smart phones as smart munitions?
war just got a bit more personal
today perhaps we saw an new evolution in warfare as chilling as it is unsurprising.
hezbollah and a variety of other groups have long used old school pagers as a communications modality because, unlike a cell or smart phone, they cannot be tracked. the system just broadcasts, it does not know where you are. it’s like having an FM radio.
this prevented network analysis and prevented them from being tracked and targeted. until now. (at least on the “targeted” piece.)
someone seems to have found the network and managed to cause all the pagers in it to overheat and explode at once to grim effect for those who had them in pockets.
for the purpose of the discussion today, let’s put aside the specific tactical geopolitics here (and if folks want to argue about that, i’m sure there are 100 online venues that would be happy to engage.) instead, i’d like to speak more generally about what this means from a tactical standpoint for pretty much every denizen of the developed world:
you all just got tagged onto the battlefield.
and you should know about it.
some are arguing that israel somehow managed to get a hold of and compromise these pagers, perhaps at a distributor, perhaps by tradecraft of some sort. it’s possible, but i don’t believe it. i just do not believe the pagers turn over that fast or that it could be so easy or effective or accurately targeted without piles of collateral damage.
my wager (and obviously, i’m guessing here and have no special knowledge just a nasty mind and some technical savvy) is that this was more like stuxnet. it’s a software hack that used the code of the pagers to remotely compromise them, take over control at a basic level, and mismanage the battery/thermo processes to make it overheat and explode.
and this means that anything with a Li-ion battery and a network connection just became a highly targeted (and targetable) weapon. a laptop is a claymore. it makes most EV’s into WMD’s. a whole new arms race just started and such weapons tech never stays in the hands of governments for long.
it’s long been a fact of life that computers, cell phones, appliances, and vehicles are laughably insecure from the standpoint of a large nation state’s intelligence communities. if the NSA wants to root your cell phone, you’re getting rooted.
presumably, that could have meant “BOOM” for a decade now. they could take down a plane with a laptop thermal excursion or quite literally blow your nuts off with an iphone in a front pocket.
the fact that this has not happened is not technical.
either:
it has happened and is just not recognized because there has been no pattern and all the evidence burned
or restraint has been applied because the information from such ecosystems far outweighs and role as a weapon and “don’t spook the prey.”
or, of course, some mix of the two
but now it has. and genies like this do not go back in the bottle. such ideas, once seen spread and metastasize. gloves come off and things explode. even if this was somehow a case of “we snuck a little semtex into the pagers” this vulnerability vector remains.
did we literally just see half our electronic world become a weapon? are we all carrying grenades with remote pins triggerable by who knows whom? because it sure looks like we are.
and that’s not good.
for a very long time, security around computers, systems, phones, appliances, cars, and 400 other electronic items has lagged hideously, much of it at government behest (and by “behest” i mean “demand” along the lines of “nice company you got there. make your phone OS secure or all your emails auto-encrypted by default and we’ll burn you to the waterline then sink what’s left.)
and now (at best) we live here in the land of
and more likely here:
and that needs to change. that’s not a world you wanna live in and even if you (unwisely) trust the state, this tech is not going to stay there.
every threat is an opportunity, so let’s climb up on the “future cat” soap box and see if we can’t plot a course:
we REALLY desperately need a secure cell phone on the market built from ground up to be hardware and software safe. this probably needs to be a full bespoke project from the chip, board, and baseband level on up. fully open source software and auditable.
if musk had half a brain he's build one like that and optimize it to be a p2p node in a distributed social media system and a wallet/transactional node.
make twitter a protocol, not a company.
move the business model to transactions, banking, and subscription management/informational sale.
make your money on phones, commerce, and star link backups for the system.
secure, opaque, censorship proof, and utterly subversive.
become the world’s bank, its network, its communications, its media. make the whole thing end to end encrypted, swarm sourced, network agile, and use encrypted routing.
at a stroke, take the whole playing field and put it out of reach, secure money, secure banking, secure speech, secure networks. link it to satellites. create somehting so powerful and ubiquitous that it would make twitter and tesla look like blips.
it’s right there as an opportunity.
maybe start it overseas and build scale and momentum in the third world, africa, south america, southeast asia. use the uber model of build and become useful so fast that by the time anyone asks if it’s allowed, you have a massive loyal base that will lose their minds if this is taken away.
then dare the developed world not to let it in. render them backwards if they refuse. make it the must have accessory for hipsters, freedom lovers, and investment bankers alike.
the applications are limitless. this could become the substrate of the world.
someone is going to control it.
it’s coming down to them or us.
and that, mis amigos, is no choice at all.
Whatever else the 21st century may be, it's certainly not dull.
It has always surprised me that no one figured out at the design phase that "childproof car locks" are also "kidnap victim-proof car locks" too.
Any programmable thingy ain't never gonna remain your friend.