced as some people (especially in the muslim world) think - therefore defeating Israel might be possible". That's what they are trying to get out of it.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
the site hurts my eyes with the electric blue links and fux0red ads!
Well with 6 billion dollars in U.S. aid per year, I think Israel can afford new radios.
Been going on for some time now. I have a friend at GD working on the encryption end of it. Of course he can't give any technical details but basically has said that they are doing a totally new communication system where everything, from the individual soldier on up, is linked and shares all information. It's an almost videogame level of information availability.
This will, perhaps, accelerate the push for that, but it's already been in the works for a long time.
Also nothing's saying that the US still uses the same system, or that they don't have additional scrambling on top of it.
For those interested, here is the original article. Compare for yourself the various comments.
Still a good reading and it explains why Hezbollah could say they had killed X number of troops or destroyed Y tanks before the Israeli military admitted to the losses. They were listening to the Israeli transmissions from the battlefield!
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
If Hezbollah actually had cracked Israeli radio codes why would they admit it? Isn't that just giving information to the other side?
The only purpose in saying this is to boost morale and cause doubt for the opposition. Neither of those requires actually breaking a code and Hezbollah is known for making boasts without anything to back it up.
Until their is actual evidence, or at least a quote from a non-anonymous Israeli military official, I don't see why I should believe this.
Just because it's on the internet, doesn't make it true.
Were they able to crack the Israeli's mini-bar?
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
eldavojohn
Prior to the US IRAQ invasion there were weekly stories focusing around how evil Iraq is... Iraq "might" be responsible for this, Iraq "might" have helped with that... The sort of "Iraq hurts kittens and little children for fun" but more subtle kind of stuff...
Now we have weekly Iran stories... There is no real evidence ever... For example there was this wonderful "Iran plans on executing girl for defending herself from rape" story... Completely fake, no known source, but yet got the internet all up in arms..
I feel this is yet another one of these stories... No proof... Can't be proven either way, perfect propaganda.
I agree with everything you said, although I doubt that the U.S. really has many export restrictions on encryption gear to Israel, except insofar as they're worried that the gear could end up in somebody else's hands besides Israel and compromise the U.S.'s own capabilities.
This is because it's not like Israel is that far behind the U.S. in terms of mathematics, computers, or encryption, so not exporting to them wouldn't change their strategic posture much at all, and would just deny business to a U.S. corporation in favor of a homegrown one (e.g. IMI).
If there are concerns about exporting to Israel, it's probably more because folks here are afraid that the stuff will be resold and eventually make it to countries that are hostile to the U.S., not really because anyone fears Israel directly. After all, although it's never been publicly admitted, I think there's a very good chance that the U.S. has given Israel nuclear weapons -- I doubt we'd bicker about a few lines of encryption code (that they could probably replicate domestically) if they wanted to buy it.
As to the idiocy of giving away your capabilities if you've successfully broken your enemy's communication system, you're totally right (and yes, it is Singh that goes into much detail about this in his book). However, it may be that Hezbollah either doesn't have the internal safeguards to prevent this type of leak, or is more interested in the public opinion to be gained through bragging than in actual operational superiority. (Or, is so convinced of their own superiority that they don't care, i.e. they've fallen victim to their own rhetoric; this doesn't seem implausible.)
Based on the past few conflicts and the reading I've done about them, the Israelis strike me as being pretty good at doing tough self-assessments and changing the way they fight in order to avoid repeating mistakes. If there is another Israeli/Hezbollah conflict (and I have no reason to believe that there won't be), I would look for some very different tactics on the part of Israel. This is the way war works: you see the greatest changes to tactics and strategy as a result of defeat or near-defeat than you do from victory.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Having used SINCGARS before (and for few years) they change frequency every few seconds. Add encryption to it and it would be nearly impossible to breach.
When I was in the military our base frequency changed everyday and our ciphers changed on a regular basis weekly and sometimes daily.
If they were exercising proper procedures the only way I think it could have happened is if they stole an ANPASS(If I remember the name correctly). It includes all the frequencies and ciphers that you would need. Three wrong passwords and it turned into a big paperweight. If that was stolen then they were not keeping track of sensitive items well enough.
Half of writing history is hiding the truth.
Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System
If that isn't nicknamed Cigars already, it should be!
[UID-HeinzIntel]
SINCGARS is about as secure as you can get. If the Hezbollah bomb boys managed to get into the system it's only because some Israeli recruit didn't follow procedure. Also, there were a lot of units from the IDF involved - how widespread is this?
...the IDF has been deploying SINCGARS clones using technologies and software from Redmond...
lawlz
More amazing it took so long to hit this site. This was reported by Haaretz as early as 31st August http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/750483.html, and it reported more extensively on how Hezbollah compromised IDF communications since then. /. seems to hate people trying to register new accounts. Hence, I am an anonymous coward.
They have computers now? That means its just a matter of time before they download all our secerets!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
If you know your enemy is eavesdropping on a method of communication, the prudent course is not to tell the world about it, it is to use that knowledge to send him *false* information, while continuing your real communication through some other (new) secure channel they hopefully do not know about.
One thing you can count on. They, or Iran, won't be able to do it the same way the next time around.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I think you hit it right on the head when you said "If they were exercising proper procedures," because that's a mighty big if.
I don't think it's hard to imagine that at least at the outset of the conflict, the Israeli soldiers might have gone into the conflict with a very distorted idea of the enemy; one that was incapable of doing anything more than listening to the latest propaganda on a 20-year-old shortwave set and cleaning their AK-47.
Thus, like the Germans with their Enigma, they got lax on the procedures, and were compromised as a result.
However, unlike the Germans, I suspect that the Israelis will get another shot, and will probably not be so cavalier next time.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Read the article very, very carefully, bearing in mind that since it's written by a journalist it might as well have been written by the Hezbollah PR 'n' Propaganda team.
What the article actually says about 'hacking' Israeli military radio communications is merely this:
Using technology most likely supplied by Iran, special Hezbollah teams monitored the constantly changing radio frequencies of Israeli troops on the ground. That gave guerrillas a picture of Israeli movements, casualty reports and supply routes.
So what precisely did Hezbollah do? Sounds like they merely verified that there was radio traffic on certain frequencies, and that it came from Israeli units, and then they were able to do a little direction-finding on it to verify where it came from. Look, imam! Funky radio traffic in the Bekaa valley that sounds like the usual gibberish exchanged between Israeli armor and base -- I'll bet there are Israeli tanks on Route such-and-such!
Well, gosh, big deal. Any amateur could do as much as easily. It's not right brilliantly clever to deduce when you get a lot of chatter on military frequencies in a certain neighborhood that there are military operations afoot in it. I mean, Hezbollah probably got as good or better "intelligence" about Israeli movements just by taking reports of survivors who counted the number of tanks that rolled over them.
Did Hezbollah actually decrypt communications, which would be an intelligence coup? Your logic argues pretty persuasively that they did not, because if they had they would have kept it a deep dark secret. In fact, they would have done their best to avoid drawing attention to their radio-interception program, lest it start the Israelis thinking. They -- or rather their Iranian paymasters -- would not have countenanced boasting about the operation to a damn fool journalist who would embellish it with wild speculation about 'hacking' secret Israeli radio messages.
Nor does the article actually manage to get anyone who might have known to say otherwise. It merely attempts to imply that they might have said it, or something like it. Hence statements like this:
The official refused to detail how Hezbollah was able to intercept and decipher Israeli transmissions.
A nice example of the old 'begging the question' fallacy, such as in the question 'Have you stopped beating your wife yet?' Maybe the official refused to "detail" how Hezbollah was able to decipher Israeli transmissions because, in fact, they weren't able to.
Or this:
But a former Israeli general, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Hezbollah's ability to secretly hack into military transmissions had "disastrous" consequences for the Israeli offensive.
"Israel's military leaders clearly underestimated the enemy and this is just one example," he said.
Hmmm....wait a minute, the direct quote only says the military leader underestimated Hezbollah. And what's the mysterious 'this' to which the general refers, which is an example of the underestimation? Interception and radio direction-finding? Or actual decryption? We don't know. The journalist implies, in the previous sentence, that 'this' means 'hacking' into military transmissions, and that this means interception and decryption. But does it?
If the anonymous general were willing to be quoted saying quite plainly: "Ayup, Hezbollah decrypted our most secret communications, damn 'em," then you can bet your last dollar the journalist would have used that very juicy quote. The fact that he didn't use that quote, or one like it, means he couldn't get it. And I'm sure he tried very hard, with all the artful questions he could. The general just wasn't willing to say those words. Because, almost surely, they would have been false.
In short, I think the odds are good that this is just another journalist whoring for Hezbollah, 'cause it makes a scary exciting man-bites-dog story.
So they intercepted all this encrypted data, and *still* got their asses kicked? Talk about the suck.
So they cracked communications such as
"We've killed everyone in the area, moving on to the next village."
"They are falling back in a northernly direction, sending missile salvos 1, 2, and 3 miles ahead of our mechanized division to thin out the runners and reduce resistance as we proceed."
"Good hit. They didn't have a chance."
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
about 10 years ago. That's why the accusation of McCarthyism is used so raraly, no sting anymore.
Hezbollah was dug in, well-trained and well-indoctrinated, could listen in on what the Israeli's were doing, and still had its ass handed to it.
Nasrallah himself has called this war a catastrophe for Hezbollah.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
:Colonel I suggest that ^H^H^H^ ALLAH OWNZ J00R B0X0RZ!^H^H^H^ insurgents.: :Shit. Switch over to IM! AOL encrypts EVERYTHING!:
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You better stop buying oil too.
CigAAAHHRRRRRRRs, matey?
Well if you have two of them at two known positions, you could probably get a direction based on the time difference between the signal's arrival at the two stations. Or maybe you could do something with measuring the signal's phase shift. I've never sat down and worked out the problem but it seems like it could be done, on paper at least.
Some Googling reveals that somebody at least has thought of the same concept (and got a patent on it already, although it was filed in 1977, so I think that means it's expired now), no idea if they've ever put it into practice:
Determining azimuth of a transponder by measuring a plurality of phase shifts. Tomasi, Jean-Pierre, United States Patent 4,110,754.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
They didn't actually have to "hack" it at all. The encryption technology is really crude (and well-known) and American frequency-hopping gear follows predetermined sequences - these are also well known.
It's trivial for any reasonably equipped and fairly savvy military radio op to monitor these transmissions.
I wish I had mod points for you. However,
Israel lost because America woke up and realized that the cluster bombs they were shipping to Israel were intended to kill large numbers of civilians.
sounds like wishful thinking. Seriously, that would be wonderfully wonderful, but it hasn't happened. I also think you're making the mistake lots of people make about Vietnam: they think that the anti-war movement ended the war. It may have helped, but the war was ended by the NLF and the Vietnamese people. Same here, Hezbollah "won" the invasion because of Hezbollah and the Lebanese people and their overwhelming support.
Property is theft.
"Contrary to popular myth, Hezbollah (unlike Hamas and the other Palestinian groups) prefers not to operate around civilians. Not for a concern for the civilians' safety -- they'll confiscate buildings to use as shooting positions if needed, whether their owners like it or not -- but for their own safety. Hamas operates openly as a sign of pride and defiance. However, by doing that, it only takes a tiny handful of defectors to point out to Israel where they are and what they're doing. Hezbollah, on the other hand, prefers to operate in areas where nobody is around to reduce the risk of being exposed by defectors."
What the hell is this youtube video then?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aur_DmTIw70
And this one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68yOJVQA51E
I'm calling BS. Take your propaganda off of slashdot - I know how to use google!
A friend of mine in the artilery told me that they were required to maintain complete radio silence, and that all targeting and unit movement data were to be sent over a target exchange network they employ. The standard radio in the IDF (MK-27, iirc) is a simple spread-spectrum radio which is not bigger of a challange to crack then the GSM networks in some countries.
Its because of the use of these that some of the ground force communications were intercepted.
If procedural errors can cause the entire system security to be breached, then I would say that the system is poorly designed. A properly designed secure communications system would not operate at all if correct security procedures were not followed.
Considering that the SINGARS family of radios are very diverse set of radios (PRC-119 being the most common), there are one of two possible scenerios that
could have occured (ranked from unlikely to likely)
Incidentally, this is my opinion and not fact so please do not take this out of context.
1) Israel was using an unsecure net (i.e. plaintext, single channel) - This is probably unlikely because as a fighting force, the Israelis are among
the best, specifically in the areas of tactical security.
2) Somebody lost a CYZ-10 encryption device (along with the physical key) - A CYZ-10 (without getting into specifics) secures the comm for the SINGARS.
If this happened and it was not reported, essentially Israel's ENTIRE theaterwide military operations would have been compromised, until a crypto
change-over (while unlikely), assuming that they did not rollover their crypto on a daily or weekly basis, they would have been totally open to anybody.
Again, I'm just speculating, but considering how important it is for us when we conduct combat ops, not to lose compromise comms, these are some real
distinct, possiblities.
Regards,
MBC1977,
(US Marine, College Student, and Good Guy!)
Regards,
MBC1977,
The Israeli military may just need propoganda to account for what's been widely considered a poor showing by it's forces in this "war" - especially considering the legendary status of Israeli military and intelligence. The citizens are not happy and are grumbling, they actually pay attention to what's going on in a conflict, unlike in the U.S, so this just might be to soothe them.
It's hard to trust what either side is saying when so much is at stake. The Hezbollah official who was showing off about their capability probably realizes Israel has the resources to make a far more secure and foolproof communications system, but he cannot pass up the chance to offer encouragement against a very tough enemy.
Hezbollah would like everyone to think about the advancing nature of Hezbollah technology and tactics, while Israeli leaders would like everyone to think of it is as a major fluke, which will be promptly patched up by "next time". The truth of what will probably happen next time is anybody's guess, but I'd rather trust what a military expert has to say than these guys or just any old reporter.
.. Now all they have to do is learn hebrew.
God Be Gone
In my experience the critical skill is the ability to get a BN CDR to allow the signal personnel to dictate the SOP for such a compromise. I can react to it, my problem is getting the proper reaction put in place in the sop and practiced so it can be done properly when needed.
Algerath
"Israel lost because America woke up and realized that the cluster bombs they were shipping to Israel were intended to kill large numbers of civilians."
Good god you're stupid.
...blame Microsoft.
Pretty hard to find out where a rocket landed 10-30 miles away.. A bunch of the tanks were destroyed by mines.
I figured they had militants near enough to see what was going on through binoculars (therefore far enough away to avoid getting hit) telling them by radio where to aim and what they hit.
Retro-tech espionage... maybe I underestimated their techies.
You can't take the sky from me...
I also find interesting how you compare Hezbollah, a guerilla army with the German professional army of WWII. Lets get something straight. If Hezbollah is going to act as if its the under-equipped, under-armed, poor underdogs, they can't be launching HUNDREDS of rockets EACH DAY. They can't be hacking MILTARY COMMUNICATIONS. They can't be recieving cutting edge technology military aid for DECADES. By your logic, given the sheer ease and availability of firearms, body armor, explosives, training and auto shops to build technicals in the U.S., every citizen is, at minimum, in the National Guard.
This is great news!!! Now the anglo-saxon war criminals and the zionist untermenschen may be apaled by the ingenuity of their adversary. ...
After all the enemy is supposed to be the untermensch, isn't he?
Just go on invading countries on an illegal basis and go on droping clusterbombs on civilian areas.
And certainly keep on dying in all those countries you are trespassing. Take all your maimed and wounded back home.
And go on trying to convince these fools, retards and mercenaries that their 'sacrifies' was worthwhile.
For what concerns me, they are opportunistic killers fighting for a zionistic, neo-con sham. Just keep dying and bleeding, you empire of evil =:-D
There is also the perspective that obscurity is not the same as security. If you have secret A and are trying to prevent B from knowing it, you can NEVER be certain that B does not have that information. If they obtain knowledge of A, and keep that hidden from you, then your obscurity becomes a weapon against you. This is the problem the Germans had once the Enigma ciphers were broken. By relying totally on obscurity, the Germans became extremely vulnerable. Obscurity is a VERY dangerous tool.
By far the best tactic is to assume the enemy could know everything - not necessarily that they will, but that they could. This introduces a degree of fault-tolerence into actions. It does not rely on an assumed weakness that may not exist (and therefore make those carrying out the action the weaker party), but assumes that the opposition is as competent and capable as it chooses to be. As this is often much closer to reality, it is a better assumption to make.
In terms of encryption, for example, using an obscure algorithm puts you at gigantic risk as it can't have had the eyeballs to verify that it is indeed secure. Furthermore, people are more likely to use weak keys, as they won't see the point in taking care, as they're working on the basis that they don't need to. A very stupid practice. The best you could do is make the algorithm public, utterly destroy any delusions of absolute mental superiority, and force people to work damn hard to use the algorithm correctly. If the enemy finds a fault and keeps it secret, they would have done so anyway, so you lose nothing. If Joe Smurf on sci.crypto finds a fault and publishes it, you will have time to fix the bug or switch to another method. Overall, you lose nothing.
Assuming the enemy is an idiot, merely because they're the enemy, is the best way to lose a battle or a war. Either that or acting stupid.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Well, there were interviews in Washington Post (and NY Times, but my memory can fool me here) about how the Hezbollah used to go into Christian villages and fire rockets and run away before the counter fire came.
Hundreds?! Can you give a source for THAT claim?
I am not a military expert, but I think history over millennia has shown two working ways of handling fanatical guerillas in bad terrain: (a) Hearts and minds of the civilian population and (b) clearing the area of people totally and not leave stone on stone.
"(a)" is hardly possible with the Shia by the Israeli border. Saddam Hussein did a variant of "(b)" with the Shia after their uprising -- outright atrocities in such a volume they stopped giving him trouble. A civilized country like Israel can't do that unless they are desperate (or the Palestinian problems would only be in history books).
Hezbollah isn't so much a guerilla as a dug down army division. Their problem is that they are easy to keep down using air -- and then use a big army unit clearing out area after area.
Let us hope none of the methods will have to be done -- and that the international community will keep its promise this time and make it a calm border. If Hezbollah continues to throw rock on the bear, it will certainly wake up again, angrier for every time it happens.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Couple of points for the racist zionist apartheid promoters:
Hezbollah was born of the poorest of the poor in southern lebanon after two decades of foreign occupation, when no one would help them. It is a home grown legitimate resistance movement, dedicated to freeing their lands, ALL their lands. That so called border is a joke, it was IMPOSED on those people by outsiders. What THE FUCK would you do if you had grown up with a bunch of foreign invaders as your rulers and masters, people who had unlimited life or death power over you and USED that power? Just roll over, be a quisling, go against your own people? The Israelis havbe been engaging in outright civilian massacres since day one of their artificially imposed, and NON semitic european nation thrust into the middle of SEMITIC arab peoples. Israel is a FARCE, has even hijacked the "semite" name, and always has been. Let Germany and Italy (and the UK of Lord Balfour) host the "holocaust remnants homeland" on their soil, back over in Europe, because it was THEIR fault, not the Lebanese or Palestinians or Jordanians.
No discipline? Thugs? You must have been looking at a parallel universe TV then, because they kicked serious ass for weeks WITHOUT ANY AIR COVER OR HEAVY ARMOR. NONE. They held those european racist zionazis back well beyond anything YOU could have done, that's for sure. They took it and took it and took it and still kept fighting! I'd like to see any nation or group, including the "invincible" israelis or the "army of one" americans do that. I *doubt* they could. Even with air cover it is now being proven that trying to invade and take over people who are fighting for their own land (Iraq for one place) on their own turf is pretty hard. Screw the invaders!
I believe it was the willingness of Hezbolah fighters to fight to the death that the difference. In the past other fighters would break and run under superior fire power. Now they hole up and take casualities. I would bet they learned tactics from Iraq. Well dug in infantry that is willing to fight will always cause a lot of casualities. Even if a someone in Hezbolah intercepted some messages, they would have to then communicate their response to many groups of fighters widely scattered. I doubt the control and communication was that good. Particulary when any movement of significant numbers would result in a punishing air strike.
Funny how whenever someone we don't like is up to something, we try to link it to someone who we're just itching to bomb.
Therefore, the following:
Could really just mean:
1) we saw a lot of radio transmissions coming from over there, so we knew they were over there ("picture of Israeil movements")
2) we launched mortars/rockets a whole bunch of places. When we launched a mortar/rocket and immediately saw a radio transmission we had a "casualty report".
3) averaging over time we saw that radio transmissions made a line on a map, this we called a "supply route".
4) our anti-tank units would point their weaopns towards transmissions, "more effectively target advancing Israeli armor".
It never says that they broke any codes, but you can get useful information anyway.
My favorite quote doesn't fit into 120 characters. Now no one will like me.
Iran has a smart leader and we have a deaf idiot run by a blind team having a bad trip.
44% of americans think christ is coming back in the next 50 years. half are creationists.
Bush hears god from his hairdryer and people belief him.
Now think-- why does it seem less stupid if you remove the hairdryer from that statement?
I don't believe Simon Singh's The Code Book is available online
At least the CDROM is.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
To clear something up, Isreal knew that Hezbollah tapped into their radios. They must have changed the codes rendering the ones Hezbollah had useless, thus why they admitted they cracked the codes b/c it was a win-win scenario. Plus, everyone in the middle east knew they had the codes at the begining of the war. You want a legitimate source? I was there this summer and this info was on every channel on tv. Plus, this doesn't come to any surprise at all. The lebanese people knew even before it was said on the tv that Hezbollah had hacked in. They have insiders in Israel, they have engineers and coders as well. The mind of a guerrilla works better than that of a lazy soldier.
>I don't think that the average American would feel that our country has lost any respect at all if we
Yep thats right. Actually, arab people aren't generally different than we are (exception of various nutcases wako's around, but the USA has its plenty share too)
>tried to figure out what is pissing those people off so much, and figured out how to address that
>problem to remove their reason to fight. It's the only way any lasting peace will be achieved.
Its very simple, and not unreasonable actually..
1)The Palestinians want (at least some of) their land back, and they want their country back (it was where Israel is now). The Israelis don't want to give (any of) it back.
2)Arabs want the USA to stop funding Israel's army and govt, as they are going around the middle east bombing and terrorizing the palestians as well as their neighbors, and the arabs are absolutely sick of it. 9/11 and such was (a rather extreme) case of 'what goes around, comes around'.. see www.aljazeera.net for a daily rundown of what the Israelis do daily over there, all paid for with US free money, free bombs & free support.
3)If the Israeli's (and the USA) want 'terrorism' to stop, see point #1 (and #2) above.
Basically thats it.. its very simple really.
What probably really happened was some ragtag bunch of Lebanese kids happened upon a broken IDF radio which was making all sorts of squawking staticky sounds, brought it to the local Hezbollah leaders, etc., and from there the story was born - "Hezbollah hacks IDF communications". The Israelis, for whatever reason, are obviously encouraging it - knowing it to be bunkum (what else can it be). Maybe the Israeli side thinks the spread of this story will lead to more American funding or equipment. They're probably right.
killing infidels was kind of ok at the time in the east too, they weren't mickey mousing it exactly,
a huge glut of trained warriors who at the time found themselves with nothing to do but 'rape and pillagize' whoever the fuck they wanted (hint: local peasants and whatnot, since the vikings/etc were pacified)
a humongous surge in secular interest in religion, due to the huge simony (selling church offices (bishops, etc), done by non church people) scandal,
eventually emperor Alexuis got roughed up a few times by some thugs, eventually got his hood all but taken (think he claimed byzantium st. crips) and asked his kind of distant friend in the other christian posse (uhm, west st. catholics? i forget) and his homie didn't just send some troops, he rallied
a whole motherfucking crusade to retake jerusalem, handed out crosses (or his uhm, underlings did) and promised heaven to those not good enough to survive (don't know about virgins though, think the muslims got them there).
also, war is good for business, especially if you're a emperor or somesuch trying to consolidate power with a bunch of bored, but trained warriors sitting around not being good neighbors.
whewww....boy, wish i had stuck with oversimplifying everything like you, woulda saved me alot of typing...
whoever agrees, disagrees or whatever, i won't be reading your replies after already wasting time with this piece of pedantry.
and now, back to oversimplifying encryptions export rules!!!1131!@1 the good vintage ones!!#@1!!
oh wait, i already passed that one up...
must...learn...to...resist...
- I'd prefer not to.
First, please read up on war laws -- it is frigging illegal to use civilians for shields in a war. As it is to explicitly target civilians. Hezbollah did both, at the same time!
Second, afaik, counter artillery is so fast that they only go after values on an arillery radar. Often/usually, the artillery doesn't really know what they shoot back at! Because of that, Hezbollah was probably trying to get Israel to kill civilians for propaganda values rather than to get shields.
Third, an army that as a matter of planning use civilians for cover to shoot at other civilians -- and you blaim the side shooting back equally?!?! Talk about double standards.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Israel ordered enough cluster bombs that the intention was a massacre of Lebanon. Even the Jewish US Senators wouldn't tolerate it.
If you are going to be a troll, at least don't be a stupid and boring one.
The EU doesn't classify Hezbollah as a terrorist organization -- so they break war laws, according to EU. It breaks international law to be a terrorist organization, by definition. You can't defend Hezbollah's behaviour.
Afaik, Israel hasn't targeted civilians as primary targets. If nothing else, that would be stupid, since they can only lose by doing so -- in international opinion and in internal opinion in Israel. (You will get misses and wrongful targeting in any war. That is legal.) Also, Hezbollah have an interest in getting civilians killed -- and could influence the count of what the dead was...
Also, since you obviously know even less than me about counter artillery fire, why don't you read up on the subject before blaiming one side for shooting back at people targeting their civilians...? Because that is what every damn army will do on the planet.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
For any half-aarsed security you're going to have to encrypt the signal further.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
You argued that since Hezbollah is a terror organization, it can't break war laws.
I answered that "argument" with that EU, amongst others, doesn't consider Hezb a terror organization and that it is friggin' illegal to be a terror organization anyway (by definition, they do things that would be classified war crimes if a state did them). So it is quite equivalent.
I really can't see how your definition game can matter, since committing war crimes like targeting civilians (by EU definition) is about as bad as being a terrorist organization. At least troll well if you have nothing to say.
I argued that -- Afaik, Israel hasn't targeted civilians as primary targets but that if you have an air bombing campaign, you will hit civilians -- it isn't war crimes and that Hezb had lots of control over which dead was counted as civilians and which were counted as Hezb (almost none, strangely enough).
You point out that Amnesty and HRW accused Israel of bombing civilian infrastructure needlessly (HRW reformulated the initial claims to be that they couldn't find Hezb where Israelis had bombed, which is logical since there will be mistaken targeting -- and it isn't believable they can have an opinion when being shepherded by Hezb through bombing sites, check other documents on their sites). Which isn't relevant for my point, either. (Others in this thread have pointed out documented cases of where Hezb really integrated Iran's, sorry, their infrastructure with civilians.)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
There is no Bible in Judaeism, let alone a "New Testament." The Torah is pretty much the same as the first 5 books of the Christian Old Testament, but that's about it.
No kidding, Webster. That's was the whole point of the quip. Even though you *understood* it, you didn't *get* it. Weird. Maybe because it was a Judaeism vs Christianity joke in the middle of a Judaeism versus Islam thread?
For future reference:
Oh, thank you, Master Po! :-P May I make another attempt at snatching the pebbles?
Jokes are usually better when they're relevant, or at least intentionally irrelevant.
It WAS intentionally irrelevant. Argh! You hecklers!
Look, just because the joke worked on a level invisible to your hyperliteralism, don't take it out on me. :)
ObSheesh: Sheesh!
Now, make sure you don't elect politicians whos most vocal suporters are kin to hurry up the end of times thus precipitating the second comming of Christ.
It may very well be that humanity is fucked by two polarized groups of lunatics.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Total bullshit. The Israelis have given up the Sinai, Gaza, and significant portions of the West Bank, and got nothing but more death and destruction at the hands of the Muslims as their reward. The Paelstinians would already have a country (which they stole from the Jews centuries ago, by the way) if they had stuck to the Oslo accords and given up the gun and bomb.
Nothing Israel does is ever good enough for the Arabs and their sympathizers in the West. The Muslims want ALL of Israel. And every Jew and Hindu slaughtered. And every Christian slaughtered, enslaved, or converted to Islam. And the destruction of liberal democracy. And the imposition of Sharia law in all nations.
This is not a secret conspiracy or the ravings of a tiny minority. It is shouted openly from the pulpit of mosques all over the world every single day. Vast majorities of the Muslim population hold to these beliefs. They are not good Muslims if they don't.
I'm not interested in negotiating with such people. Hand-wringing, guilt-ridden, thumb-sucking, root-cause-contemplating Western liberals have nothing of value to contribute to this problem, nor do cucumber-sandwich-eating Arabist diplomats.
The only answer to this problem is for the armies of the civilized nations to provide speedy martyrdom to each and every Muslim who seeks it. Eventually the jihad gene will be bred out of the population, and those who remain can learn to live in peace with everybody else.
Too much Law; not enough Order.
I can see where you are coming from but I do not consider myself part of the problem. :-)
This is not "my" government nor are these "my" big fortune 500 businesses who they
are fighting. If somebody gets killed that otherwise causes me trouble or even downright
harm, then I welcome that death. I would love to tell you more here but going any
further than that could land me into serious trouble
I am sure that the terrorists understand that it does not make any sense to blow up innocent
civilians because any such an attack would only benefit their enemies. I know of few major
attacks that have not been a false flag maneuver by what I would call the true terrorizers:
for example western govnerment agencies that blow up subways and trains to frighten the populace.
In fact, I am certain that only very few terrorist attacks have occurred in the past decades,
otherwise we would have had so many more attacks against police stations, military and
intelligence installations and maybe even the IRS or whatever else that kind of scum happens to
be called in your country.
They hacked israel radio transmission?? how stupid is that?? want to attack other country but let the them here what you are saying... Is it part of their propaganda bcoz they cannot killed the Hezbollah?? ..
;)
Hezbollah is terrorist?? If someone take your land and want to kill your mother, father and sisters, won't you try to protect them???
Who invade their country? In their eyes the israel troops is the terrorist.
Yup its true that Hezbollah kidnap one of their enemy, but the israel also kidnap lebanon men. Don't the lebonan people also have pride? Did israel think other people life is like animals life and they can killed others without any mercy?
i've seen a documentary after the invasion, the Hezbullah is their hero bcoz they really hate israel and their family members are all Hezbollah, so if the israel attack the Hezbollah houses, of course they will protect their house..
about the hacked, i think it is part of the propaganda to bcoz they ashamed they cannot killed the Hezbollah
i am not anti-jews but its just my opinion
I also dont agree some of the muslim bomb restaurant and holy place. bcoz killing innocent people will not solve the problem and believed every one have their right to live once in this world
LOL!!