[HN Gopher] Israel Spent Years Hacking Tehran Traffic Cameras to...
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       Israel Spent Years Hacking Tehran Traffic Cameras to Track Khamenei
        
       Author : gambutin
       Score  : 29 points
       Date   : 2026-03-04 19:40 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (thedefensepost.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (thedefensepost.com)
        
       | quantified wrote:
       | Good think Flock has such strong E2E encryption and internal
       | controls on who can access camera data.
        
       | lbreakjai wrote:
       | 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 ...
        
         | 49421 wrote:
         | Probably all of it: Cameras are hacked, they got the real info
         | from a human and they want them to be shut down now.
        
         | adampunk wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
         | If it's from Israel, it can't be trusted.
        
       | mdni007 wrote:
       | Good thing Isreal is our greatest ally. If they were our enemy
       | they'd be doing this to Americans
        
         | cute_boi wrote:
         | they might be doing it, we never know.
        
         | xenospn wrote:
         | If you think every nation isn't doing it to every other nation,
         | constantly, I have a bridge to sell you (cheap!).
        
         | ahartmetz wrote:
         | That is how some NSA-type agencies work around the prohibition
         | of spying on their own citizens: they have the agency of
         | another country do it. I think some also just ignore the
         | prohibition. The German BND has the "space theory", the idea
         | that the data might have theoretically been transmitted by
         | satellites, which makes it okay to intercept.
        
         | victorbjorklund wrote:
         | Wait until you find out what Americans are doing to everyone
         | else on earth (and sometimes to themselves). Americans should
         | sit down. Don't talk about surveillance and spies as if
         | Americans have never ever spied or used survilliance.
        
       | aussieguy1234 wrote:
       | These types of cameras are quite useful to authoritarian regimes
       | for tracking dissidents and tracking protests.
       | 
       | So it's possible the release of this knowledge could be a ploy to
       | encourage the Iranians to shut them down.
        
       | pier25 wrote:
       | Anyone remembers stuxnet? Apparently part of a US and Israel
       | joint operation called Olympic Games [1].
       | 
       | In the documentary Zero Days some anonymous source mentions there
       | was another project within Olympic Games called Nitro Zeus[2].
       | This was a complete takeover of Iran's infrastructure.
       | 
       | I wonder if these hacks we're seeing are the remains of Nitro
       | Zeus.
       | 
       | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Olympic_Games
       | 
       | [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitro_Zeus
        
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       (page generated 2026-03-04 23:01 UTC)