Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Sandwich on April 06, 2013, 01:27:44 pm
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https://news.google.com/news/rtc?ncl=dXSNwGlaCemYBXMc-5g_8eEcJ2kiM
Dear Anonymous,
Nobody is truly anonymous.
Love,
The Mossad
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Minor government functions inconvenienced; Israeli helicopters launch Hellfire missiles at Linus Torvalds
Obama administration: 'a fair response'
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Anonymous is pretty juvenile but if you are getting a hard-on at the thought of Mossad ninjas waterboarding some script kiddie with a LOIC installation because they DDOSed an info page, you might want to reconsider the proportionality of your response.
Instead of writing breathy love letters to a big organization I think I prefer the sane and measured approach taken by one of the very articles you linked:
“But we have to keep things in proportion. These are independent hackers located around the world, an assortment of young people. The significance of the threat is somewhat limited. The damage will likely be confined to the realm of image,” Gaist said.
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Anonymous is pretty juvenile but if you are getting a hard-on at the thought of Mossad ninjas waterboarding some script kiddie with a LOIC installation because they DDOSed an info page, you might want to reconsider the proportionality of your response.
Under the "right" circumstances, it's not an unimaginable situation at all, apparently: http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/21/4130740/tallin-manual-on-the-international-law-applicable-to-cyber-warfare
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Let me just recap here. An ill-organized and ineffective hacker collective briefly brought down the Central Bureau of Statistics website, and you started a forum thread about your country's aggressive and allegedly quite smart intelligence service tracking them down and killing them.
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Mossad would be much more cool and sick (like skateboarders) if they tracked down these guys' names and then made Advice Dog memes out of them and got frontpaged on Reddit, talk about cutting edge information warfare
e: apostrophe goes after the plural S
e2: Israel is actually under sustained cyber attack from all over, though particularly from the obvious antagonists in the West Bank and Gaza. They also have some really beastly cyberware capabilities (the US worked with them on Stuxnet), which I think are part of military intelligence rather than Mossad. Given that they have constant and much more important cyberattacks to deal with I suspect this is fairly low on their list of priorities compared to the hostile state and non-state actors right on their doorstep.
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Mossad would be much more cool and sick (like skateboarders) if they tracked down these guys' names and then made Advice Dog memes out of them and got frontpaged on Reddit, talk about cutting edge information warfare
e: apostrophe goes after the plural S
That's the second time I've seen someone purposefully point out how to properly place the apostrophe when plural. Has it become common place for people to try and correct proper grammar?
Anyway your first point reminded me of NYC's anti graffiti campaign (http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/graffiti/n11050/).
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Minor government functions inconvenienced; Israeli helicopters launch Hellfire missiles at Linus Torvalds
Obama administration: 'a fair response'
Wait what? I didn't see any articles about that.
Unless you're talking about Sandwich's post.
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Mossad would be much more cool and sick (like skateboarders) if they tracked down these guys' names and then made Advice Dog memes out of them and got frontpaged on Reddit, talk about cutting edge information warfare
e: apostrophe goes after the plural S
That's the second time I've seen someone purposefully point out how to properly place the apostrophe when plural. Has it become common place for people to try and correct proper grammar?
Anyway your first point reminded me of NYC's anti graffiti campaign (http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/graffiti/n11050/).
Well it wasn't right before I fixed it!
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Let me just recap here. An ill-organized and ineffective hacker collective briefly brought down the Central Bureau of Statistics website, and you started a forum thread about your country's aggressive and allegedly quite smart intelligence service tracking them down and killing them.
that's israel for you
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Mossad would be much more cool and sick (like skateboarders) if they tracked down these guys' names and then made Advice Dog memes out of them and got frontpaged on Reddit, talk about cutting edge information warfare
e: apostrophe goes after the plural S
That's the second time I've seen someone purposefully point out how to properly place the apostrophe when plural. Has it become common place for people to try and correct proper grammar?
Anyway your first point reminded me of NYC's anti graffiti campaign (http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/graffiti/n11050/).
Well it wasn't right before I fixed it!
Ah, you simply annotated your edit. Sorry for some reason I assumed you were pointing out the proper grammar. As I mentioned I had just recently seen an internet post were special attention was paid towards explaining the correct use of the apostrophe. I wasn't sure if there was a new grammar meme.
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who said anything about killing them?
i would love to see those whiny, worthless losers get *****slapped.
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i would love to see those whiny, worthless losers get *****slapped.
Pot, kettle. Seriously man, you're bitter, we get it. Stop spewing bile all over every topic in GenDisc, it's annoying as hell.
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trace, hack, set up mail list virus and terrorise hacker's mates
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I think that simply releasing the names and locations of the participants should be enough. Make sure it'll make the news so their parents will know. So much for the whole "Anonymous" gig.
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Apparently Anonymous is intending for this to be more along the lines of wiping Israel off the Internet or something rather than just defacing a few websites. Again, those are their intentions from what I've heard/read. We'll see.
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well i'm sure that's a credible threat for which appropriately harsh measures will be justified
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I don't see any mention of plans to track them down and kill them either to be honest, all I see is a newsfeed giving a situation update?
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yes, the thing we're responding to is sandwich's thinly-veiled nationalistic chest-thumping
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It's amazing how much prosthetic meaning has been added to the original post in that case. Everyone seems to be offending themselves with their own assumptions....
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Yup, it's quite amusing, ain't it? :p
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Personally, I'd love to see Mossad post names and addresses of every "hacker" involved on a public website and do nothing else.
That would send the loudest message possible.
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I don't see any mention of plans to track them down and kill them either to be honest, all I see is a newsfeed giving a situation update?
The discussion is mostly gentle mocking of Sandwich's Mossad hard-on. (Americans could never even get this far because our biggest foreign intelligence agency is a limp cigar.)
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Personally, I'd love to see Mossad post names and addresses of every "hacker" involved on a public website and do nothing else.
That would send the loudest message possible.
and yeah this would own, except that you are buying into this weird Mossad boogeyman brand: as I talked about last page, Israel's excellent and well-practiced cyberwarfare corps is, I believe, part of their military intelligence service, though I'm not exactly sure where. Flame?, Stuxnet, and Duqu were examples of their offensive capabilities, but they're also constantly dealing with more routine attacks.
This is part of why I think it's so ridiculous to swallow Anonymous' chest-thumping and get all oooh wooo Mossad: when you've already got a more serious local enemy text messaging your officers to tell them that Tel Aviv will soon be a sea of flame, a gang of badly organized cyber-graffiti artists whose bark has generally greatly exceeded their bite are hardly something to get worked up about.
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Anonymous is pretty juvenile but if you are getting a hard-on at the thought of Mossad ninjas waterboarding some script kiddie with a LOIC installation because they DDOSed an info page, you might want to reconsider the proportionality of your response.
Under the "right" circumstances, it's not an unimaginable situation at all, apparently: http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/21/4130740/tallin-manual-on-the-international-law-applicable-to-cyber-warfare
According to the manual's authors, it's acceptable to retaliate against cyberattacks with traditional weapons when a state can prove the attack lead to death or severe property damage.
Emphasis mine. Anonymous... has proven remarkably ineffective at killing people, historically.
Keep in mind, though, Mossad's best weapon is it's reputation. Yes, they've been very effective in the past, and probably will be in the future, but they only have top be effective 2% of the time if they can have people (not least their own people) convinced that they're effective 100% of the time. As Battuta's pointed out, the chances that they're going to care about something like this (unless it's thousands of times more effective than past anonymous attacks, which seems unlikely) are very close to zero. But if even a handful of people decide not to take part because of their fear of Mossad (or the Israeli citizenship gets to feel a bit safer because they think they've got tat kind of protection)... well, everyone's job gets that much easier, doesn't it?
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Mossad would be much more cool and sick (like skateboarders) if they tracked down these guys' names and then made Advice Dog memes out of them and got frontpaged on Reddit, talk about cutting edge information warfare
e: apostrophe goes after the plural S
That's the second time I've seen someone purposefully point out how to properly place the apostrophe when plural. Has it become common place for people to try and correct proper grammar?
Anyway your first point reminded me of NYC's anti graffiti campaign (http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/graffiti/n11050/).
Well it wasn't right before I fixed it!
Ah, you simply annotated your edit. Sorry for some reason I assumed you were pointing out the proper grammar. As I mentioned I had just recently seen an internet post were special attention was paid towards explaining the correct use of the apostrophe. I wasn't sure if there was a new grammar meme.
You must have missed this thread then.
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=84260.0 (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=84260.0)
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He posted in it :p
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http://www.jpost.com/Defense/Israeli-cyber-activists-attack-anti-Israel-hackers-308921
Heh: http://www.opisrael.com/
[attachment deleted by ninja]
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That's a good one, even if some facts are not entirely true (for example, Muslims pray facing Mecca. This does indeed mean they have their backs to Jerusalem around those parts, but Muslims from other places may face both Mecca and Jerusalem during prayer).
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heh, bigotry
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I doubt the Mossad cares about stuff like this -- These are the guys who track down and assassinate terrorists abroad, why would they care one iota about DDOS attacks?
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heh, bigotry
Pretty much. But what would you expect, reasoned discourse? :p
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Just making sure we're all on the same page on what it is.
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This thread gets more and more baffling - that vandalized OpIsrael website was linked in the articles Sandwich posted right in the OP, suggesting he didn't even read them :blah:
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This thread gets more and more baffling - that vandalized OpIsrael website was linked in the articles Sandwich posted right in the OP, suggesting he didn't even read them :blah:
You mean the link to a constantly updating list of Google News results?
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Personally, I'd love to see Mossad post names and addresses of every "hacker" involved on a public website and do nothing else.
That would send the loudest message possible.
and yeah this would own, except that you are buying into this weird Mossad boogeyman brand: as I talked about last page, Israel's excellent and well-practiced cyberwarfare corps is, I believe, part of their military intelligence service, though I'm not exactly sure where. Flame?, Stuxnet, and Duqu were examples of their offensive capabilities, but they're also constantly dealing with more routine attacks.
This is part of why I think it's so ridiculous to swallow Anonymous' chest-thumping and get all oooh wooo Mossad: when you've already got a more serious local enemy text messaging your officers to tell them that Tel Aviv will soon be a sea of flame, a gang of badly organized cyber-graffiti artists whose bark has generally greatly exceeded their bite are hardly something to get worked up about.
I think you missed my point: the Mossad needs to publicly post the list of names and addresses, not the security services gathering them. Something along the lines of "The Mossad has become aware that the following individuals at the following locations have participated in cyberwarfare/security attacks on the citizens and State of Isarel" followed by the names, addresses, and absolutely nothing else. They don't need to do a damn thing other than that - that service posting that information should be a significant enough psychological threat (give the originating agency).
I agree that, in general, Anonymous is a minor irritation at worst and not a credible threat to anything, but the clowns are starting to get a little too big for their britches and frankly need to be taught that nothing is truly anonymous. The majority of these script-kiddies have no idea what some of the pre-eminent cybersecurity/warfare agencies are actually capable of.
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Wow. The message log on that site is full of angry Muslims and Jews hurling insults at each other.
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Wow. The message log on that site is full of angry Muslims and Jews hurling insults at each other.
Welcome to the Middle East!
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Words flying back and forth is a good thing. Better, at least, than munitions.
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This thread gets more and more baffling - that vandalized OpIsrael website was linked in the articles Sandwich posted right in the OP, suggesting he didn't even read them :blah:
Indeed, what BloodEagle said:
You mean the link to a constantly updating list of Google News results?
But also, when I originally posted the thread, the coordination site for these attacks hadn't been counter-hacked by Israeli hackers (as far as I'm aware).
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Personally, I'd love to see Mossad post names and addresses of every "hacker" involved on a public website and do nothing else.
That would send the loudest message possible.
and yeah this would own, except that you are buying into this weird Mossad boogeyman brand: as I talked about last page, Israel's excellent and well-practiced cyberwarfare corps is, I believe, part of their military intelligence service, though I'm not exactly sure where. Flame?, Stuxnet, and Duqu were examples of their offensive capabilities, but they're also constantly dealing with more routine attacks.
This is part of why I think it's so ridiculous to swallow Anonymous' chest-thumping and get all oooh wooo Mossad: when you've already got a more serious local enemy text messaging your officers to tell them that Tel Aviv will soon be a sea of flame, a gang of badly organized cyber-graffiti artists whose bark has generally greatly exceeded their bite are hardly something to get worked up about.
I think you missed my point: the Mossad needs to publicly post the list of names and addresses, not the security services gathering them. Something along the lines of "The Mossad has become aware that the following individuals at the following locations have participated in cyberwarfare/security attacks on the citizens and State of Isarel" followed by the names, addresses, and absolutely nothing else. They don't need to do a damn thing other than that - that service posting that information should be a significant enough psychological threat (give the originating agency).
I agree that, in general, Anonymous is a minor irritation at worst and not a credible threat to anything, but the clowns are starting to get a little too big for their britches and frankly need to be taught that nothing is truly anonymous. The majority of these script-kiddies have no idea what some of the pre-eminent cybersecurity/warfare agencies are actually capable of.
I always found it interesting that, in protest to a perceived 'invisible world order of self-proclaimed 'Elites' who want to dictate to the rest of the world what they can and cannot do by using technology to attempt to control people', Anonymous remain ignorant to the fact that they themselves are pretty much becoming precisely the thing they claim to be fighting.
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This thread gets more and more baffling - that vandalized OpIsrael website was linked in the articles Sandwich posted right in the OP, suggesting he didn't even read them :blah:
You mean the link to a constantly updating list of Google News results?
This thread gets more and more baffling - that vandalized OpIsrael website was linked in the articles Sandwich posted right in the OP, suggesting he didn't even read them :blah:
Indeed, what BloodEagle said:
You mean the link to a constantly updating list of Google News results?
But also, when I originally posted the thread, the coordination site for these attacks hadn't been counter-hacked by Israeli hackers (as far as I'm aware).
The news article I referenced - and the vandalism it's about - was there when you posted this thread; I even thought about posting a screenshot of it but didn't want to triple post. IIRC (I may be wrong about the exact order) it was actually linked and discussed in the first article on the feed when you linked it.
You just didn't read what you posted.
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You just didn't read what you posted.
Indeed, I didn't read the never-ending stream of articles about the topic that Google News provided me. Additionally, Google News shows different people different articles, even when they're viewing the same link - regional prioritization, personalization, etc.
In any case, good to know that Anonymous lost control of their own domain even longer than I had thought. :p
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Which just further proves that you really don't need Mossad to deal with an 'organization' that can barely compete with amateurs.
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Uhm, okay, so? What's your point? Anonymous are even dumber than I was implying? I can't tell if you're arguing with me or not, but it seems like we're both agreeing with each other... :p
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My point is the same thing it's been the entire thread: you badly misunderstood both the capabilities of Anonymous (buying into their PR, which is their biggest asset) and how your own country deals with cyberwarfare. In particular I am mocking, as in highlighting the humor inherent in the notion, your initial supposition that nefarious Anonymous hackers would be tracked down and killed by Mossad.
People get spooked by Anonymous all over the world, but in Israel in particular cyberwarfare is already an everyday reality, and the media hype over this effective non-event just speaks to how badly people misunderstand both Israel's capabilities and and Anonymous' lack thereof.
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In particular I am mocking, as in highlighting the humor inherent in the notion, your initial supposition that nefarious Anonymous hackers would be tracked down and killed by Mossad.
I could just as easily post something along the lines of, "Hezbollah/Hamas/Palestinians/Iranians/Egyptians/Syrians/Lebanese/[insert name of group unfriendly to Israel here] throws stones at IDF; forgets Israel's nuclear arsenal". Setting aside the whole do-we/don't-we have nukes for the time being, there's a somewhat obvious disconnect between the concept of somebody throwing stones and Israel responding with nukes, and yet there would still be a valid point in there: don't bite off more than you can chew.
Drawing the analogy back to this thread's topic, we suddenly realize that there's not an expectation that a Mossad hit squad will be bashing down any Anonymous doors anytime soon. Rather, there's a warning not to pick a fight you can't expect to win.
I'm sorry the gallows humor escaped you. I'll try to be clearer next time I think about going for a subtle jab at the ridiculousness of something.
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Hilarious to see Battuta taking a metaphor literally. I would wrongly guess he would be the last one to fall for that kind of thing.
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In particular I am mocking, as in highlighting the humor inherent in the notion, your initial supposition that nefarious Anonymous hackers would be tracked down and killed by Mossad.
I could just as easily post something along the lines of, "Hezbollah/Hamas/Palestinians/Iranians/Egyptians/Syrians/Lebanese/[insert name of group unfriendly to Israel here] throws stones at IDF; forgets Israel's nuclear arsenal". Setting aside the whole do-we/don't-we have nukes for the time being, there's a somewhat obvious disconnect between the concept of somebody throwing stones and Israel responding with nukes, and yet there would still be a valid point in there: don't bite off more than you can chew.
Drawing the analogy back to this thread's topic, we suddenly realize that there's not an expectation that a Mossad hit squad will be bashing down any Anonymous doors anytime soon. Rather, there's a warning not to pick a fight you can't expect to win.
I'm sorry the gallows humor escaped you. I'll try to be clearer next time I think about going for a subtle jab at the ridiculousness of something.
I wouldn't call mentioning the mossad a subtle jab.
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Hilarious to see Battuta taking a metaphor literally. I would wrongly guess he would be the last one to fall for that kind of thing.
I think nationalist chest-thumping and ~CYBERPOCALYPSE~ paranoia are both lovely targets for jibes, thank you :P Sandwich is scrambling to reframe his motives but I think the fundamental ridiculousness of his original point's been made clear.
Even if you take it as a metaphor it's a dreadful one. Anonymous has little to nothing to fear from the Mossad and for Israel this isn't the day they get wiped off the Internet, it's just Tuesday. Nukes aren't a deterrent to kids throwing stones at the IDF; kids throwing stones at the IDF is a problem that Israel actually has to deal with quite a bit, and one that it's learned to respond to (perhaps not as effectively as it might). The alleged 'gallows humor' he's trying to have meant the whole time is still predicated on the same fundamental illusion that Israel handles these problems via some kind of massive deterrent capability people just 'need to remember'.
Post-9/11 we had an eruption of Don't Tread On Me bull**** in America and it seems to stem from the same psychological flaw: when people are threatened they want to believe they can hit back so hard they'll never be threatened again, that the bad guys will realize that they've 'bitten off more than they can chew'. In practice, the best tactics for handling this kind of asymmetric threat are pretty far from that intuitive kneejerk - which is a whole separate and fascinating topic.
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I actually think that the doxxing stuff that has been suggested in this thread is pretty aggressive, although ofc it pales in comparison to being sniped, etc.
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I haven't given serious thought to the effectiveness of doxing everyone involved (in some cases it might well lead to arrests) but it would be hilarious and that counts for a lot.
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Well, it could prove to be amazingly aggressive towards those people's lives (at least lose their jobs, or much much worse), however I'll grant you that doing so in a "hilarious" comical type of "action", even if harmful, would be fitting against "Anonymous". The trolls being trolled, the hackers being hacked, etc.
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Sandwich is scrambling to reframe his motives...
The alleged 'gallows humor' he's trying to have meant the whole time...
Let me be clear for you. My entire original post could be replaced with "...you're kidding, right?". That was the tone of the tongue-in-cheek love letter from the "Mossad" to "Anonymous". I'm apologize that I wasn't clearer and that it caused you confusion.
It's insightful to see how your choice of words effortlessly rewrites history, as it were. "Sandwich is scrambling to...", "The alleged 'gallows humor' he's trying to have meant the whole time..." - both phrasings assume that your intricate understanding of the situation is inherently superior to your subjects' understanding (me), and that merely by stating it, you can make it true. Reminds me of those people that love manipulating the media, distorting current events and rewriting history to suit their fancy. You should get into international politics.
Post-9/11 we had an eruption of Don't Tread On Me bull**** in America and it seems to stem from the same psychological flaw: when people are threatened they want to believe they can hit back so hard they'll never be threatened again, that the bad guys will realize that they've 'bitten off more than they can chew'. In practice, the best tactics for handling this kind of asymmetric threat are pretty far from that intuitive kneejerk - which is a whole separate and fascinating topic.
First of all, in the case of Osama bin-Laden vs the American People, yes, he did bit off more than he could chew, as I'm sure he could tell you if he were still alive. Your disregard for the basic rights of fellow human beings to live without fear is disturbing.
What's more, do some reading up on the Arab/Middle-Eastern mindset. Culturally, they respect strength. If someone backs down when threatened, it's seen as a sign of weakness to be taken advantage of. That works on the national level as well as the personal one. So when America got sucker-punched on 9/11, a response along the lines of gentle diplomacy would have been the worst possible response to choose. Thankfully, they acted instead of blustered, and the world is a bit safer because of those actions.
I, at least, appreciate it.
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Calm down. You presented yourself badly but I don't think you're a moron or a bad person; you just ****ed up a post on the internet.
I don't think it's going to make a super interesting discussion to yell about how I literally support terrorism and disregard basic human rights - you know that's not true, and you're just lashing back at what you see as a personal attack. It's a tired exchange that won't teach anyone anything, though I can empathize with the fact that you've probably been in a lot of shouting matches w/r/t this highly charged and complicated topic. I'd go so far as to guess that you probably think I'm anti-intervention, anti-Israel, any of that - which isn't necessarily true; these are huge problems and they defy reduction to simple valences.
What is a really interesting discussion is what America (or Israel) should do when faced with threats like this. You've leapt to the assumption that I'm an advocate of gentle diplomacy (again, it reads like you've been in this discussion so many times you're just replying to what you usually see as opposition talking points). But I'm not in favor of that kind of policy at all, and I think you're making the same mistake you did when you leapt to assumptions about how Israel 'handles' cyberattack - drawing up a clear binary between 'violent direct retaliation' and 'pretty much do nothing'.
The response spectrum is actually a lot more complicated than that; we've touched on some aspects of it right here in this thread. How do you, as a state actor, retaliate against an asymmetric threat without accidentally feeding into the enemy's biggest advantages - their ability to paint themselves as victims and you as the aggressor, their ability to tap a groundswell of moral outrage? This is the question the IDF faces when people throw rocks at them, that America faced after 9/11, that Israeli cyberwar faces when they deal with a situation like this. It's the reason that bin Laden didn't simply bite off more than he could chew, the reason that bin Laden was actually the strategic victor for a lengthy period of time after 9/11 due to errors in American strategy (errors that were eventually overwhelmed by his own inability to lead his organization, that 'organization's' cannibalistic attacks on its own power base, and much more deftly measured American retaliation).
What do you think the proper response is? So far, yeah, I'd agree with your assertion that my understanding of the situation has been better - it's really complicated, and I don't think you've done a great job of acknowledging that complexity. But this has been a pretty casual discussion so far and I'm genuinely interested about your thoughts on the topic.
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BTW, I haven't abandoned this discussion yet, I just got caught up in RL stuff. Your reply was too amusing to pass up responding to. :)
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If you want to have the discussion you should go forward in good faith because you're interested in the topic.