Now I'm Worried My Toaster Will Explode
Thoughts on Israel's opening salvo in the expanded war with Hezbollah
Responses from my friends to the spontaneous explosion of thousands of pagers, walkie-talkies and other electronics used by Hezbollah, presumably at the push of a button somewhere in Israel, have fallen largely into two camps.
The first camp: that was incredibly cool. To pull this off, Israel had to get access to the supplier of these electronics or their components, modify them to contain plastic explosive and a detonator, and then sit on the knowledge of what they had done for years until the right moment to detonate. (Rumor has it they detonated the devices earlier than originally planned because they feared the operation was going to be revealed.) The attacks were not free of harm to civilians, of course, but the ratio of damage to their intended targets to collateral damage has got to be extraordinarily high, particularly when you consider the psychological damage done to Hezbollah, which can no longer communicate effectively nor truly trust that their organization hasn't been infiltrated. Israel already followed up their initial attacks with air strikes that have killed key Hezbollah leaders. If Israel thought full-scale war with Hezbollah was inevitable, and wanted to be the ones to start it, they’ve started it with an impressive bang.
The second camp: that was incredibly reckless. Israel has not yet completed its war in Gaza; Hamas has suffered considerable damage, but its effective leader Yahya Sinwar remains at large and in command, the organization remains the most formidable force in Gaza, the hostages that remain alive are still in Hamas’s hands, and there is no end-game in sight either militarily or diplomatically. So is now a wise time to escalate another front to full-scale war? The fact that Hezbollah was able to force tens of thousands of Israeli civilians to evacuate their homes is obviously unacceptable, of course, but tactical brilliance is no substitute for strategy, and Israel has no strategy to defeat Hezbollah short of a full-scale invasion and reoccupation of southern Lebanon—which, it should be noted, is the condition that led to the founding of Hezbollah in the first place. And as with the conflict in Gaza, once joined there’s no obvious end-game.
I appreciate both perspectives. But my own perspective is different. I’m now worried about my toaster exploding.
Lot literally—I don’t have a smart toaster, and I’m not a person of interest to anyone. But the point is: when Israel launched their attack, my first thought was “well, now we know that’s something that can be done. Who next will do something similar?”
There was a good piece yesterday in The New York Times by security technologist Bruce Schneier making a similar point. On the one hand, Schneier points out that both Israel’s and other military and intelligence services have been doing more and more of this kind of thing, using cyber attacks and sabotage to seriously disrupt the operations of hostile countries and organizations. On the other hand, Israel’s attack blazes a new trail in its scale and audacity, and both the globalization of supply chains and the routine embedding of internet-connected electronics in more and more items means that it’s less and less possible to even get a handle on the scope of the potential risk.
Because here’s the thing. If an adversary wants to do something like Israel did—target a particular group of people—then they need access to items used by that group of people. So maybe you could effectively ring-fence the Pentagon, and the power grid, and so forth (though I suspect this would be harder than you imagine). But what if the goal is just to cause terror generally and disruption to normal life. If China wanted to do that to Taiwan—or Ukraine wanted to do it to Russia—they wouldn’t need to be nearly so targeted. And if you didn’t need to be so targeted, then how do you build a wall high enough to keep out the danger? I’m not even sure it’s enough to say “don’t trade with a potentially hostile country” since that includes China; are we going to trust that either Canada or Mexico will be sufficiently scrupulous in their own trade relations not to let any components in from anyone we’re suspicious of? And if we can’t trade freely with our two largest and nearest trading partners, then we can’t trade freely with anyone.
We’re going to see more and more rules like this one banning Chinese software in automobiles, aimed at preventing China from conducting wholesale spying, and no doubt we already have good procedures for detecting hidden explosives in equipment with an obviously sensitive purpose. But anyone who wanted to wreak havoc presumably knows what procedures we have in place. What workarounds might they discover that we haven’t imagined?
I don’t want to be alarmist. It’s not my nature, for one thing. I’d long since given up worrying whether the government was spying on me through my smart phone, assuming as I do that if the government really wants to know something about me, they do, and I can’t really prevent them. But the phone exploding wasn’t on my list of worries at all. It’s not high on the list now, but it isn’t at zero anymore. And that’s disconcerting.