By Deivison Faustino and Walter Lippold
Translated by Adilson Skalski Zabiela
Originally published in Portuguese at Boitempo’s blog
How is it possible, and what does it mean, that pagers and walkie-talkies exploded simultaneously in Lebanon? We are at one of those historical moments that can be considered a “point of no return”: widespread climate collapses, mass unemployment intensified by artificial intelligence (AI), the platformization of politics under the technical and ideological hegemony of the far right, and the frightening sophistication of death technologies. We urgently need to discuss the geopolitical dimension and the material basis of electronic and digital technologies.
Last Tuesday, the world was surprised by the news of a terrorist attack carried out by the State of Israel that injured over 2,800 people and killed twenty[1]—including Syrian and Lebanese civilians and militants of the paramilitary Islamic party Hezbollah—through the coordinated explosion of AR-924 model pagers. The devices were distributed by the organization itself to militants to avoid interception of their cell phones, something known to be possible since the mass digital surveillance revelations offered by Snowden regarding Project PRISM in 2013. There is at least one child victim: nine-year-old Fatima Abdullah, who was hit by the explosion in the village of Saraain, Lebanon[2].
The next day, while we were distracted by the illegal return of X (formerly Twitter) to the Brazilian internet, the world was again surprised by news of new fatal explosions in Lebanon, this time involving IC-V82 VHF walkie-talkies manufactured by the Japanese corporation ICOM Inc., also used by Hezbollah militants and Lebanese state authorities. There are reports of other devices, such as solar panel systems that exploded in the Lebanese organization’s bases, as well as photos of biometric identification devices[3]. What is happening? How is this possible, and what does it tell us about contemporary capitalist geopolitics and its infrastructural basis? In Digital Colonialism: For a Hacker-Fanonian Critique[4], we draw attention to the centrality of the material and infrastructural dimension of digital technologies. Without disregarding the decisive importance of the logical layers and internet applications for understanding the ongoing social transformations, we argue that the digital is also real (material) and, therefore, subject to the causal laws of physics and political economy:
Contrary to intuition, the virtual is not the opposite of the real nor can it be confused with the digital. The digital is the storage and processing of data in computers in the form of codes representing letters, numbers, images, sounds, etc., while the virtual is a potential attribute of reality that can be grasped by the work of thought. (Faustino, Lippold, 2023)
At the same time, we try to demonstrate that, with the rapid development of digital technologies, contemporary wars have new and more effective technologies of destruction and death that allow a new repertoire of cyberattacks both on virtual environments (surveillance and espionage) and physical ones (attacks on military and nuclear facilities). We know that “the Government’s Robocop is cold, feels no pity…” (Racionais MC’s, 1997). The study of the cyborgization of war and its peak development with the introduction of drones on the battlefield is not new (Chamayou, 2015). However, the Palestinian genocide—the first genocide accompanied and ignored in “real time” via the internet—has prompted us to revisit the implications of these innovations for forms of surveillance and mass murder. More than that, it raises the suspicion that we are facing a new sociotechnical level of genocide practice, which demands attention.
The Sociotechnical Conditions of Genocide
Far from a technophobic stance but attentive to the different ways humans use technical and social means to meet certain needs, it must be recognized that in capitalism, the development of productive capacities ends up being directed more toward human self-destruction than toward satisfying needs.
From Portuguese and Spanish expropriation of Indigenous lands to the genocide of the Herero in Namibia, from the Nazi Shoah against European Jews to the current Palestinian genocide committed by the State of Israel, the development of sociotechnical means has represented an expansion of the capacity to kill. Mass murder is not possible without the existence of a massive death industry that always integrates the most sophisticated weaponry and informational technologies.
“We can begin to show the relationship between large corporations and the destruction of freedoms by looking at the Nazi period. There is consistent evidence of the decisive importance of IBM’s Hollerith punch card technology for executing the Holocaust. IBM codes were engraved on the arms of Nazi prisoners and allowed the identification, selection, and massive control of the extermination process. But the current and persistent demolition of rights is not as evident as that practiced during the Nazi period.” (Silveira, 2015, p. 12).
Some recent examples are the use of the Lavender AI in selecting Palestinian targets based on data profiling collected from digital platforms provided to the Israeli army, and the dissemination of viruses in enemy military installations. News of AI use in wars has been increasingly frequent, as have cyberattacks, and the first with great destructive potential were executed by the Stuxnet, Flame, Duqu, and Gauss viruses, used in the early 2010s to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.
In terms of cyberweapons and electronic warfare, Israel is a technological vanguard that uses Palestine, but also Lebanon and Syria, as a nefarious laboratory to develop and showcase its latest-generation weapons. Some examples are the Scorpius electronic warfare device and the Harop drone from Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI)[5], as well as the Lavender AI—produced by Unit 8200[6]—and Pegasus, the infamous spyware negotiated by the Bolsonaro government with NSO, an Israeli company.
The ability to disseminate technology, even that considered obsolete, allows innovation in attack techniques. It is certainly an act of state terrorism that, despite all media ideology, dehumanizes the targets to revel in the efficiency of the attack. We have heard the term “surgical war” since 1991, with the invasion of Iraq and later the wars in the former Yugoslavia. These terms aim to delude public opinion into thinking that only the “bad guys” will be neutralized, within the U.S. Manichaean logic. “Project power without projecting vulnerability” (the motto of dronification and many remote attacks) (Chamayou, 2015). What we have actually seen is precisely the precision in destroying civilian lives, public facilities, and vital infrastructures in enemy territory.
But what does this have to do with pagers and walkie-talkies tearing apart militants and civilians on the streets of Lebanon? Since Snowden’s revelations, it is known that cell phones are vulnerable. Mobile devices can be monitored by political agents of all kinds for data collection purposes that allow for targeted propaganda, behavior profiling, and even georeferenced location of military targets. The subversive militant who ignores this technical reality—in war contexts of high geopolitical interests—is, above all, an easy target.
Concern about this fact increased in Palestine when it was revealed that Israel was using artificial intelligence programs to select possible targets for automated military drones. The AI program scanned social networks in search of keywords considered subversive or users’ contact with members of enemy political/military groups to eliminate them.
Once identified and selected, targets were tracked by facial biometrics and instant geolocation—provided by their cell phones—to then be attacked. If there was a target in a ten-story building, the entire building would be—and was—bombed. This process not only decimated tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank but also wiped these cities and their physical infrastructure off the map.
With this scenario in mind, Islamic leaders began seeking alternative means of communication. As far as is known, Hezbollah leaders prohibited their cadres from using cell phones and offered pagers and walkie-talkies as an alternative—which are still widely used in countries where access to cutting-edge informational technology is still a privilege of a few[7]. But the Islamic organization did not count on a completely unexpected factor: the possibility of Israeli intervention in the mobile devices’ production chain.
The pagers and walkie-talkies exploded, injuring thousands and killing more than ten people in the first wave, fourteen in the second, leaving hundreds in critical condition with severe injuries, putting the Lebanese population in panic. Rather than a cyberattack that hacked device hardware to overheat them or batteries programmed to explode after a certain cycle, we can call it an operation of logistical infiltration for sabotage.
But How Was This Possible?
Much remains to be explained, but apparently, we are facing sabotage in the supply chain of parts and components of pagers, supposedly manufactured by Gold Apollo, from Taiwan. The company soon announced that this batch was made in Budapest, Hungary, by BAC Consulting KFT, an acronym from the name of its founder and CEO, scientist Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono. The Orbán government denied that the pagers were in Hungary[8] and that BAC is only a commercial intermediary[9].
Initially, it was suspected to be a cyberattack that hacked the devices’ hardware to overheat them or that the batteries were programmed to explode after a certain cycle. The AR-924 pagers have a lithium battery that lasts 85 days, rechargeable via USB, so they are used not only by militants but also by civilians due to constant power outages[10]. But it’s unlikely that they all discharged at the same rate for thousands of people.
The most probable scenario is that a charge of one to three grams of pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) was injected into the lithium-ion battery or a component of the board at the behest of Israeli intelligence during the manufacturing process at some point in the supply chain[11]. Probably, the synchronized explosion was remotely triggered via radio signal.
This differs from the historic Stuxnet attack, recognized in 2010, where cyber technology sought kinetic effects. The target of Stuxnet, produced by the United States and Israel, was to control the digital programs of uranium enrichment centrifuges in Iran. But the plan backfired, according to the documentary Zero Days[12] (2016); the virus, with modifications made by Israel, got out of control and ended up infecting the digital logistics chains of the attacker itself, in this case, the USA.
The transition from cybernetic to kinetic is not simple. If it were, with the advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT), it would be possible for smart refrigerators, smart lamps, smart devices controlled remotely with AI to become weapons of war. Perhaps it already is if we agree that technology is war and politics by other means, but here we are not dealing with a weapon in the sense we are analyzing in this article.
It’s important to remember that, although they work together, electronic warfare differs from cyber warfare. The first signs of electronic warfare were in 1899, in the Anglo-Boer War on African soil, with interference in Morse code transmission via telegraph. Later, with the use of broadcasting in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, they began using jamming or interference in radio wave transmission, disrupting radio signals. Fanon, in Sociology of a Revolution (1959), analyzes the jamming used by French colonialists to attack broadcasts from the rebel radio “The Voice of Fighting Algeria.” We can say that electronic warfare and colonialism are old acquaintances.
This type of attack, which aims to hit soldiers and militants through their equipment, killing or severely injuring them, resembles the use of so-called “spiked ammo,” or explosive ammunition, which was infiltrated through the supply chains of state and non-state actors. When triggered, the ammunition explodes the weapon and the hands of the operator. Weapons like rifles, grenade launchers, and mortars are the most known for applying this type of sabotage. The spiked ammo technique was first used by the English in Africa, in the territories of present-day Zimbabwe, to hit the Matabele and Shona in 1896. Used in World War II (1939–1945), it became more known in the Vietnam War, used by the United States (Project Eldest Son), and recently in the Syrian War. The use of spiked ammo is part of what is called unconventional warfare.
The simultaneous explosion of pagers and walkie-talkies inaugurated a new stage in the capitalist necrotechnological race because it revives old electronic warfare at a new level that combines interference in the device’s production chain with social and logistical engineering. This allowed the altered devices—whose components were produced in different countries—to reach the targets and explode at the desired moment. It is suspected that the bombs were triggered by a radio signal emitted by Hezbollah’s own command. The connection of this signal with the explosive outcome still needs to be studied but already points to new possibilities of orchestrated deaths by the great capitalist powers.
What Lessons Can We Draw from This Event?
If in times of peace the dependence on foreign technology, within the frameworks of imperialism and digital colonialism, directly harms national sovereignty and the self-determination of peoples, now we explicitly know the threat of this dependence during war. The warlike-technological race is not limited to software but also occurs in terms of hardware. Let us not forget the most instructive phrase of Google’s then leaders, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen: “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and security companies will be to the twenty-first century” (Cf. Assange, 2015, p. 40), declaring the new geopolitical role of big techs.
Electronic warfare, cyber warfare, and these new “unconventional” attacks have their materiality, permeated by the spheres of capital production and circulation, their logical chains, and “shadow” companies that apparently barely know what subcontractors do in their name. The hardware logistics chain of electronic components requires means of production—that is, raw materials, tools, labor, and the digital cloud that can only exist through this process. For the ethereal digital cloud to exist, it is necessary to emit steam from the cooling needed to contain the overheating of processors and boards.
Among the fantasies of our time is the denial of the ubiquity of capital and the materiality implicit in the sociometabolic mode of reproduction. According to some prominent intellectuals, the capitalist mode of production is experiencing a kind of neo-feudal regression, or techno-feudalism that profits from value through the monetization of intangibles or in circulation itself—inviting Marxists to abandon “factory thinking.” However, as Terezinha Ferrari argues, the factory has not ceased to exist but has expanded, manufacturing the city and increasingly substantial fractions of private life (Faustino, Lippold, 2023).
Ferrari argues that the introduction of computerization and robotics in the capitalist production process allowed not the much-talked-about overcoming of the Fordist production line but the synchronization of social work times to enable the articulation of different productive units in a geographical context where public roads are converted into open-air production lines. Not by chance, the quintessential ideological slogan of the fabricalization of the city is the famous “Just in time” created by Toyota Motor Corporation in the 1940s and 1950s, adopted as an ideological mantra of flexible accumulation. The explosions in Lebanon and Syria, in a kind of fabricalization of war, seem to realize this mantra by inaugurating the just-in-time explosion. The event places us before the phenomenon of manipulation and social engineering of insurgency itself: Israel, with its technological vanguard in digital surveillance, along with the conditions of the Lebanese power grid, led Hezbollah and civilians to circumvent the use of cell phones, reverting to devices like pagers and walkie-talkies. To what extent all this was part of the plan, only time will tell. But the case raises the alert to the complexity of the technical and social means employed.
Notes:
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce9jglrnmkvo
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/middleeast/lebanon-funeral-pager-attack.html
[3] https://www.theweek.in/news/world/2024/09/18/lebanon-panic-as-two-solar-panel-systems-explode-amidst-pager-walkie-talkie-blasts-in-beirut-targeting-hezbollah.html
[4] https://www.boitempoeditorial.com.br/produto/colonialismo-digital-152312
[5] See the website of the necrocorporation IAI. The diversification of the war arsenal in the company’s catalog is impressive. https://www.iai.co.il/
[6] Intelligence division of the Israeli armed forces, similar to the NSA but military; the same that created Stuxnet.
[7] A technological innovation that recalls the Algerian sophistication against the French army, when the military engineering of the National Liberation Front of Algeria reorganized its structure so that each member would only communicate with and know a very limited number of militants (in case they were captured and tortured, they wouldn’t have much information to give).
[8] https://apnews.com/article/hungarian-company-behind-lebanon-pager-explosions-9ebcca9cc9e5a7d7bc9bc74ddcf23fb3
[9] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/europe/pager-explosions-lebanon-what-we-know.html
[10] https://www.newindianexpress.com/world/2024/Sep/18/gold-apollo-says-pagers-that-exploded-in-lebanon-syria-were-made-by-company-in-budapest
[11] https://www.infomoney.com.br/mundo/como-filme-de-espioes-israel-teria-adulterado-pagers-para-explodir-apos-mensagem/
[12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joP7Tz2sbRE&feature=youtu.be&themeRefresh=1
References:
Assange, Julian. When Google Met WikiLeaks (trans. Cristina Yamagami). São Paulo: Boitempo, 2015.
Chamayou, Grégoire. Drone Theory. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2015.
Faustino, Deivison; Lippold, Walter. Digital Colonialism: For a Hacker-Fanonian Critique. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2023.
Ferrari, Terezinha. Fabricalization of the City and the Ideology of Circulation. São Paulo: Coletivo Editorial, 2008.
Racionais MC’s. Mano Brown. “Diary of a Detainee.” São Paulo: Cosa Nostra, 1997.
Silveira, Sérgio Amadeu da. “WikiLeaks and Control Technologies.” In: ASSANGE, Julian. When Google Met WikiLeaks (trans. Cristina Yamagami). São Paulo: Boitempo, 2015.
