Old Fashioned Israeli Spy

This morning, I read in Naharnet that the wife of one of the guards in Parliament Square is an Israeli spy. What most caught my attention was her dastardly mission:

investigators found out that the unidentified officer was not a suspect and instead discovered that the Mossad had recruited his wife around four years ago and tasked her with photographing buildings and institutions that lie near the parliament in downtown Beirut

Photographing buildings and institutions is apparently what spies still do nowadays. My conclusion is that either we caught the world’s lousiest spy, or that the report still didn’t get to the bottom of what that femme fatale is up to. The reason is that the spy industry, like the rest of industries, was disrupted by technology.

Nowadays, you don’t really need to “recruit” people on the ground to take “photographs of buildings”. For a top view of the building, all you need to do is a quick visit to google maps. (you can even play Pac Man on the streets of Beirut, but that’s another story)

But what about the buildings themselves? Let’s forget for a moment that the area outside of parliament is one of the most photographed places in Lebanon. If you really must have up-to-date images of what’s going on around parliament, all you need is instagram and any app that will show the latest instagram posts from a particular geographic location. This one for example. There, the latest selfies and grins with detailed buildings in the background in all their glory. Even Israeli spies can’t do better than this…