Canadian Press, 8 March 2010: If there’s a signature moment in the plot to kill Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, it’s likely his short elevator ride from the hotel lobby to Room 230. The Hamas commander and a woman hotel clerk enter the elevator and, just before the doors close, two men slip in. They look like any tourist here for the Persian Gulf winter sunshine: baggy shorts, tennis rackets, sneakers and baseball caps. Al-Mabhouh – still wearing the winter jacket he travelled in from Damascus to Dubai – barely gives them a glance.

But Dubai police say he was rubbing shoulders with two members of a surveillance team that would trail him to identify his room in the Al-Bustan Rotana hotel. A few hours later, authorities say, assassins would break in, drug him with a syringe jab and then smother him with a pillow – a killing Dubai’s police chief Lt.-Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim calls “99 per cent, if not 100 per cent” carried out by Israel’s Mossad secret service.

The tactics might look like old school: simple disguises such as wigs, months of scouting missions and a hotel pillow as the murder weapon. But they are thoroughly modern in one important sense. We’re seeing it unfold: on media websites and social networks such as Facebook and YouTube – everything but the killing itself.

Perhaps no other political assassination has ever been so quickly and thoroughly displayed before the public, a testimony to the pervasiveness of surveillance technology and our connected world. . . . .