All the little bombs
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken.
Remember that time when Israel set up a front company to build pagers, walkie-talkies and some solar equipment branded by official makers and turned batches of them into little improvised explosive devices to be shipped around Lebanon in the hopes they would be with Hezbollah fighters when they went off? Yeah, that was last week’s news.
Everything worth reporting on this has been reported, so in lieu of regurgitating anything about Israel’s scaled-up Unabomber operation, here’s the best of what I’ve seen so far…
- Turning Everyday Gadgets into Bombs is a Bad Idea, by Bunnie Huang
- Mystery Profile Linked to Hungarian Firm Implicated in Exploding Pagers, by Foeke Postma, Logan Williams and Jake Godin for Bellingcat
- Paging The Hague: Israel’s Exploding Electronics Might Be War Crimes, by Jonah Valdez for The Intercept
- How Israel Built a Modern-Day Trojan Horse: Exploding Pagers, by Sheera Frenkel, Ronen Bergman, and Hwaida Saad for the NYTimes (gift link)
- Pagers attack brings to life long-feared supply chain threat, by Eva Dou and Gerrit De Vynck for WaPo (gift link)
It’s already moving down into the memory hole as each week out of the region new horrors emerge. But in Israel’s war against Gaza and now in what’s basically an extension of that in southern Lebanon, it has moved the overton window a few times in dangerous ways that will change the face of wars around the world. This latest move has been seen as nearly unanimously as another violation of international law by the Israeli government, and a tactic that is more on par with what any terrorist organisation would consider to be a huge victory. It’s been creepy the number of news outlets and pundits somehow hailing this as a cunning, clever or even especially “targeted” attack, it’s anything but. Had this been carried out by Iran against Israeli military commanders The U.S. would be joining Israel in a regional war right now.
This has not just been an attack on Hezbollah, but an attack on entire supply chains of technology and making everything from the jurisdictions where they were assembled or shipped complicit. It highlights several weaknesses in procurement and ensuring who are the third parties that build the technology we use. The company Israel created to make gadgets that exploded was also producing ordinary versions of the same things (in any cover story, you often also have to do the actual work to look legitimate). Are we sure anyone didn’t get shipped a device from the wrong batch?
I think hardware hacker Bunnie Haung gets it most correct as to the risk here: “I fear that if we do not universally and swiftly condemn the practice of turning everyday gadgets into bombs, we risk legitimizing a military technology that can literally bring the front line of every conflict into your pocket, purse or home.”
