I did this kind of work for a bit. I really do think this was more of a 9/11 slash Pearl Harbor kind of thing. It has that feel all over it. I think it was an epic and world (or at least region) changing fuckup.
I do not doubt the current government of Israel has used Hamas as a cat’s paw. I think the constant low level violence cost them little and produced huge political returns for the most far-right government in the history of the country. But I think this was unanticipated in scale and scope, and that both the attack and the response were far beyond what anyone - Israel and Hamas included - would have intended.
There will always be the Monday morning quarterbacks who will quite rightly point out that the information was just there. Looking backwards, we can reverse-solve the problem and say that we could have (or even did) know about Pearl Harbor, 9/11, or Oct 6. The truth is that we know shitloads of things, all the time. We have a constant flow of information, from all corners of the world. We even have constant fire hoses of information from our allies and even our own citizens.
The paradox of the panopticon is that when you’re looking everywhere, you’re really looking nowhere. There’s not ten thousand people in a bunker in North Dakota watching monitors. There’s a few thousand people in cities like Langley around the world who commute to work and get there around 9, and read through what happened yesterday and overnight, and write up summaries that themselves get summarized. If they have too many sources of information, it’s all processed algorithmically first, but it’s still a process of sorting the wheat from the chaff.
We need to fix that. We cannot surveil everything, even with our best and brightest working on technical solutions. But at the end of the day, these are human in the loop systems, and sometimes people fuck up. Sometimes they fuck up royally, and they lose the playoffs or they start a war.
I think it’s done at this point. The system fucked yo, and now a lot of people are going to die, afraid and in pain, because that’s what we do and we just don’t have it in us to stop doing that kind of thing quite yet. I quit the business and know others that did, but at the end of the day there’s still people who think other people need to be killed, and a second group of people who buy the argument and are good with doing it.
I think that the conspiracy theories will continue to fly as they tend to do, but this really just smells like a colossal fuckup in which 20-30k civilians are going to die, and it’s just a train that doesn’t have the ability to stop at this point.
There’s a few thousand people in cities like Langley around the world who commute to work and get there around 9, and read through what happened yesterday
You’re speaking as if Palantir etc didn’t exist. In a world where every 10 year old in the West can get Chat GPT to help with homework, why would we believe that govt level networked surveillance is like something straight out of an old John Le Carré novel?
I appreciate your well thought response, but I think the comparisons with 9/11 and Pearl Harbor are weak.
For 9/11, the USA had no incentive to let 9/11 happen. And it was a very novel attack that nobody was predicting. Conspiracy theories on 9/11 have no credibility for those reasons.
Pearl harbor is a little bit different. The USA was definitely pushing Japan and could have expected them to respond. But US leadership thought the Japanese wouldn’t want to drag the USA into the war through an obvious act of war. History is clear that US leadership could have expected it, but gambled on Japanese leadership making a different choice.
This attack is different. The only surprise is the extent of the success.
Israeli leadership has been baiting and nurturing Palestinian terrorism for decades in order to have support for land grabs and ethnic cleansing.
This time they just got burned harder than they expected.
Yo we spent like 4 trillion dollars on war. What the fuck do you mean there was no incentive? The billionaires accumulated like half of the countries GDP for 2 decades.
If only because no way Bibi would actually bomb his political career forever, and go down in history as a failure, for this. This current government is finished, they will put the keys on the table. The majority of Israel already wanted them out of office, especially Bibi, now? They’re responsible for the worst event in Israel’s existence, to its existence…
There are warnings all the time. The intelligence failed, the protections failed, and we paid the price.
It seems pretty likely that Israel let the attacks happen to have a casus belli for land grabs and genocide.
I did this kind of work for a bit. I really do think this was more of a 9/11 slash Pearl Harbor kind of thing. It has that feel all over it. I think it was an epic and world (or at least region) changing fuckup.
I do not doubt the current government of Israel has used Hamas as a cat’s paw. I think the constant low level violence cost them little and produced huge political returns for the most far-right government in the history of the country. But I think this was unanticipated in scale and scope, and that both the attack and the response were far beyond what anyone - Israel and Hamas included - would have intended.
There will always be the Monday morning quarterbacks who will quite rightly point out that the information was just there. Looking backwards, we can reverse-solve the problem and say that we could have (or even did) know about Pearl Harbor, 9/11, or Oct 6. The truth is that we know shitloads of things, all the time. We have a constant flow of information, from all corners of the world. We even have constant fire hoses of information from our allies and even our own citizens.
The paradox of the panopticon is that when you’re looking everywhere, you’re really looking nowhere. There’s not ten thousand people in a bunker in North Dakota watching monitors. There’s a few thousand people in cities like Langley around the world who commute to work and get there around 9, and read through what happened yesterday and overnight, and write up summaries that themselves get summarized. If they have too many sources of information, it’s all processed algorithmically first, but it’s still a process of sorting the wheat from the chaff.
We need to fix that. We cannot surveil everything, even with our best and brightest working on technical solutions. But at the end of the day, these are human in the loop systems, and sometimes people fuck up. Sometimes they fuck up royally, and they lose the playoffs or they start a war.
I think it’s done at this point. The system fucked yo, and now a lot of people are going to die, afraid and in pain, because that’s what we do and we just don’t have it in us to stop doing that kind of thing quite yet. I quit the business and know others that did, but at the end of the day there’s still people who think other people need to be killed, and a second group of people who buy the argument and are good with doing it.
I think that the conspiracy theories will continue to fly as they tend to do, but this really just smells like a colossal fuckup in which 20-30k civilians are going to die, and it’s just a train that doesn’t have the ability to stop at this point.
@SatanicNotMessianic
You’re speaking as if Palantir etc didn’t exist. In a world where every 10 year old in the West can get Chat GPT to help with homework, why would we believe that govt level networked surveillance is like something straight out of an old John Le Carré novel?
I appreciate your well thought response, but I think the comparisons with 9/11 and Pearl Harbor are weak.
For 9/11, the USA had no incentive to let 9/11 happen. And it was a very novel attack that nobody was predicting. Conspiracy theories on 9/11 have no credibility for those reasons.
Pearl harbor is a little bit different. The USA was definitely pushing Japan and could have expected them to respond. But US leadership thought the Japanese wouldn’t want to drag the USA into the war through an obvious act of war. History is clear that US leadership could have expected it, but gambled on Japanese leadership making a different choice.
This attack is different. The only surprise is the extent of the success.
Israeli leadership has been baiting and nurturing Palestinian terrorism for decades in order to have support for land grabs and ethnic cleansing.
This time they just got burned harder than they expected.
Yo we spent like 4 trillion dollars on war. What the fuck do you mean there was no incentive? The billionaires accumulated like half of the countries GDP for 2 decades.
That would be more believable if the head of Egyptian intelligence hadn’t personally called and spoken with Netanyahu.
Conspiracy theories.
If only because no way Bibi would actually bomb his political career forever, and go down in history as a failure, for this. This current government is finished, they will put the keys on the table. The majority of Israel already wanted them out of office, especially Bibi, now? They’re responsible for the worst event in Israel’s existence, to its existence…
There are warnings all the time. The intelligence failed, the protections failed, and we paid the price.
How long has Bibi been in power? I don’t believe anything you wrote is even remotely correct.