Before the Yom Kippur war in 1973 the IDF soldiers and officers used to stand on the East bank of the Suez Canal calling Egyptian army officers and soldiers by name along with their families names surprisingly in order to prove that the IDF is the best army in this universe that knew everything everywhere.
The intelligence did not take to much long to figure out how the IDF and also Mossad got their info : Al Ahram Obituary pages , the most famous Who is Who pages in Egypt society and the cash cow of the famous newspaper along with its ad. Egyptian families especially the big and rich ones like to show off with their relations through big obituary , it has become a shallow and silly tradition that the longer the obituary is regardless of how expensive it will be , the most prestigious the family is. As personal experience there are still family members who are angry from my grandma on how she dared and published a small obituary for my grandfather in the famous newspaper !!
Anyhow back to the Egyptian-Israeli war years , since then the minister of war had issued an order : No military rank or identity to be revealed in an obituary except by the approval of the intelligence service even if that deceased has left the army for decades.
I think the order or rule will be adopted in the ministry of interior after what Mustafa Hussein has done , Mustafa is a respectable geek who found interesting family connections and relations in the state security at the famous Al Ahram Obituaries page online through Linux and scripts I do not understand. It is really amazing and I bet the geeks at MOI will not understand how Mustafa did it.
Now I believe this family business culture should stop , it is not only about trust but about the fact that may be there are others who deserve that position and do not get because they are not related to general X or general Y , general X wants his nephew whom he probably helped to entered the police academy in the first place.
Its just easy .. I am not as geek as that guy but he uses a tool called 'curl' to download the 'HTML' pages of the news paper then filter names using some tools that any Linux system has such as 'sed' ...
ReplyDeleteits simple but in windows world its impossible
the best thing in linux is you can automate things not like windows every thing is manual via a GUI the linux shell 'bash' make you make some commands in a certain way that automate tasks that may take decades if you did it manually
you are very good blogger i follow your blog every day >>> go ahead
ReplyDeleteEXCLUSIVE as usual Zeinobia ..!!!!
ReplyDelete@anonymous , well it is easy for geeks who use linux for sure but impressive for windows users like me
ReplyDelete@Ibrahim , thank you so much :)
@Akher , well thanks but the exclusivity this time is from the share of Mustafa Hussein
I think this should be generalized for:
ReplyDelete-Police (not state security only)
-Army
-Judges (I expect here we will discover families, clans and tribes!!)
-University Professors, especially Faculties of Medecine
Wow, very very interesting information. Didn't know about the military thing. BTW, Al-Ahram stopped publishing the obituaries online at the beginning of 2010.
ReplyDeleteAnd thanks for the nice words.