How To 'Reach Out And Touch Somebody' In Gaza

How the Israeli Army manages how to know who, where and how to warn non-combatant Palestinians in Gaza when to get the hell off the phone and out of the building before the Hellfires drop, is eerily similar to the movie, "Eagle Eye:"

"[Apparently] the Israeli Army has "figured out how to separate the civilians from the weapons: call the neighbors and give them ten minutes warning.

"Apparently, by Friday Israel had made at least 9,000 (nine thousand) such phone calls.

"The numbers prove how efficient this has been: prior to the ground invasion, more than 600 targets had been destroyed, fewer than 500 Palestinians killed, and fewer than 100 of those were civilians even by Palestinian and UN reckoning."

Also as apparently, this blogger is an IT ubergeek - NOT that there's anything wrong with that. Jus' sayin'.

For the rest'a'us, let's take a deeeep breath, and read the next paragraph together aloud:

"Israel clearly has created a sophisticated GIS (geographic information system). A system that records tens of thousands of buildings, their location, and their distance from each other. Then there's a database with the names of the tens of thousands of families who live in the buildings, and the phone number of each family. The system has the ability to identify all the families and phone numbers that could be affected by an attack on any given building. Finally, given the numbers involved, there must be a system that automatically makes concurrent phone calls to dozens of families, since everybody has to have the same ten-minute warning.

"Ah, and someone put tens of thousands of piece of information into that database.

"Such a system costs real money, takes time to set up, and since it is obviously operating close to flawlessly, it was tested, fiddled with, tested, fiddled with, and tested again. The purpose, I remind you, is to save the lives of thousands of Palestinians who happen to have murderous neighbors.

Ahh, right, that last sentence.

Turns out there's a pretty cool and constructive use for that paranoid, slacker fever-dream of a plot that that pretty much made up Eagle Eye, after all.

Who knew? Clearly not the PatriotActophobics who made the film.

Read the rest.