Endless Thread - Introducing Click Here: "Israel, Gaza and all the light you cannot see"

Episode Date: December 27, 2023

An episode from the Click Here podcast from Recorded Future News. The story of two ordinary people who decided to tackle two extraordinary problems: identifying the thousands who went missing in Israel in the days after the October 7th attacks, and one man’s leap of faith to get internet and cellphone service into Gaza.

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People who follow our subreddit may remember that we recently asked you if you wanted to hear stories about the war in Israel and Gaza. And if you wanted to hear our take on that. And we got a lot of response to that. We are thinking about that. We're taking in your reactions to that question and thinking about how endless thread might want to cover this story. But in the meantime, we wanted to take a minute to share an episode from another tech podcast

that tackled this. It's a show we listened to called Click Here from Recorded Future News. And it is hosted by Dina Temple Rastin, whose name might ring a bell. If you listen to NPR, she was a long-time terrorism and investigative. correspondent on NPR. Dina and the Click Here team put together an episode recently that looked at the communications problems in both Israel and Gaza shortly after Hamas launched deadly attacks on southern Israel and the war in Gaza began.

Some 1,200 people died in the Hamas attacks on October 7th. 120 more are still being held hostage by Hamas. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, Israeli air strikes have killed some 20,000 Palestinians. The fog of war has made it impossible to verify those numbers. What everyone seems to agree on is that the ability to communicate, emotionally, politically, and even technologically, is hobbling both sides. Today, our friends on the Click Here podcast bring us two stories from Israel and Gaza about bridging the information gap in the conflict. Here's Click Here is Dina Temple Rastin. Aras Calderon says Kippwitz-Nuros not far from the Gaza border was such a beautiful.

place. Full of flower and peaceful place. Just nearby Gaza. Always we had animals, rabbits, birds, cats, dogs. She was born there, spent some time away, and then returned 20 years ago

and had four kids. Her youngest, Erez, is 12. He loved to ride horses. He loved to play football and ping pong. He loved computer, like all children, you know. He loved to laugh. He laugh a lot. He's great. humor. She sent us videos of him, one with the family, sending a greeting to someone.

And you can see a mugging for the camera. And then, October 7th came. It's a Saturday, normal Saturday. 6.30 in the morning, I wake up. 7 o'clock, 7.30, I start to hear them. I can hear Arab shouting and shooting and shooting. shooting everywhere. Tata, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta.

A lot of noises coming over. She ran to the safe room they have in the house, and the gunmen were right behind her. I can hear them behind my door. Ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta. Talking, talking, al-Aqmar, Arabic, you know. I used to love this language.

I used to love it. Adas's daughter and son had been spending the night with their father. He lives less than a mile away. And Adas sent a text to her ex-husband to see if everyone was okay. And the last message I got from him, it was 8.30 in the morning. The terrorists is in our house. We jumped from the window.

We're hiding in the bushes. I said, oh, no, oh my God. Don't do that. Go back to the shelter immediately. But I don't think he saw this message. A short time later, she got a message from her son. He told me, Mom, Mom, be quiet, be quiet. I love you.

And then there was silence. Until just a few days later, when Hamas, which had been posting real-time videos of the attacks, posted this online. A short video clip of her son, Eras, the one who had texted her. Hamas had grabbed him in the chaos of that initial attack. It doesn't sound like much. It's the visuals that are supposed to shock you.

It shows Eras being manhandled by an armed Hamas fighter. He looks tiny in this little black t-shirt, and the fighter is pulling him around by the shoulder. Addis knows that the video is out there. It's gone viral, but she won't watch it. I don't want to see my son, my small baby, helpless, so helpless, so confused, so terrified. I don't want to see that. If you look at the video, Eris looks like he's trying to be brave. There's been no words since, and his sister and his dad have gone missing too. So Addis, like the members of hundreds of other Israeli families of the missing,

has no idea where they are, or even if they're still alive. We don't have any information. We didn't get any information. Halfway across the country in Tel Aviv, a woman named Karin Nahan was thinking about how distressing it must be for people like Addis. Families missing loved ones with so little information to go on. And it turns out, information is Karin Nhan. specialty. I'm a professor on my usually daily life. I'm a professor of politics of information.

But she's more than just a professor. For much of this year, she's been focused on the protest movement that broke out in Israel back in the spring. She was one of the protest organizers. I'm one of the, I would say, prominent voices in Israel in civil society. People had taken to the streets to object to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's efforts to change the court system in Israel, and to dismantle some of its democratic institutions. We've been protesting for the last nine months, millions of people in Israel. So she already had a network ready to go. She controlled WhatsApp channels brimming with tens of thousands of socially active individuals

who had spent much of 2023 taking their cues from her. After the October 7th attack, she put a call out to the network of people she'd been working with, asking if they wanted to help with a different kind of grassroots campaign. She wanted them to help identify the thousands of people who were unaccounted for in the confusion after that initial attack. And my WhatsApp really exploded, really. The tech bros, academics, and ordinary citizens who had been marching in the streets with her for months immediately responded.

Though she made a point of saying that anyone who was willing to help was welcome. It didn't matter if you were a humanities professor, a coder, or a doctor of philosophy. And for more than a month, she worked in a conference center in Tel Aviv with 1,500 of these volunteers, all trying to put a name to the face of the missing. And they weren't alone.

Other groups had recruited thousands of volunteers, and they were all working in the Expo Center on different projects related to the attacks. One was responsible on evacuating people, one was responsible on making sure that the soldiers get the right equipment, one was responsible on civilian equipment. In Karin's Corner, the volunteers were fully focused on just identifying people who either were killed, survived, or were abducted during those initial attacks. And to do that, they needed to know who was in the area at the time. We didn't even know what the list is. We didn't know what we're talking about. Who knew who was exactly in the South?

Who might have been near the border with Gaza? That would be like saying, how do you identify who went to Central Park on a Saturday? So they decided to ask the military. And we said, okay, they probably have the right list. And we started with their list. But very fast we found out that the list was with the latter noise. Noise, in other words, not very helpful, not very accurate.

And you have to understand, you can't, you can't, make mistakes here because every person counts. It's not like you did a small mistake and you can continue. Now we have to start going one name after the other and start to understand what happened to each one of them. So they realized we're going to have to compile a list of the missing ourselves. And since there was nothing reliable to build from, they decided, why don't we just go straight to the people themselves? So they created a website for families and friends to report someone was missing. So we created very fast. We created a website that started to get information from the public.

And that was our strength, that we got a bottom-up kind of straight and live information from so many people around the country. So you were basically crowdsourcing. We started with crowdsourcing. So we had, if we had in thinking about the sources of information, so we had, first of all, the public, which was our main strength at the beginning. One of the first problems they had to solve had to do with, the giant music festival that was going on not far from the Gaza border.

As many as 4,000 people were supposed to attend this rave in the desert. And it wasn't like a purely ticketed event. People were camping, milling in and out. So how do you figure out who was there? Karin and the team started cross-referencing names with festival organizers, with cities and the network of nearby kibbutz to try winnowing down the list. Harvey ended up not going to the festival, Norman went in his place, that sort of thing.

It was really crafting a kind of a picture from so many sources of information. It's really an investigative effort. And as they built that approximate list, they were also trying to gather all the available information they could about the status of those potential victims. They scoured videos taken at the festival, images online,

which meant that a lot of the source photographs they were looking at were taken on the fly. These weren't images with two eyes and two ears or someone looking at the camera. These were blurry, maybe taken from the side or moving by quickly. So they had to find ways to decode those. And they ended up having people write algorithms that addressed those problems. They'd unbler photographs or rework facial recognition software so it could identify half a face. And then they started looking beyond faces to other clues.

So for example, we identify a person by the fabric of his underwear. We identified people by looking at their tattoos, by looking at their properties, at their unique properties of their body, and by that identifying their face. So it's a flip, right? Usually you'd identify the face and then you identify the body, but here we did something opposite. And then they needed to cross-reference all the information they'd gathered on potential victims with videos Hamas had posted themselves. For example, 150 channels of Hamas, in Facebook, TikTok, WhatsApp, Twitter, et cetera, et cetera.

To try to find out whether that person is found in any one of the videos with the terrorists. So it's really to start kind of assembling a portfolio, a kind of a dossier, about each one of the people. That's what gave, you know, our ability to understand the big picture. and also the small picture. They'd get a name, try to identify all the pictures they could of that person, trained facial recognition software on it, and then a human, one of the 1,500 people in the room who were on her team, would check it all.

And if they found a match, they would pass that information to the authorities. And the fact that we were in one physical space, we refused to work on online spaces because everybody just walks between the tables and gets their solution. was I call it creative chaos? Creative chaos, she says. And I said, we're not trying to do an optimization. We're trying to find the fastest and best solution.

And that's actually, for example, how they were able to solve that blurry photo problem. Because with all those random people in one room, when they said, hey, they're blurry photographs. Anybody know what to do? Some of the professors and scholars who were there actually had a solution. There were technologies that were developed in scholars' head. They were in compartments sitting in universities, but never were implemented. So you had this kind of a big bang, and after 110 hours, they were able to implement things that so far were in theory only. Between the social media feeds, the Hamas posts, they improvised technologies,

and all of that people power, they ended up identifying just about everybody at the festival. This is the ultimate lesson of the machines can't do it alone. It needs a human. And you have to have interdisciplinary spaces. The challenges today are very interdisciplinary. It's not about technological people. It's really about having diverse groups. But in a way, the most improbable thing about it was that it was led by Corrine Nohan at all. She'd even alluded to it during a bullhorn speech she gave to the volunteers when the project started. Normal time, she had told them, we wouldn't have the right to do even a tenth of what

we're doing here, both ethically and legally. That's because this was a giant project of scraping the internet, a giant project to invade the privacy of thousands of people who by no fault of their own went missing on a terrible day in Israel. And that's the kind of project that went against everyone. everything Kareen stood for. One of the things that you said was, in normal times, we wouldn't have the right to do even a tenth of what we're doing here.

What did you mean? I established the digital right movement and I established privacy Israel. Privacy Israel. It's a kind of digital rights group. So I'm the one who's all the time complaining, even appealing to the High Justice Court for breaching privacy. but she said, this was different. And here, basically, I switched my hat to 180 degrees to get any information, any information, right, about those people, right?

We were in a situation where this is a disaster. And so you pass, for me, it was passing a red kind of line that before I didn't cross. Yeah, yeah, it was obvious that we need to do that. We talked to Kareen just a day after she said they decided to shudder the war room. They did what they had come to do, she said. We're still missing between 40 to 100 people. 40 to 100 cases they're still working on. And we're working, you know, online on particular cases,

but it's time to close it because when we created this war room, we didn't create it for the structure of the war room. Created it basically to have a goal to accomplish that goal. we accomplished it, I think. I asked her if the team had worked on the Calderon case, whether they had tracked down more information on what had happened to Erez or his sister or his dad. The Calderon's memory, yeah.

She said they had a policy of not talking about specific cases publicly. And then she added, By the way, we know all the names. Unfortunately, we know all them. Adas Calderon's two children were among the hundred or so hostages. Hamas has since released. Their father is still being held captive. When we come back, a grassroots campaign that is fixing a very different but very big

problem on the other side of the conflict in Gaza. This is Click Here. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music. Music. Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab. Adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire.

Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from CitySpace. Productions, the Creative Studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. This is Endless Threat.

I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and today we are bringing you a pair of stories from our friends at the Click Here podcast. They've reported on how factions are wielding technology to their advantage in the war between Israel and Hamas. Residents in the Gaza Strip aren't just dealing with air strikes and house-to-house fighting. They are struggling with basic communication.

Without a phone connection, no one can really call an ambulance or let their loved ones know they are safe. Initially, the outages appeared to be the work of Israel, which has control over fiber optic cables in Palestinian territories. The local cellular provider,

Paltel, says that fuel shortages are to blame. Dina Temple Rastin, host of the podcast Click Here, reports on how Palestinians found an ingenious way to try to stay connected. So I'm Hamad Abajwa and I'm a 22-year-old. Right now, I'm in central Gaza in a city called Dair al-Balach. Ahmad is an English teacher in Gaza and was about to go to Germany to start work on a master's degree when the war began. We wanted to talk to him on the phone, but the internet was so patchy

we couldn't get through. So we send him some questions and had him record answers for us. Right now I'm standing at a window at the staircase, and I'm looking out to a bunch of rubble that has been left by the bombing

that happened. I think 10 days ago. 10 days ago or so. Israeli airstrikes hit the house next door. Trucks arrived a couple of days later. In order for them to be able to extract the bodies from underneath the rubble. A lot of people died and some of them were never found. So, yeah, it is pretty terrible.

The internet blackouts, the sinking feeling that people in Gaza were subject to only cut off from the world began a short time after that. The first time it happened, I was waking up from sleep to the sound of my brother-in-law saying that they cut off the internet and the service of the phones. And I picked up my phone. They did cut off the phone and everything. I mean, imagine if you were abroad and you had a family here in Gaza, and that internet connection was stable for some point.

But then it suddenly blacks out. for 24 hours or so. People outside Gaza immediately assumed the worst. The worst case scenario that comes to your mind is that your family and friends were bombed here in Gaza. So my family and friends cried so much and they were so anxious and afraid that we were under the rubble. When the internet came back on, his friends and family flooded him with calls. We comforted them. We told him that, hey, everything.

is fine, we're doing okay. And yeah. The first time the internet disappeared for about 36 hours. The other one had was the other one was a couple of days ago and it was quite shorter. The Wi-Fi came back quickly. It feels like someone's pulling it's pulling the plug and plugging it back in whenever they please. Phone lines and internet services have once again been cut right across the Gaza Strip. That's according to the telecommunications company, Paltel. Gaza is about twice the size of Washington, D.C. And Paltell started in 1990s.

Its very existence was set out as part of the Oslo and Paris Accords. It was supposed to be part of an effort that would allow Palestinians to manage their own infrastructure, roads, water, telecoms. But Paltel's fiber optic cables, they run through Israel. So it's easy to be able to kind of shut the Internet down. Helga Tawil Surrey is an associate professor of media, culture, and communications at NYU Steinhard. So I generally actually write about media and media infrastructure, mostly in the Palestinian territories, but across kind of Israel-Palestine. And she says throttling the internet takes more than just bombing cell towers like we've seen in Gaza.

She says internet outages could not just be caused by some sort of collateral damage, like getting caught in the war. There has been bombing of cell towers for sure, but that in and of itself is not enough to just shut down in the way that we saw. That requires the metaphorical flip of a switch. It is a purposeful kind of shutting off. That said, even when the Internet is not being intentionally turned off, even at the best of times, connectivity in Gaza is patchy. And that has more to do with the technology itself. So Palestinian providers are still functioning on a network that was initially able to sustain about 200, maybe 300,000 cellular users on a 2G network. Today you have obviously sort of a million more users, but they're still operating on that same kind of infrastructure.

With three to five times more users on a network that was essentially built for flip phones, it means either you don't get a signal because there are too many people trying to use the network at the same time, or you get to get to. dropped calls. Helga says people still have dial-up modems there. But she says those issues don't change the fact that turning off the internet, even when the internet isn't great to begin with, has a huge impact. Because it's not just simply preventing kind of communication in and out of Gaza, but also within Gaza, right? So people can't call each other. You can't call the ambulance. You can't get through to anybody. Never mind that it's dark and there's bombs and there's no electricity and so on. Muhammad said that when the internet disappears, it's unnerving. But when we don't know what's going on, it's more, more scary, basically.

This lack of internet connection and so on, it really covers up so much of the atrocities that they're doing to the point where no one knows about it. And that's the issue to begin with. No one knows how bad the situation in Gaza because they can't know when there isn't anyone to report. That was also a concern for a marketing executive in Saudi Arabia named Bashar Shaheen. I'm a Jordanian that comes from Palestinian origins.

He was watching events unfold in Gaza, the bombings, the internet blackouts, and he thought there must be something he could do. Bashar already had a bit of a history organizing people. I had created the Translators Movement in the Gaza War of 2021, which I collected more than 300 people that speaks all the languages of the world just to reveal the truth to the world. As he was trying to think about solutions

for the communications issues in Gaza, he saw some people floating one particular idea. People were posting that they should get Starlink into Gaza. That's Elon Musk's satellite network that has been working so well in Ukraine. But Bashar didn't think that would be an option. And I saw that and I tweeted about it. I said, listen, guys, this is impossible to be happening right now because Gaza is closed.

Nobody is allowed to enter. Nobody is allowed to go out of it. So the startling thing won't happen. So he started to look for other things. And he's not a techie guy, but he thought about this one technology you may not even know exists. An e-sim. It's been around since 2016, but it's only become popular in the last couple of years. Like a regular SIM card, it holds your phone number and your account information.

But to install it, you don't need to go to a store. You just need to scan a QR code with your smartphone. And what it does is it essentially turns your non-functioning Pal-Tel phone into a phone that can now connect to a different network. It'll roam for one that is online and then use that one instead. So the people closer to the northern part of Gaza, they connect to their Israeli towers, the cellular towers, and the people closer to Ruffah, which is in the south,

they connect to the Egyptian towers. And they're pretty cheap. You can get one that lasts for a week for about $5, or a higher-end one with more connectivity and more time, for about 30. And I'll be completely honest. I didn't know that the E-SIMS initiative would work, so I took a leap of faith. So Bashar tweeted out his plan and asked if there was anyone in Gaza

who wanted him to send them a couple of YSems. The next morning, his social media account was filled with barcodes for ESIMs that he could send to Gaza. And when the people knew that that one actually worked, they started sending me tens. Then it turned to hundreds. And then it turned to thousands. So we couldn't keep up with the numbers. Little more than a week into the project, he has more messages in his inbox than he has time to reply to. At least 800 messages in it.

So we're sending thousands. and the people actually found my account on Instagram, so they decided to flood me there. So they're now sending me on Instagram. They're sending me on Twitter. At first, he was just sending them to journalists and emergency medical personnel. Now he says anyone who asks can get one. He has a couple of friends helping him manage all the requests. So you're literally sending thousands of e-sim cards to Gaza?

It was just an idea that came up, and I'm really glad that it came up. It helped a lot. there was a lot of messages of people thanking us. Thanking him for giving them back their voice and their connection to the rest of the world. There was a lot of emotional messages telling us that this ESM might have provided us with one last call to call our loved ones outside of Gaza and just to tell them goodbye. It's not a perfect solution. We spoke to half a dozen people in central Gaza who said they were too far away from world.

working networks in Egypt or Israel for the E-Sims to work. But in a time of war, when everything seems so unsure, just being able to hear a familiar voice on the other end of the phone can be a welcome lifeline. This is Click Here. That was Dina Temple Rastin in the show Click Here, a cyber and intelligence podcast from recorded future news. They drop new episodes every Tuesday. And if you want to hear more, check them out wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and that's it for me and us for now. We'll have some more things dropping in your feed,

and we'll see you in the new year.