See this paywalled article/
Cameras and monitoring bodyguards ahead of the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader
When the highly trained, loyal bodyguards and drivers of senior Iranian officials came to work near Pasteur Street in Tehran — where Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in an Israeli air strike on Saturday — the Israelis were watching.
Nearly all the traffic cameras in Tehran had been hacked for years, their images encrypted and transmitted to servers in Tel Aviv and southern Israel, according to two people familiar with the matter.
One camera had an angle that proved particularly useful, said one of the people, allowing them to determine where the men liked to park their personal cars and providing a window into the workings of a mundane part of the closely guarded compound.
Complex algorithms added details to dossiers on members of these security guards that included their addresses, hours of duty, routes they took to work and, most importantly, who they were usually assigned to protect and transport — building what intelligence officers call a “pattern of life”.
This shows that even for dictatorships leaders, mass surveillance is also a threat to their safety (from adervsaries)
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I wouldn’t call it mass surveillance. More like a targeted attack. But i guess the cameras everywhere mass surveillance is what allowed it to happen. Archive
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Mossad and CIA: You can run, but you can’t hide. We’ll get you one way or another.
Understand that war is usually an opportunity to market for the defense industry. These “PR leaks” may exaggerate whatever the orgs want to exaggerate.
There exists managerial class who “enjoy” feeling or being superior, and PR like this tickles their mojo.
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I can’t access your link.
I do consider cameras everywhere mass surveillance personally. But that was exactly my point : Iranian mass surveillance of its citizens allowed a foreign power to gain intelligence of its leaders.
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That archive service recently began blocking major VPNs and proxies, so if you use a VPN, you’ll either need to turn it off or find a server that’s not blocked.
This suggests how the imperfect mass surveillance technologies currently being promoted in EU countries and US states could be exploited by hostile countries.
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I hope @Expert4870 provides original link.
I noticed the Archive was blocking recently and wasn’t sure what was going on. Now I know.
You nailed it. There are no guarantees that adversaries can’t hack cameras as nothing is guaranteed to be unhackable. Apparently, China has the most number of CCTVs installed in the world to surveil its population.
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