This week we talk about interdiction, the NSA, and Mossad.

We also discuss exploding pagers, targeted strikes, and paramilitary organizations.

Recommended Book: Uncertainty in Games by Greg Costikyan

Transcript

In the world of technology, and especially computers—or anything with microchips and thus, some computing capabilities—a “backdoor” is a bit of code or piece of hardware that allows someone (or a group of someones) to get inside that computer or compute-capable device after it’s been delivered and put into use.

At times the installation of backdoors is done beneficently, allowing tech support to tap into a computer after it’s been sold so they can help the end-user with problems they encounter.

But in most cases, this term is applied to the surreptitious installation of this kind of hardware or software, and generally it’s meant to allow those doing the installing to surveil the activities of whomever is using the product in question, or maybe even to lock them out and/or hijack its use at some point in the future, should they so desire.

There are potential downsides to the use of backdoors even when they’re installed with the best of intentions, as they can allow malicious actors, like hackers, working independently or for agencies or nation states, to tap into these devices or networks or whatever else with less effort than would have otherwise been required; in theory such a backdoor would give them one target to work on, rather than a bunch of them, which would mean attempting to access each and every device individually; a backdoor in an operating system would allow hackers who hacked that backdoor system access to every device that uses said OS, for instance.

Backdoor efforts undertaken by the US National Security Agency, the NSA, were famously divulged by whistleblower Edward Snowden, revealing all sorts of—to many people outside the intelligence world, at least—unsavory activities being conducted by this agency, among them efforts to install backdoors in software like Linux, but also hardware like routers and servers, at times opening these devices up and installing what’s called a Cottonmouth, which allows the NSA to gain remote access to anything plugged into that device.

This sort of interdiction, which is basically the interception of something before it reaches its intended destination—so intercepting a modem that’s been ordered by a big company, opening it up, installing a backdoor, then repackaging it and sending it on its way to the company that ordered it as if nothing has happened—is not uncommon in the intelligence world, but the scope of the NSA’s activities in this regard were alarming to pretty much everyone when they were divulged, with leaks and reporting showing, basically, that the NSA had figured out ways to put hardware and software backdoors in just about everything, in some cases resulting in the mass collection of data from American citizens, which goes beyond their legal remit, but also the surveillance of American allies, like the chancellor of Germany.

What I’d like to talk about today is another, recent high-visibility example of an intelligence agency messing with devices ordered by a surveillance target, and what consequences we might expect to see now that this manipulation has come to light.

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In the world of covert operations—spy stuff, basically—a “hand of God” operation is one that is almost immaculately targeted to the point where it might almost seem as if those who are struck did something to piss off a deity; those who the targeters want to hit are hit, and everyone else is safe or relatively safe.

In 2020, a hand of God operation was launched against an Iranian general named Qassem Solaimani while he was near the Baghdad airport, an American Reaper drone hitting Solaimani and his escorts’ cars with several missiles, killing the general and nine other people who were with him, but leaving everyone else in the area largely unscathed—not an easy thing to do.

Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated in July of 2024 by Israel, which blew up his bedroom in a military-run guesthouse in Iran’s capital city, Tehran, either using a well-targeted missile or a bomb that they somehow managed to hide in that room ahead of time—either way, it was a very precise attack that made use of a lot of intelligence data and assets in order to hit the target and just the target, avoiding other casualties as much as possible—which again, can make this sort of strike, though still massively destructive, seem like an act of god because of how highly specific it is.

On September 17 of 2024, at around 3:30 in the afternoon, local time, thousands of pagers, which were purchased and used by the militant group Hezbollah, which governs the southern part of Lebanon, and which is locked in a seemingly perpetual tit-for-tat with Israel, mostly using rockets and drones across their shared border, these pagers began to buzz, indicating there was a new message from Hezbollah leadership, and then seconds later they exploded—some in their owners’ pockets or on their hips, some in their hands, if they lifted them to their faces to see what the message contained.

These sorts of devices were subbed-in for smartphones by the organization’s leadership in recent years, especially following the early October attacks on Israel by Hamas in 2023, due to fears that Israel’s notorious intelligence agency, Mossad, would be able to tap their communications if they used more sophisticated tools.

The pagers in question were a bit more modern than those that were common a few decades ago, allowing users to basically text each other, and it was thought that they were simple enough that they would reduce the number of software backdoors that Mossad could use to intercept their messages, while still allowing those in the higher-levels of the organization to communicate with each other quickly and efficiently.

Instead, it looks like Hezbollah acquired these pagers from an Israeli shell company—maybe several shell companies—operating out of Hungary which licensed the device schematics and branding of a Taiwanese company in order to make it seem legit.

This company or companies were set up in mid-2022, and the tangled web of activities surrounding them is still being unspooled by journalists and intelligence agencies, but pretty much everyone, from the pager brand’s parent company to the Hungarian government deny any connection to any of this, the US and Israel’s other allies deny having any foreknowledge of the operation, and Israel’s Mossad is of course not divulging their secrets, so it could be a little while before we know all the details, if we ever do, but it seems like this larger operation, the infrastructure for it, anyway, may have been in the works for a decade or more.

The way it played out, though, is that those thousands of pagers seem to have been filled with a few ounces of explosives and rigged with software that would detonate said explosives when a specific message was received by them. These pagers, then, were delivered to Hezbollah, distributed to their higher-ups, their inner-circle, basically, and then on September 17 thousands of them received the detonate message, blew up, and killed at least 12 people and injured nearly 3,000.

Lebanon’s hospitals were filled with the dead and grievously injured, shutting down a significant chunk of their overall medical capacity, and the following day a wave of radios—the kind used to communicate, not the kind used to listen to music, so basically walkie-talkies—alongside a few mobile phones, laptops, and some solar power cells, all owned and used by Hezbollah officials and operatives, blew up, killing at least 25 people and injuring about 450.

Then, a few days later, Israel launched an airstrike on a suburb in Beirut—the capital city of Lebanon—killing two senior Hezbollah officials and something like 36 other people with the 140 or so rockets it launched during the operation.

Anonymous officials from the US and Israel have told reporters that the explosives hidden in those pagers and other devices, were originally meant to be used as an opening salvo of an all-out attack against Hezbollah, which by definition would probably mean an invasion of Lebanon, since Hezbollah controls a fair portion of the country, but they were growing concerned that Hezbollah might have been on to them and their explosives-hiding efforts, so they decided to move sooner than planned and detonate these devices without having that immediate full-bore followup ready to go.

This might be part of why the attack is generally being seen, in analytical and intelligence circles, at least, as a tactical success but a strategic question mark, as the end-goal isn’t really clear, especially since Israel is still partly tied-up in Gaza and increasingly the West Bank, as well, and thus not super well-prepared for a potential real-deal war with Lebanon, to its north. This operation’s culmination would have made a lot more sense several months in the future, when they would theoretically have been in a better spot to detonate these devices, launch a bunch of missiles, and then move in with soldiers on the ground to capture or kill the rest of Hezbollah’s leadership.

It has been posited that this effort still serves a few important purposes for Israel’s military and intelligence agencies, though. For the latter, it serves as a reinvigoration of the “don’t mess with us” reputation they held up until the successful sneak-attack by Hamas last October; Mossad has been heavily criticized for ignoring the signals they were receiving about that attack, and this could have been partly meant to show their government and the world that they still have plen