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Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon

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Re: Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon

#121

> Palantir ended up having to rent a second-floor building that housed its Tel Aviv office, to accommodate the intelligence analysts who needed tutorials Has anyone here tried using their software? It's salesforce-level fucked. They did a great job spewing lofty concepts, with their ontologies and their kinetic layers, but in the end it all ends up being a giant wormy ERP. There might be one good idea in there (artic…

An ERP where instead of investing in building up your in-house domain experts, your pay consulting fees to train another company's staff on the knowledge, then pay to access it. Crazy how modern companies want to be McFranchise level of capable. What are you adding as a company if you outsource everything that can make your company a differentiator and your company is just plug and play cogs?

You forget that the whole idea that public companies sell on the stock market is that any management, any idiot with an MBA, could just come in and take it over, making roughly the same profit as the people that sold.

If you don't believe that, you shouldn't be investing.

If you're going to make this argument, it'll only apply to private companies in founders' hands, maybe to family businesses, but certainly not to public companies.

Re: Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon

#122
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Targeted attacks against military/militia leadership is not terrorism - almost by definition. If it was just random devices exploding, then sure, that could be considered terrorism. But it wasn't random devices, it was communication devices procured by Hezbollah and directly given by Hezbollah to their own members for their own purposes.

Two things Firstly, generals, like anybody else can be terrorized. Secondly, even if you only kill generals, that doesn't mean you didn't cause terror for everybody else. Imagine for example that Hezbollah found a way to poison the food for Israel's top X military personnel. It would cause a state of emotional terror for many people in Israel about their food safety for decades most likely, even if they weren't in th…

Terrorism doesn't mean "anything that makes someone scared," or else all wars would be acts of terrorism.

There isn't a universally agreed upon definition, but generally it refers to targeting non-combatants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism

For example, when the Allies tried to assassinate Hitler with a smuggled briefcase bomb during WW2, that wasn't terrorism: that was just regular warfare. Hitler was the leader of Germany and directed its military.

Similarly, smuggling pager bombs to members of Hezbollah generally wouldn't qualify as terrorism, since Hezbollah a) is a militia (famously it's the largest non-state militia in the world), and b) was actively fighting a war against Israel — a war that Hezbollah themselves initiated.

Re: Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon

#125

One of the most sucessful integelligence operations ever, absolutely brilliant. And the brilliance in my opinion is that the targeting was not your regular Hizbollah terrorists but only higher ranking members the one who were given the beepers. So basically cutting the head of the snake. I doubt Palantir had any involvement, just trying to get some credit. The operation to attack the supply chain was started long bef…

The brilliance in the targeting was in doing pagers, which are disproportionately carried by doctors and other medical workers. One of the most effective acts of terrorism in history.

> One of the most effective acts of terrorism in history.

It's what "israel" specializes in. When you read the history of "israel", it's literally a series of acts of terrorism.

Re: Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon

#126
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this was a brilliant operation and perfectly lawful. I also think that if Lebanon (not Hezbollah) were in a state of war with Israel, yes, that would (depending on proportionality and target discrimination) be perfectly legal, too.

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The most brilliant part about the civilian casualties from this operation is how many fewer of them there were than there would have been with any alternative means available to Israel.
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