Operation Grim Beeper and the Weaponization of Everything

A new book warns that it's time democracies reined in Big Tech and prioritized personal privacy and security over rapid innovation and growth. Recent events in Lebanon suggest it's already late.

“We must not…shy away from building sharp tools for fear they may be turned against us.” Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, from his oped in The New York Times, July 25, 2023

On Monday, I started reading The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley, a terrific new book by an old friend of mine from Personal Democracy Forum days, Marietje Schaake, with one goal: I wanted to have something intelligent to say about it beyond simply plugging it and telling my New York-based readers about an event she is doing this coming Wednesday at 6:30pm at Civic Hall, 124 East 14th St, with Esther Dyson and Alondra Nelson. (RSVP by emailing TheTechCoupRSVP@gmail.com.) Little did I know how timely this reading would become, however.

Schaake served as a member of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2019, where she took her passion for human rights and curiosity about technology and turned herself into one of that body’s leading voices for internet freedom. In that role, she did pioneering work tackling the rise of spyware (the use of technology to spy on and harass dissidents in many countries), fought to defend Europe’s relatively aggressive approach to regulation of Big Tech, rubbed shoulders with and saw through the claims of the blockchain bros at Richard Branson’s Necker Island, led the European team observing the 2017 elections in Kenya (where over-reliance on faulty electronic voting systems made by a French company led to a complete political disaster) and kept a vigilant eye on many of the other ways companies like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Google were pushing countries and communities around. After leaving the parliament, Facebook tried to get her to join its Oversight Board, but she had the good sense to see through that charade and instead joined the Real Facebook Oversight Board along with a coterie of other independent experts.

As an elected official herself, Schaake also had an insider’s experience of how major tech platforms try to insinuate themselves with politicians across the spectrum by offering them free help on their campaigns, and she has a healthily jaundiced view of how Big Tech has lobbied itself into a cozy position with the powerful in many national capitols. Unlike most politicians, she understands the difference between a server and a waiter and can tell when she is being bullshitted. Her book takes the reader up through 2023 and recent efforts in the United States, where she is now based, to develop guardrails for the development and use of AI and also to address TikTok’s influence on American society.

Running throughout The Tech Coup is Schaake’s well-grounded concern that the tech barons, their whiz kid engineers, and their products are moving much faster than democratic governments and their representatives can thoughtfully respond. “For too long our political leaders have been in the grip of an overly optimistic and self-centered view of new technologies,” she writes. Worse, “our social, professional and civil lives are increasingly digitized and, essentially, all aspects of digitization are in the hands of private companies” while governments are outsourcing their own ability to make and oversee its own digital services to private companies, hollowing government’s core capabilities.

Unfortunately, as Schaake herself notes, there isn’t much of an organized constituency in America for protecting people’s digital rights (including their core right to privacy) or for holding Big Tech companies accountable for the harms their products impose on consumers and communities. Recently, the ground has shifted in a slightly better direction, though mainly regarding the negative impact of social media on young people. President Biden’s well-publicized efforts to address existential concerns about AI have been successfully dominated by the very companies rushing to make AI more powerful (and profitable). And the only thing Congress can move on is the supposed threat to national security presenting by the popularity of TikTok, which is ultimately owned by the Chinese government and therefore exempt from kid glove treatment accorded to American tech makers. The Tech Coup is a highly readable guide to all these issues and ends with a visionary set of proposals to ensure that tech serves democracy and not the other way around.

Paging Nasrallah

I always find that I learn more about a topic by reading a well-written book on it than simply trying to stay on top of it from the daily news, but sometimes a timely book offers insight on breaking news as well. And to be honest, starting Tuesday afternoon, I had a hard time staying focused on The Tech Coup, as the news of what some wags have labeled “Operation Grim Beeper” began to break. By now, you probably know the highlights: Tuesday afternoon local time, thousands of pagers in the possession of Hezbollah operatives across Lebanon and in parts of Syria exploded, killing and maiming hundreds, including some ordinary civilians. Chaos reined and hospitals were flooded. Wednesday, hundreds of walkie-talkies also belonging to Hezbollah also exploded. Though Israel is officially denying involvement, leaks to key Western outlets and additional reporting makes clear this was a long-term and highly sophisticated operation by the Mossad that set up front companies that made and sold these electronic tools, packed with tiny but lethal amounts of explosive, to Hezbollah, making the militant organization an accomplice in its own emasculation.

Well, folks, that old saying of sci-fi writer William Gibson, that “the future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed,” has never felt more real and more worrisome. One of the core characteristics of our digital lives has now been weaponized at state-level scale. It’s not as if we couldn’t have connected the dots before this week. People have been warning for a while that the so-called “internet of things” might not be an unalloyed good. As Schaake writes, “Traffic lights, drones, sound systems, and cars that connect to the internet also provide hackers with new entry points to disrupt and destroy digital networks. Successful attacks on our smart networks can bring society to a halt. Thus, having connected devices without matching policies and protections is causing unprecedented risks from a cybersecurity perspective.” Or, as she sums it up: “We are facing an inescapable and terrifying reality: the digitization of everything has enabled the weaponization of everything.”

While Israel could not have pulled off this attack without physically altering the insides of pagers, walkie-talkies and other devices, to turn them into mini-grenades, it also would never have made sense to make the investment in such a complex covert operation if people weren’t already so deeply tied to their phones and similar electronic communications tools. Surveillance capitalism has thrived by making these devices so affordable, convenient and nifty that most people generally don’t know, don’t care or forget that they are also generating huge and valuable amounts of personal data about their movements and their interests. And now, we see that our dependence on personal technology can, under the right circumstances, be turned into a weapon of pinpoint mass destruction.

A decade ago, I remember being a somewhat lonely voice along with Zeynep Tufekci warning that the Obama campaign’s adroit use of Big Data to win a presidential election wasn't something we should be cheering blindly, because bad actors would certainly figure out how to target and manipulate people as well. I don't think any of us anticipated back then that it would be bad foreign actors taking advantage of the tech platforms and microtargeting in order to try to influence an election--we were focused simply on domestic threats and dirty tricksters. That was before 2016, when Russian-led troll farms took advantage of tech platforms to whip up misinformation and foment division among American voters.

In a similar way, I think our worries about how the vulnerabilities about the Internet of Things might manifest, in terms of violation of privacy, scams, ransom attacks, and so on, underestimated what could really go wrong once foreign adversaries decided to weaponize them. Right now, people in Lebanon are apparently afraid of all their technology, shutting off their laptops and worrying that their cigarette lighters might explode. I don’t think those of us who live in the supposedly secure West really understand how vulnerable we are as well. If it’s “okay” for Israel to weaponize their enemies’ pagers (since after all Hezbollah started the current round of hostilities by lobbing munitions indiscriminately into Israeli towns last October 8), why isn’t it “okay” for Iran to hack Americans’ traffic lights or remotely commandeer some high-end cars to turn them into street-level missiles?

Perhaps I’m being alarmist, but it does feel like a line has been crossed. Maybe that line was already blurry—after all, both Hezbollah and Israel use different kinds of conventional weapons to hit each other and on both sides, civilians have been hurt and killed in large numbers. (That said, we shouldn’t forget that Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah refers to the residents of northern Israel as “settlers” and postures as if he is helping “liberate” Palestine though Israel occupies no meaningful bit of Lebanon). And maybe the line against unconventional use of cyberweapons has already been crossed as well, especially by Russia in its ongoing war on Ukraine, which has included cyberattacks on its power grid, electricity transmission operator, banks and the like. But Grim Beeper (sorry, can’t help but use this term) feels like an acceleration of the trend. As more of the world’s militaries and para-militaries invest in cutting-edge technologies, all hoping to develop sharper tools, we should not be sanguine. Another dark genie has gotten out of its bottle.

One final observation that is more geopolitical than technological. It is impossible to look at what just happened without also recognizing how the Israeli tail is trying to wag the American dog. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has clearly calculated that he will be better off with a Donald Trump presidency than a Kamala Harris presidency. So escalating in Lebanon now works in his favor in a variety of ways: he knows the Biden White House will not rein him in because it doesn’t want to tip more Jewish voters toward Trump (there are 300,000 in the key swing state of Pennsylvania, for example); he knows Biden will try to restrain Iran on his behalf since an all-out regional war can only make things worse; he knows that a hot war makes American voters more anxious about “global chaos” and thus more inclined to vote for a strongman; and by opening a second front he can continue to defer any domestic political reckoning that might come once a ceasefire is achieved over Gaza.

How did Israel’s leader come to understand that he could play the United States so easily? Well, it turns out American democracy is quite vulnerable to determined lobbies. Here’s how Schaake describes how Big Tech came to be so dominant in America:

“A cascading set of society’s leaders helped us arrive at our sad reality. Early tech pioneers crafted a libertarian ideological foundation the burgeoning industry could embrace. Later tech executives transformed that ideology into antiregulatory corporate practices and build companies that sought to become governments of their own. Even as tech growth skyrocketed, Democratic and Republican administrations in the United States refused to put checks in place to balance companies’ power or behavior and to hold them to account when needed. Along the way, a rotating case of operatives moving between public office and industry sustained this hands-off approach.”

Sound familiar?

Note to readers: Next week may be busy so today’s extra post may have to count as next week’s regular post. We shall see!