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Title: Hacked Tehran Traffic Cameras Fed Israeli Intelligence Before Strike
On Khamenei

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/03/03/0512...

An anonymous reader shares a CTech article with the caption: "A brilliantly
executed operation." From the report: Years before the air strike that killed
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Israeli intelligence had been quietly mapping the
daily rhythms of Tehran. According to reporting by the Financial Times
(paywalled), nearly all of the Iranian capital's traffic cameras had been
hacked years earlier, their footage encrypted and transmitted to Israeli
servers. One camera angle near Pasteur Street, close to Khamenei's compound,
allowed analysts to observe the routines of bodyguards and drivers: where
they parked, when they arrived and whom they escorted. That data was fed into
complex algorithms that built what intelligence officials call a "pattern of
life," detailed profiles including addresses, work schedules and, crucially,
which senior officials were being protected and transported. The surveillance
stream was one of hundreds feeding Israel's intelligence system, which
combines signals interception from Unit 8200, human assets recruited by the
Mossad and large-scale data analysis by military intelligence. When US and
Israeli intelligence determined that Khamenei would attend a Saturday morning
meeting at his compound, the opportunity was judged unusually favorable. Two
people familiar with the operation told the FT that US intelligence provided
confirmation from a human source that the meeting was proceeding as planned,
a level of certainty required for a target of such magnitude. Israeli
aircraft, reportedly airborne for hours, fired as many as 30 precision
munitions. The strike was carried out in daylight, which the Israeli military
said created tactical surprise despite heightened Iranian alertness. The
Financial Times reports that the assassination was a political decision as
much as a technological feat. Even during last year's 12-day war, when
Israeli strikes killed more than a dozen Iranian nuclear scientists and
senior military officials and disabled air defences through cyber operations
and drones, Israel did not attempt to kill Khamenei. The capability to do so,
however, had been built over decades. Former Mossad official Sima Shine told
the FT that Israel's strategic focus on Iran dates back to a 2001 directive
from then-prime minister Ariel Sharon instructing intelligence chief Meir
Dagan to make the Islamic Republic the priority target. What distinguishes
the latest operation, according to the FT, is the scale of automation. Target
tracking that once required painstaking visual confirmation has increasingly
been handled by algorithm-driven systems parsing billions of data points. One
person familiar with the process described it as an "assembly line with a
single product: targets." Further reading: America Used Anthropic's AI for
Its Attack On Iran, One Day After Banning It

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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