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Did Qatar pay a billion dollar ransom?

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Did Qatar pay a billion dollar ransom?

#31

Post by jhpriestley »

paidleaf wrote: post #26

So did they or didn't they? Are they asking the readers? Is this our homework assignment that we are supposed to answer and turn in to the bbc? Can the news start reporting on facts? Read the article only to find out that we don't know who the kidnappers are, if and how much they got, how much cash qatar sent to iraq, etc. Whenever I read articles like this, it leaves me angry and wanting to never read anything from…

It would be irresponsible of BBC to simply relay the viewpoint of a hostile state intelligence service without skepticism or framing, or giving the Qataris a chance to have their say.

Sorry, understanding the world requires engagement and judgment. Sometimes there's a lot of evidence pointing one way, but it's been manipulated and the other side is actually correct. When news organizations try to boil down the complexity to simple answers it doesn't go well (see: Iraqi WMDs).

In this case, the Qatari story is pretty ridiculous. They say they talked to terrorists about a ransom, then flew a large sum of cash into Iraq in secret, and then that large sum of cash was taken by some people in black masks, and then they got their hostages back. But it wasn't a hostage payment and terrorists didn't get it, it's being held in an Iraqi bank for development or something. This is a pretty far-fetched story and they probably did pay a large ransom, perhaps $1 billion or perhaps something smaller or larger, but in the same ballpark.

Re: Did Qatar pay a billion dollar ransom?

#32

Post by forapurpose »

makapuf wrote: post #22
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good systems are resilient to bad leaders. See the Roman Empire or England for example, neither has any shortage of bad emperors/kings and both avoided violent regime changes or subjugation by a foreign power for many hundreds of years (and counting in England's case)

I'll go further and say that if there is a system, it's precisely to be resilient to bad leaders. If leaders can effectively lead, why have a system over them ? e.g. a system that works when everyone acts out of good will is redundant.

> If leaders can effectively lead, why have a system over them ?

Do you mean, 'if the leader is perfect, why not give them absolute power?' The problems with that question seem obvious to me.

Re: Did Qatar pay a billion dollar ransom?

#33

Post by dev_dull »

> These were obtained by a government hostile to Qatar and passed to the BBC.

How long until governments with access to required backdoors just start openly blackmailing citizens of “hostile” countries?

Without a doubt it’s already happening. Resist all back doors.

Re: Did Qatar pay a billion dollar ransom?

#34

Post by forapurpose »

kurthr wrote: post #12
sandworm101 wrote: post #9

This is why government by royal families doesn't work. When the state and the family are the same thing, the inevitable family crisis become a national crisis. A billion-dollar ransom that then sparks a trade war? This is a group of families fighting a petty grudge match against a background of slight religious differences, reminiscent of the worst of the Tudors.

I think it only matters what type of people are in charge. Democracy won't protect your country, only whether those who have taken an oath to defend the rule of law, their country, and their vote, actually do. See recent events. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-replaces-natio...

> I think it only matters what type of people are in charge. Democracy won't protect your country, only whether those who have taken an oath to defend the rule of law, their country, and their vote, actually do.

I think that citizens in a democracy have the power to protect themselves by voting and taking other political actions. The tools of democracy, unused, are insufficient.

At the same time there seems to be a very high correlation between the system of government and the quality of leaders. Trump is a problem but he stands out as an exception in U.S. history. The leaders of mature democracies seem much higher quality than those of other forms of governments, especially over time.

Also, institutions have a large effect. Their power isn't absolute, but the institutions in the US government are well-established and support the rule of law; they can't be changed overnight. Those institutions are protecting Americans from much worse (though they are also failing to do all they need to).

Re: Did Qatar pay a billion dollar ransom?

#35

Post by walrus01 »

dev_dull wrote: post #33

> These were obtained by a government hostile to Qatar and passed to the BBC. How long until governments with access to required backdoors just start openly blackmailing citizens of “hostile” countries? Without a doubt it’s already happening. Resist all back doors.

All of the gulf nation states make use of ZTE, Huawei and other Chinese phone system 'core' equipment for SS7, SMS, and for their mobile carriers' LTE networks. The "lawful intercept" abilities built into these systems, being designed for sale both domestically in China and to authoritarian governments around the world, are quite thorough.

Not that the intercept abilities in Alcatel/Lucent/Nokia/Ericsson equipment is much less robust, it's just not as commonly used in these environments.

Here's a really old but reasonably well documented instance of the same type of event:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens-affair

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2...

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/greek_wiretap...

In the case originally referenced, I would be totally unsurprised that some other nation-state has inserted an advanced persistent threat into the SMS core infrastructure of Qatar's telecoms. One of the reasons why proper end to end crypto (Signal, etc) is so important. At least if you can be reasonably assured of the security and OS of the endpoint devices, you don't have to trust the network in between them.

Re: Did Qatar pay a billion dollar ransom?

#36

Post by dragonwriter »

forapurpose wrote: post #34
kurthr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it only matters what type of people are in charge. Democracy won't protect your country, only whether those who have taken an oath to defend the rule of law, their country, and their vote, actually do. See recent events. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-replaces-natio...

> I think it only matters what type of people are in charge. Democracy won't protect your country, only whether those who have taken an oath to defend the rule of law, their country, and their vote, actually do. I think that citizens in a democracy have the power to protect themselves by voting and taking other political actions. The tools of democracy, unused, are insufficient. At the same time there seems to be a v…

> The leaders of mature democracies seem much higher quality than those of other forms of governments, especially over time.

The quality of leaders you must have for a mature (and thus taken for granted) democracy to survive as a democracy increases with maturity, so this is arguably simple survivorship bias: democracies that get poor leaders when the people have lost the immediate visceral understanding of the fragility and specialness of democratic institutions tend very strongly to stop being democracies.

> Also, institutions have a large effect. Their power isn't absolute, but the institutions in the US government are well-established and support the rule of law.

Do they? There are certainly many executive branch institutions that support the rule of the way things have traditionally been done in those institutions (which, particularly within the national security apparatus, may not reflect the law even when it also does not reflect the whim of the current chief executive. And even where they might (as I think a good argument can be made for the professional core, and even much of the subcabinet political leadership, of the DoJ and FBI) support the rule of law, they are extremely subject to disruption by the President via directed personnel change.

It's certainly not clear that legislative branch institutions support the rule of law at the present time; arguably, the legislative majority (at least in the House) has been openly aligned with the President against those institutions interested in the rule of law.

The judiciary is what's left, but this President has been making appointments there at a much higher rate than most recent ones (there's been attention to his second Supreme Court pick recently, but the pace of lower court appointments has been quite high.)

Re: Did Qatar pay a billion dollar ransom?

#37

Post by dragonwriter »

kurthr wrote: post #12
sandworm101 wrote: post #9

This is why government by royal families doesn't work. When the state and the family are the same thing, the inevitable family crisis become a national crisis. A billion-dollar ransom that then sparks a trade war? This is a group of families fighting a petty grudge match against a background of slight religious differences, reminiscent of the worst of the Tudors.

I think it only matters what type of people are in charge. Democracy won't protect your country, only whether those who have taken an oath to defend the rule of law, their country, and their vote, actually do. See recent events. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-replaces-natio...

> Democracy won't protect your country,

It may, but democracy goes beyond mere voting.

Re: Did Qatar pay a billion dollar ransom?

#38

Post by londons_explore »

dev_dull wrote: post #33

> These were obtained by a government hostile to Qatar and passed to the BBC. How long until governments with access to required backdoors just start openly blackmailing citizens of “hostile” countries? Without a doubt it’s already happening. Resist all back doors.

Bet that government was the UK, as part of the Five Eyes program, which has significant surveillance hardware in the middle east.

Almost certainly the USA used that equipment and grabbed those transcripts to give to close ally Saudi Arabia, who used them to turn states against Qatar.

The first world war was caused by the killing of a duke, the third world war will be caused by a clumsily worded text message from a president to his wife, misinterpreted by another powerful nation state.

Re: Did Qatar pay a billion dollar ransom?

#39

Post by dmix »

forapurpose wrote: post #32
makapuf wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll go further and say that if there is a system, it's precisely to be resilient to bad leaders. If leaders can effectively lead, why have a system over them ? e.g. a system that works when everyone acts out of good will is redundant.

> If leaders can effectively lead, why have a system over them ? Do you mean, 'if the leader is perfect, why not give them absolute power?' The problems with that question seem obvious to me.

Which is why the OP proposed that (rhetorical) question... we have systems in place because we can't expect perfection, nor should the system require all actors to be acting in good faith to function.

So far I haven't seen any evidence that this has not been the case in the US (that the system of controls has failed or has been circumvented). Unless of course you take rhetoric at face value over measuring real-life actions and realistic outcomes, as is popular in partisan politics these days.

Re: Did Qatar pay a billion dollar ransom?

#40

Post by peterlk »

johnchristopher wrote: post #24
peterlk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It lays out many of the basic principles by which the FBI negotiates with kidnappers. The author writes that the book is meant to first lay out the foundations, and then build on them to give the reader a toolbox (arsenal?) of negotiation strategies. An argument in the book is that these strategies work in business as well - I find this argument compelling. The title of the book is in reference to the fact that you c…

The winner takes it all strategy has short-comings though.

Much of the time "winner takes all" is a fallacy. What people say they want and what they actually want are different things. People taking hostages claim they want money; what they actually want is the stuff that money will get them. If you keep digging, often there may be even deeper motivations. Don't split the difference; find out what people actually want
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