Israel (via Unit 8200/Mossad cyber ops) spent years hacking into Tehran’s public traffic cameras and related feeds specifically to track the daily movements and bodyguards of Iranian leaders, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. This intel directly fed into recent assassination/strike planning. They found the useful traffic cameras and used those to track Khamenei, IRGC and others.
Everyone spies on everyone. It is called Mutual Assured Espionage. The big five (US, China, Russia, Israel, UK) all play at this level.
Israel penetrated Iranian (and reportedly other) feeds.
US has China feeds and China has US Feeds especially via Chinese hardware.
China has US infrastructure access.
How Screwed Are Countries Without Sophisticated Cyber Capabilities?
Very.
In a real shooting war, real-time movement tracking via hacked traffic cams, city CCTV, private security systems, and even webcams becomes a massive asymmetric advantage.
Troop convoys, leader movements, supply lines, civilian panic — all visible if the adversary owns the cameras.
Blackmail/flipping are standard operating procedure. Intelligence agencies have been turning people with kompromat (sexual, financial, family) from hacked cameras/webcams for decades. The footage does not even need to be live as archived recordings work fine.
There are no secure cameras. Anyone a major power cares about can be seen. The only real question is whether the target is high-value enough for a nation-state to burn resources maintaining access. For leaders, military sites, or key infrastructure? Often yes. For random street cams in a small neutral country? Probably not — until the shooting starts.
Public traffic cams are often the easiest targets — many stream openly online or use default passwords. Script-kiddie level hacks are common. Nation-states just do it quieter and deeper and have AI facial recognition and processing. This is part of what the Palantir AI does…process the info to get useful results.
Chinese CCTV & Surveillance
China’s domestic Skynet/Hikvision/Dahua system is one of the most pervasive on Earth — but it is extremely locked down internally. Foreign access (US/Israel) is harder but not impossible. The US has hacked Chinese networks repeatedly in the Snowden-era and later.
China is so paranoid it just banned multiple US and Israeli cybersecurity products in domestic firms over backdoor fears.
Chinese-made cameras exported globally (including to the US) are the bigger vector for Beijing than foreigners hacking Beijing’s own feeds.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Very interesting. I just assumed this has always gone at the government amd military level after a certain point in history.
Thankfully there always is and always will be pushback against this happening at a citizen to citizen level. The powers that be might not like it, but they’ll always be forced to accept it.