Inside the plan to kill Ali Khamenei

FT · Mehul Srivastava · James Shotter · Neri Zilber · Steff Chávez

This is mostly an article about the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but I was drawn to the intelligence operation, namely the construction of “patterns of life” through hacked traffic cameras.

Nearly all the traffic cameras in Tehran had been hacked for years, their images encrypted and transmitted to servers in Tel Aviv and southern Israel, according to two people familiar with the matter.

One camera had an angle that proved particularly useful, said one of the people, allowing them to determine where the men liked to park their personal cars and providing a window into the workings of a mundane part of the closely guarded compound.

Complex algorithms added details to dossiers on members of these security guards that included their addresses, hours of duty, routes they took to work and, most importantly, who they were usually assigned to protect and transport — building what intelligence officers call a “pattern of life”.