

Ask HN: Assassination Robots - DanielBMarkham

Looks like slow news day to me, so I have a question to the HN community.<p>Last week there was a story about a hit team in Dubai that got tracked from multiple CCTV cameras as they did their job. It was a large team and performed a very-well coordinated assassination.<p>It occurs to me that such hit jobs with big teams are a thing of the past due to constant surveillance, and we've probably seen the last one. That means that a shift might be coming, with lower-cost disruptive technology doing the work that highly-trained paramilitary people used to do.<p>We're already seeing a lot of recon being done by man-portable UAVs in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, we're seeing some very complex IEDs being created by insurgents using off-the-shelf technology.<p>So, <i>without getting into the politics of assassination</i>, what do you guys think the next step in technology will be? Small UAVs with sniper rifles? Pre-positioned automated sniper rifles? Robot bombs disguised to look like ordinary street items?<p>If speculating makes you uncomfortable please don't participate, and I'm not crazy about working all the bugs out of these ideas, but I am interested in what sorts of unique ways you guys can come up with for whacking somebody. Note that effectiveness and anonymity are the scoring criteria. And let's stipulate that the goal has to be to whack one person with a very low chance of whacking anybody else by accident, so IED's aren't going to work.
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Semiapies
I think your premise is wrong - constant surveillance did jack-all to prevent
this assassination and will continue to be little deterrent. Surveillance
doesn't often detect crimes/attacks before or even during their commission.
It's primarily good for piecing events together after-the-fact.

Until behavior-analysis and/or facial recognition become ready for primetime
so that a hotel security's gets an alert saying, "possible organized covert
activity by these people", such operations will only continue.

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DanielBMarkham
Really?

I was under the impression that something like 25 agents had their covers
blown by having their pictures in every major newspaper in the world.

If the Israelis did it (which looks very likely), they sure are acting like it
was a major disaster for their intelligence services. There have been calls
for people to resign, editorials about what went wrong, etc.

The problem as I read it is that this was conducted like a military operation
-- probably very similar to the way operations are conducted in the Gaza
strip. Only in a modern western city, you leave a lot more dirt behind you
than you do in a poor slum somewhere.

That's just what I've gathered from half a dozen articles or so, though.
Perhaps you are right: perhaps these same guys can be effective in other
operations. I doubt it, though.

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Semiapies
" _Really?_ "

Is the target dead? Were they stopped?

Really.

 _"I was under the impression that something like 25 agents had their covers
blown by having their pictures in every major newspaper in the world."_

And their names are...?

Considering that a number of analysts point out that the involved people
appeared aware of, but not concerned by, the security cameras, it seems
unlikely that any exposure was unexpected.

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DanielBMarkham
_Considering that a number of analysts point out that the involved people
appeared aware of, but not concerned by, the security cameras, it seems
unlikely that any exposure was unexpected._

I think that's the key question. From what I've heard, the assumption is that
they never expected the Dubai authorities to connect up all the videos. After
all, the hit was staged to look like a natural death.

Remember the goal isn't just to kill the guy. It's to kill him preferably by
making it look like a natural death and definitely by not getting your face on
the nightly news. Ideally nobody ever suspects anything so nobody goes back
and pieces together the video.

