- How much of that is true, and how much of that is to cover and protect the actual humans on the ground feeding most of the intelligence?
I doubt they'd let their secret leak so soon into the conflict if it was even half as useful as the articles I read claim. Now on the other hand, if I wanted the Iranian counterintelligence to waste time investigating and even taking the cameras offline ...
- Remember that you can burn human intelligence but you can also burn technical capacity. Israel has shown itself willing to burn technical capacities to strike (see also: the pager attacks).
I would also submit that forcing Iranian traffic engineers to investigate their camera system is probably not a very high priority at Mossad. What is much more valuable is forcing other countries to change over their traffic control system to a new vendor that has been compromised by the Israelis. That is exactly how they achieved the pager compromise that they did— they fomented a crisis which forced adversaries to change their networks to a network that the Israelis controlled. This is more effective if it is not a bluff.
Finally, the intelligence that they describe is most easily explained by the capability that they burned. You cannot have a human intelligence source sit on a street corner like that 24 hours a day in a country like Iran without someone asking questions. You absolutely need someone sitting on that corner 24 hours a day in order to get the kinds of intelligence that they got. You simply cannot collect that with a human source. On the contrary, it is quite easy to imagine how that intelligence could be gathered given only a traffic camera.
- Probably all of it: Cameras are hacked, they got the real info from a human and they want them to be shut down now.
- Good think Flock has such strong E2E encryption and internal controls on who can access camera data.
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