Hezbollah bought a specialty item (pagers) and many countries/companies are legally prohibited from doing business with Hezbollah. My sense is that these two facts were all but necessary for Israel to carry out this operation. So "changed the world" is hyperbole.
IDF/military buildings are near civilian areas, considering that IDF is buying bombs to kill civilians (definition of terrorism), do you think it is okay to bomb civilian buildings located near IDF buildings?
I changed the word "pager" to "building"
IDF buys bombs and kills children. Source that theyre systematically targeting children?
He... Did not say that. He said they are targeting civilians, and basic math on casualty numbers ("hamas" numbers being the same as in use by both US and IDF military intelligence) can at least tell you they're doing very little to avoid it.
Doing little to avoid something isnt the same as doing it on purpose.
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Israel’s pager attacks did not change the world. They merely alerted the world to the possibility of everyday devices being compromised. What is true today was still true yesterday, it just wasn’t top of mind: we have to be very careful with what we allow our adversaries to sell to us.
It used to be a possibility. Now is a reality, and done not by a minor unorganized player (like a small group of people breaking things) but by a major power. Even if they stop doing it right now, and not escalate it to i.e. phones, it has set up a dangerous precedent.
Did 9/11 not change the world because the idea had been made in fiction beforehand?
The pager attack did change the world in two ways: the obvious one is where your point is most accurate (people becoming aware of how fragile supply chain are - just think snout what a terrorist could do with Amazon’s comingled inventory and returns!), but the other thing it did is start to legitimize this. If it’s only the Unabomber doing something, it’s clearly indefensible but as states use it other people will start to justify it on those grounds.
Hezbollah is hardly a sympathetic target but I’d be shocked if someone in the region doesn’t try to attack Israelis this way saying it’s not a war crime for the same reasons.
> the other thing it did is start to legitimize this. If it’s only the Unabomber doing something, it’s clearly indefensible but as states use it other people will start to justify it on those grounds.
This is the most worrying part: Do we really need to normalize the idea of governments sending little bombs out into the civilian population and detonating them, hoping that they actually hit their targets? This is not how legitimate warfighting is done.
That is not what this war, at least according to most reporting on the topic. This was a carefully chosen shipment of pagers being handed out specifically to Hezbollah members.
Hence the vast, vast majority of casualties being Hezbollah members.
There's been a lot of debate on this, as there should be, but as far as we know now, statistically speaking, this is far more targeted than hitting buildings with missiles or something.
I agree with your main point, though I'd add that this also made this attack being possible "common knowledge" in a way that might be relevant. (Using this term in its mathematical sense.)
> Hezbollah is hardly a sympathetic target but I'd be shocked if someone in the region doesn't try to attack Israelis this way saying it's not a war crime for the same reasons.
This is, unfortunately, pretty laughable. Israelis are already under attack, constantly, in what are 100% war crimes. Hezbollah, for example, has fired thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians, a clear war crime, just in the last year, not to mention for years before that.
In addition, they've helped carry out multiple terror attacks inside Israel, i.e. suicide bombings, including several in the last few months.
So no, I don't think this will change anyone's idea to do something similar to Israel - the reason they don't carry out this kind of attack isn't because they're holding back, it's because they can't. (I hope.)
People are a large part of the world. If enough people who weren't aware of something are aware of it now, society can react to it, and change.
It seems like a stretch to argue that a world in which thousands of people are simultaneously injured or killed by an electronic device they had no reason to fear is not meaningfully changed by said event.
The world is in a continuous state of change, and the fact that these pager attacks are now in the public consciousness introduces a whole series of potential pathways of thought and action that wouldn’t have been explored if not for this event. This is in addition to gaining clarity about the world as it already was immediately prior to the attack, i.e. yes we were vulnerable, and an entity was in the process of actively exploiting that vulnerability. Now we're aware, and that awareness has/will initiate a new cascade of change.
ETA: I'm very curious to understand how/why people disagree with this.
By that definition, Covid-19 and the September 11 attacks also did not change the world.
Literally the first sentence says the pager attack 'graphically illustrated a threat that cybersecurity experts have been warning about for years'.
What’s really needed is some way you can easily tell that a device has been tampered with, but which is also extremely difficult to bypass. And also where even if the OEM was in on the scheme, you could still tell. Like how a hash is used to tell if someone made changes to a piece of software. For consumer products this is a nonstarter because companies will almost never fully divulge info about all the parts of a device required for this.
For defence product where almost everything is fully specified by the customer, it might be possible. If you know all the components in a device, and you can prove they are all genuine, then you can prove the whole device is genuine.
Engraved hashes on every part comes to mind, but that would be ungainly to validate and fairly easy to bypass by simply copying codes from one device to another.
You’re not going to easily detect supply chain tampering of code, but you might be able to detect the covert inclusion of explosives in your devices with imaging (X Ray and CT) and random sampling tear downs.
This doesn’t work because the hashes are controlled by the same party party you don’t trust. If you want this, you need to pay for trusted third-parties to audit the factory and random samples - otherwise it’s basically like all of the blockchain startups trying to reinvent supply chains only to learn that a chain of hashes showing package A was delivered to warehouse B don’t help if you don’t actually know what was in the box, who picked it up, or what happened to it in transit. I guarantee that the Mossad would have had valid hashes on every battery.
This isn’t even very effective for software: people have been working on commit signing, reproducible builds, etc. for ages but it’s just a cascade of trust problems where striking the balance between workable and effective can be extremely challenging. Something like xz or SolarWinds would have had valid signatures on everything, and you still wouldn’t know the real identity of the person responsible for the duplicitous code.
It was a multi-year operation to get to the place where they could sell the targets the mined devices. Google hasn't got that kind of time horizon.
Who is your enemy and why do they want to hurt you? Is anyone really concerned that mass market consumer devices have command detonated explosives in them already? I mean, other than the iphones?
> Who is your enemy and why do they want to hurt you
It seems like the perfect occasion to quote Mickens' immortal words:
> Basically, you’re either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad. If your adversary is not-Mossad, then you’ll probably be fine if you pick a good password and don’t respond to emails from ChEaPestPAiNPi11s@ virus-basket.biz.ru. If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ https://. If the Mossad wants your data, they’re going to use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that’s shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they’re going to hold a press conference and say “It wasn’t us” as they wear t-shirts that say “IT WAS DEFINITELY US,” and then they’re going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them.
If they are that competent then it implies they let October 7th and September 11th happen. My know-nothing take is that given the funds, lack of morals, and government support they can pull off some actions that benefit them, but let’s not act like it is more than it is.
Don’t forget that governments are big organizations. The Israeli government “knew” in the sense that they were earned by the Saudi and Egyptian governments, and the Israeli intelligence community had Hamas’ plans at least a year before the attacks and widely circulated them, and had specific warnings months and days before the attacks:
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-12-05/ty-article/.p...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-h...
One take on this is that Netanyahu allowed them to happen because he needs to stay in power to delay his personal risk of going to jail, which would be compatible with his subsequent actions to prolong the war, but it’s also quite plausible that this simply reflects widespread arrogance: many reports say the intelligence alerts were ignored because senior officials didn’t believe that Hamas was capable of a sophisticated attack. Their tactical excellence would have fed into this, because they generally do outclass their opponents considerably.
I'm a big Netanyahu critic, as are many in Israel nowadays. And I think he'd do pretty much anything to stay in power, which is at least some part of the reason the war is still ongoing, if not the main reason.
But the idea that he actually knew about this and let it happen, is IMO very, very unlikely. I mean, just from that same pragmatic perspective in which he'd do anything to remain in power - he lost massive amounts of support because of October 7th. He's been able to claw some of that support back, but he's still polling far below where he was before October 7th, and it is very unlikely he will remain in office past the next elections.
It would be weird if no government saw it coming. Some people clearly anticipated it: https://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=123885
Surely no government would ever lie about something like that! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag
Don't confuse ruthlessness for competence. Israel does a lot of things because it knows it can get away with them. Israel is also known for spreading blatant disinformation. Occam's Razor suggests they were unprepared for the Oct 7 attack because they simply didn't see it coming even if they knew Hamas was up to something.
When having terrorist organisations shoot bottle rockets at you or have their members blow themselves up is a common occurrence and your tolerance of collateral damage in your military counter-attacks is so high that you've continuously killed an order of magnitude more people in your counter-attacks every year while maintaining a much higher ratio of civilians casualties per military target, you don't actually need good intel because your mode of response defaults to "just kill 10x as many of them as they killed of us".
Israel's official X account tweeted that they consider US students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza to be terrorists. So it is apparently incredibly easy to become the enemy of Israel without breaking any laws or hurting anyone. That should concern everyone.
edit for source: https://x.com/Israel/status/1781951509070012435
>Israel's official X account tweeted that they consider US students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza to be terrorists
Source?
Thanks.
The quoted tweet mentions "videos", and is actually a thread of multiple posts. You have to be signed in to see them, or use a nitter proxy[1]. If you look at those videos, it's clear that they're not calling the protesters "terrorists" for merely protesting, they're calling them "terrorists" for engaging in behavior such as intimidating jewish students or praising the October 7th attacks. It's slightly misleading to round that off to "protesting Israel's actions in Gaza".
[1] https://xcancel.com/ShaiDavidai/status/1781927143758262389
It's slightly misleading to round that off to "protesting Israel's actions in Gaza".
It' very misleading to round it off that way, and that's exactly what Israel's retweet is doing.
Even though the underlying tweet tells a different story, by truncating and framing the material the way they did -- by juxtaposing the insipid "(a)-(b)-(c)" argument with a video of a perfectly nondescript protest scene -- it's very clear that what they're trying to do is to convey a simple 3-second emotional impression: "protesting Israel's actions in gaza == support for terrorists == terrorism".
>Even though the underlying tweet tells a different story, by truncating and framing the material the way they did
It seems like a stretch to argue they're "truncating" the material, when twitter doesn't provide a way to link threads besides quoting the first tweet.
>it's very clear that what they're trying to do is to convey a simple 3-second emotional impression: "protesting Israel's actions in gaza == support for terrorists == terrorism".
I certainly didn't get that impression when reading the tweet. I agree the video was nondescript, which was why I went out of my way to use a nitter instance to see whether there were more to that tweet. All these accusations of "well if you read between the lines..." are getting absurd to the point where they could be used anywhere. For instance, you could plausibly argue that the original claim of "Israel's official X account tweeted that they consider US students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza to be terrorists" followed by that tweet is trying to do the same thing, by portraying any objections against intimidation of jewish students as being anti-palestinian.
Nice deflection but you're arguing in bad faith.
The OP is correct, since although the official Israel account is quote tweeting Shai Davidai, the most shameless zionist hasbarist on twitter, Israel's tweet is still self contained and is clearly trying to demonize and vilify the protestors as terrorists based on their "ideology" i.e. fighting back against your colonizer and oppressor is "terrorism" because any opposition to the racist colonial enterprise that is Israel has to be demonized and delegitimized by Zionists while they themselves engage in blatant terrorism. Israel's propaganda is so awful and lazy that it has become predictable. They will always hyperfocus on fringe cases, even manufacture such cases if they don't exist, in order to delegitimize the whole protest.
And anyone who actually followed the protests carefully has witnessed that Zionists were the aggressors trying to intimidate anyone who opposes Israel's actions in Gaza in any shape or form. Furthermore, the "they were intimidating jewish students" narrative has become so laughable at this point because zionists perceive any opposition to Israel as "intimidating" and so they are abusing the jewish identity as a shield to protect the israeli apartheid entity from criticism. People are sick and tired of this game because they have seen zionists playing these sick and twisted mind games for decades.
I never claimed that those videos are representative of all anti-israel protests, or that either accounts aren't engaging in bad faith argumentation, but at the end of the day, the linked tweet does not substantiate the object level question of "[israel] consider US students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza to be terrorists". The examples might be cherry picked, but it's a stretch to claim that a thread calling the worst protesters "terrorists" actually means they think all anti-israel protesters are "terrorists". Cherry picking is bad, but two wrongs don't make a right.
That sounds like what the IDF would say too. Do you have anything to back your statement?
>Do you have anything to back your statement?
Did you not see the xcancel link?
Report that tweet for the hate speech and violence it is.
Lol, it's been "antisemitic" to not fully support Israel for 20 years.
They've been playing this game for a really long time and so it's no surprise they think they'll keep getting away with it forever.
Do you really think Israel is going to try to blow up Columbia students? If not, what is the point of your post?
Israel would 100% "blow up Columbia students" if they happens to be in the wrong side of the border at the wrong time. That's exactly the problem, Israel murdering wholesale students so other students are standing up tonight them while people like you ignore and defer.
The word "terrorist" is very overloaded in Israeli politics. To anyone right of Likud (or even Likud itself) it can even include opposition leaders and arab citizens.
quite indicative
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https://x.com/Israel/status/1781951509070012435
Are you still laughing?
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I'm curious about why you're bringing Google into this. Is there some reason you think they'd totally be running a loosely targeted mass assassination program, except that they just can't plan ahead far enough?
That is such an out of the left field thing to lead with that I thought the article must have brought up this possibility somehow. But that doesn't seem to be the case either.
Well I didn't wanna say "Oracle" cuz it aint healthy to piss them folks off
I don't know how difficult it would be to detect these in customs, but I'm thinking more of an organization posing as a fly by night Amazon/Aliexpress/Temu seller who wants to cause some chaos in a country.
No way huawei etc would pull such a stunt.
Now it'll probably become standard operational practice for every organization that fears such attack to separate part of its new acquisitions of everyday items and sell them in Israeli second-hand market first, before internal use, as a deterrent.
Couldn't the attacker include a geofence to mostly mitigate that threat?
Geofence a pager? How much extra stuff would they need to make room for in the pager in order to pull that off?
Probably just check the network it's using?
"We can’t imagine Washington passing a law requiring iPhones to be made entirely in the United States. Labor costs are too high, and our country doesn’t have the domestic capacity to make these things. Our supply chains are deeply, inexorably international, and changing that would require bringing global economies back to the 1980s..."
Yeah, and that's what is happening. Globalization has waxed and waned several times over the last few centuries. It is a matter of government policy, not in any sense "inexorable". It is currently waning, and will continue to do so for several decades, probably, for this reason and many others.
> Globalization has waxed and waned several times over the last few centuries.
This is a new one to me, you got me genuinely curious. When was there a meaningful push for globalization prior to WWII, ignoring empires trying to colonize the world?
Fighting terrorism with terrorism, what could go wrong? Maybe we can go back to devices with removable batteries after this.
Has "Israel" been designated a terrorist state by a NATO country?
No? Then nothing has changed.
What would the practical implications of this actually be?
My first thought is that NATO countries would stop selling arms or partnering militarily with Israel. Though I'm not sure if that is set in stone, the US has a habit of arming and working with groups, especially in the middle east, that either are designated as terrorist groups or act as one and are only missing the official designation.
This is concerning - what if Israel wants to take out one bad guy on a plane or something and views the bystanders as "collateral damage"? They blew these up in multiple countries, there is no rule of law here. This op has US state department/intelligence agencies written all over it (like the Nord stream pipeline). I suspect folks at the TSA, FAA, FTC, all over concerns over this behavior.
It was reported they attemped to blow commercial passenger aircraft over the mediterran in the 80s, to kill Arafat: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/25/israel-plan-sh...
But it didn't happen, right? So maybe, just maybe, the people who did this super elaborate plan had the mental capacity to consider that option and took precautions to ensure that it won't happen?
There really aren't precautions necessary, mobile devices shouldn't have any signal when a plane above a few thousand feet.
Even without precautions, the odds that one of the pagers was in a plane over Lebanon within a couple minutes of being on the ground does seem very low. Not zero for sure, but you may be able to mitigate that simply by watching the handful of flights that may be over Lebanon at any one time.
Didn't they just kill about 30 thousand innocent women and children in Palestine exactly for this reason- because they happened to be near some bad guy (at least that is the excuse given)?
A commercial airline is a whole different story. The world would be much less receptive to such an occurrence.
Why, did anything happen when Israel shot down a plane full of civilians?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libyan_Arab_Airlines_Flight_11...
"Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 114 (LN 114) was a regularly scheduled civilian flight from Tripoli to Cairo, through Benghazi, that was shot down in 1973 by Israeli fighter jets after it entered by mistake, due to a system malfunction, the airspace of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula – then under Israeli occupation – resulting in the death of 108 civilians"
"The Israeli Cabinet discussed the incident three times in secret meetings. The minutes, declassified in 2023, show that the main decisions were to deny all responsibility and to refuse to hold an official inquiry"
But then, I think the only real difference between a civilian flight and a residential building is that in the first one there's people of many nationalities, while the bodies buried under the collapsed ruins of the building are all Palestinians, so we don't care much about them.
You left out the part: "it was shot down by the Israeli fighter pilots after they did not receive a response to their demands for the aircraft to land"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inc...
> one there's people of many nationalities
Yes, obviously PR and how the world will react is a big part of decision making.
That's pretty cool if the idf can tell if people carrying pagers are on a plane or not. Or, indeed, stood next to a kid, for example.
So because it cant detect a kid then might as well blow up a plane?
Acceptable collateral damage is about proportionality and trying to reduce casualties to a minimum, it doesn't mean zero (and don't get me wrong, every one is tragic)
>what if Israel wants to take out one bad guy on a plane or something and views the bystanders as "collateral damage"?
They'll do it and they won't be held accountable for it.
What if?
Minus The airliner that's exactly what Israel is doing and has been doing for the better part of 40 years. What did you think was going on? The West is moving into a region, destabilizing it, murdering all of the natives, and taking the land, there's definitely going to be some collateral damage.
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@dang I think there should be a stricter downvoting policies for some topics, especially about anti-Israeli sentiment, as we already know Israelis are using botnets to promote ideas or lower the visibility of other opinions.
Here is a sample comment I posted which got immediately downvoted multiple times, I still think my concern is valid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41617290
Well... Maybe you get down-voted because you write anti-semetic stuff like "In my eyes, this incident raises the question about every Israeli software developer and hardware developer I work with."...
Wow.
That’s not anti-Semitic - it would have been if they’d said “Jewish” since “Israeli” is a question of citizenship rather than religion. If you have foreign nationals in your supply chain, it is reasonable to question how you’d know if they were subverted - for example, change “Israeli” to “Russian” or “Chinese” and ask whether you’d say there’s a legitimate possibility that their government might be coercing them. (And, of course, anyone outside of the U.S. is totally justified asking the same questions about our tech industry.)
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I know quite a few folks who consider the casual conflation of "Jewish" and "Israeli" to be antisemitic, so maybe... like...
In my eyes, this incident raises the question about every Israeli software developer and hardware developer I work with.
Could they be a part of another operation, infiltrating products I work with and eventually harming the reputation of company? Possibly, yes.
If your client is Hezbollah, I would say your fear is warranted.
Where do you think the line should be drawn?
Arguably if your client is IDF your devices are more likely to exclusively end up in the hands of military personnel whereas if your client is "Hezbollah" (whatever legal entity acted on their behalf in this case) an attack would be (and has been) far more likely to injure, maim or kill civilians and non-militants, not just because of the higher likelihood of harming bystanders and family members.
Would a supply chain attack like this against Toyota be justified because of the large market share in after-market "technicals" used by terrorist and insurgent groups?
Who is the client of Android OS, pencil, smartphones?
You don't need to build specifically for Hezbollah, to start worrying about your risk factors
Uh, shouldn't it raise the question about every developer you work with, period?
Even if you just think Mossad does this (not the case), if they want to mess with you, it's pretty poor op/sec to declare their nationality first.
As if israel is the only state actor operating inside companies.
The list of state actors that partake in corporate espionage and more is quite long.
North Korea is known for doing this in the crypto space to pull off heists.
There is a difference between using infiltration to gain intel and engage in surveillance (although this still caused moral outrage when Snowden leaked details about US intelligence services infiltrating foreign companies in allied countries) and using supply chain attacks to turn electronic devices into remote detonated bombs at scale to carry out a terrorist attack. What's next? Car bombs?
> What's next? Car bombs?
Pretty sure that's been done by almost everyone.
If "almost everyone" is "Russia, Ukraine during an invasion, allegedly the Mossad, maybe the CIA and otherwise mostly terrorist groups and insurrectionists" then sure:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_bomb
Most countries don't actually have their intelligence services routinely carry out assassinations and when they do the point of having the intelligence service do it rather than the military is usually to keep a low profile.
there is a difference between espionage and infiltration.
corporate espionage yes, practiced by many states, to gain competitive advantage.
infiltration, I don't know many examples, except Israel.
Snowden? Prism? Russian/Chinese hacks? Nothing rings a bell?
Here's a fun story: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/23/24163389/joseph-cox-dark-...
This isn't entirely hypothetical. There was for example a US-German joint venture of the respectivel intelligence agencies that produced compromised encryption/security software. The primary market were of course hostile foreign countries but the US saw no problems also selling to its allies which the German agents balked at (because after all if they openly do this that means there's no reason to believe they wouldn't also do this to Germany).
Granted, infiltrating a supply chain to boobytrap devices to prep them for a coordinated act of state terrorism is a different beast from merely compromising encryption and communication but a certain level of paranoia seems warranted.
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