OLD SCHOOL: Hamas fooled Israel’s advanced surveillance by doing all of its planning offline, retired US general says. “What Hamas did, what their leadership did, was apparently they moved off of the normal modern communications links that we take for granted every day, and went back to what you did in the 19th century: face-to-face meetings, they went and used couriers instead of going in and using the telephone or the cell phone.”

Human intel is more difficult and much more dangerous to collect than signals intel but there’s no replacing it.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Can I call it or what? “There must have been plenty of communications, of course, but maybe they used couriers, carrier pigeons or some other nonelectronic means. Electronic spying doesn’t get everything, and people tend to rely on it too much.”