8 ms·
Did Qatar pay a billion dollar ransom?
- philip1209 8y ago> These were obtained by a government hostile to Qatar and passed to the BBC. Israel?
- simbas 8y agosaudis?
- karimdag 8y agoEmiratis ?
- NeutronStar 8y agoIlluminatis ?
- readhn 8y agoKilluminatis?
- sctb 8y agoOne bad turn does not deserve another on this site. Please don't.
- oferzelig 8y agoSealand? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand
- sctb 8y agoSince you keep posting unsubstantively we've banned the account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- rangibaby 8y ago> Shortly after the money was flown to Baghdad, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt began their economic blockade of Qatar. They still accuse Qatar of having a "long history" of financing "terrorism".
- aaron695 8y agoIsrael would not work direct with the Post/BBC. It's pretty amature hour to do so. What about Tunisia, they share the mobile network, friends, but not happy about Qatar funding terrorists. I think it would be unethical for the Post to have worked with direct enemies of Qatar and not mentioned it. Their article doesn't say it's an enemy state, unlike the BBC. UAE have hacked Qatar before (Or outsourced it), but this is different and I can't see UAE working direct with the Post.
- sandworm101 8y agoThis 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.
- kurthr 8y agoI 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-national-pride-with-personal-vanity/2018/07/16/d8c8605e-8927-11e8-8aea-86e88ae760d8_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-replaces-natio...
- ben_w 8y agoWhile the type of person unavoidably makes some difference, it’s exaggeration to say it’s the only thing which matters. The structure of a government can require consensus. To use a named rather than implied current example, this is why the UK government spent the last two years paralysed over which Brexit to choose, either “hard” or “soft” — no consensus; and also why the process started at all despite the lack of specificity — 498/114 supermajority consensus in favour of some form of Brexit.
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoGood 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)
- makapuf 8y agoI'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.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- homero 8y agoIf Qatar wanted to support terrorism, it's plausible the terrorists could pretend to kidnap those people. The hostages would suffer voluntarily due to religious reasons to make it look legit.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoThere's a lot of underhanded ways to fund terrorism that don't involve having your family kidnapped, like the US did with the Taliban by calling them freedom fighters or something against Russia - see also Rambo. It's easy for rich people or even a country to 'lose' money.
- peterlk 8y agoThis story reminds me of a book that I read a few months ago called "Never Split the Difference". It's a negotiation book by a former FBI hostage negotiator. I think the context of that book offers some color to this story, and I'd highly recommend it. EDIT: I think the contextual question that arises from that book is: How does the idea of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" play out in multi-sided negotiations with such high stakes?
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoCould you provide a short summary? I've never heard of it.
- peterlk 8y agoIt 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 can't split humans. The job of a hostage negotiator isn't to get half a human back by compromising. The negotiator has to get 100% of what they want, or the mission is failed.
- johnchristopher 8y agoThe winner takes it all strategy has short-comings though.
- peterlk 8y agoMuch 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
- paidleaf 8y agoSo 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 the BBC again. What's even more frustrating is that the BBC is government funded and not dependent on advertisers and they have no reason to clickbait.
- cheez 8y agoIt's an interesting story. The only reason the information is out because a government hostile to the parties released the information.
- 21 8y agoHow do you even authenticate the info if it's from a hostile government?
- londons_explore 8y agoQatar not denying it is half way to authenticating it. Audio recordings get you 90% of the way. Carefully checking transcripts and metadata for errors gets you further still. Managing to get the same transcripts from the intelligence agencies of another country (either legitimately by asking, or covertly through "journalistic contacts") takes you to 99%... You can never be 100% sure, but presumably the above met the BBC's standards for reporting.
- jhpriestley 8y agoIt 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.
- dev_dull 8y ago> 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.
- walrus01 8y agoAll 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://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens-affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2%80%9305 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2... https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/greek_wiretappi_1.html 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.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- londons_explore 8y agoBet 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.
- defen 8y agoHow did Hezbollah AND fundamentalist Salafi groups end up with the money? In my limited understanding those two groups don't like each other. Or is that enough money for them to put aside their differences?
- pbarnes_1 8y agoI stopped reading at this bit: "These were obtained by a government hostile to Qatar and passed to the BBC." Uhuh. So... how did you verify them?
- talltimtom 8y agoUhh RTFA? “Qatari officials accept that the texts and voicemails are genuine, though they believe they have been edited "very selectively" to give a misleading impression.”
- flukus 8y agoAre they launching another world cup bid?