The Mahmoud al-Mabhouh Assassination
Remember the Mahmoud al-Mabhouh assassination last January? The police identified 30 suspects, but haven’t been able to find any of them.
Police spent about 10,000 hours poring over footage from some 1,500 security cameras around Dubai. Using face-recognition software, electronic-payment records, receipts and interviews with taxi drivers and hotel staff, they put together a list of suspects and publicized it.
Seems ubiquitous electronic surveillance is no match for a sufficiently advanced adversary.
Will • October 12, 2010 7:01 AM
the general optimism at the time was that the agents had done it all wrong. There were ‘ex-agents’ and other people claiming authority criticizing them for not being savy to the risks of cctv and other bad fieldcraft.
much of the comments on this blog earlier were more circumspect: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/02/al-mabhouh_assa.html