Tech Won't Save Us - Gaza Is a Laboratory for Future Warfare w/ Spencer Ackerman

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

Paris Marx is joined by Spencer Ackerman to discuss the past year of Israel's actions in Palestine and the innovations in war technology being used to carry out what the ICJ has deemed a "plausible" genocide in Gaza.Spencer Ackerman is a Pulitzer-prize winning author of Reign of Terror. He’s a contributor at Zeteo and publishes the Forever Wars newsletter. He’s also writing a new series of Iron Man comics that come out very soon.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:Spencer wrote a piece marking a year since October 7 for Zeteo. He’s also written about the Lebanon pager attack and Israel’s innovation with quadcopters.Yuval Abraham has written about the use of AI in Gaza and how Israel is relying on US cloud companies for military purposes.Roberto González wrote a paper about the links between Silicon Valley and the military-industrial complex.Support the show

The rules-based international order has been exposed as simply a system in which America and its allies operate as sort of super global citizens. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Spencer Ackerman. Spencer is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Reign of Terror. He's also a contributor at Citeo and publishes the Forever Wars newsletter. And this is a pretty cool detail. He's also writing a new series of Iron Man comics with Julius Oda and Alex Sinclair that comes out soon. So keep your eye out for those or, you know, go pre-order them. This week on the show,

we're talking about a conversation I felt we needed to have. This isn't coming out on October 7th because we don't usually release on Mondays, but this conversation I had with Spencer was recorded on Monday, October 7th, just in case there's any events or developments that happen afterward that we don't talk about in this conversation. But given that we're a year on from Hamas' attack on Israel, and of course, all of the carnage that Israel has unleashed on Gaza, the West Bank, now Lebanon and beyond since then, I felt that we needed to have a discussion about what has happened over the past year, what we have seen playing out in front of our eyes with this

genocide that Israel has been engaging in, so that we're not ignorant to that and not ignoring it, but also the potential consequences of everything that we've seen over the past year and how that could potentially escalate the brutality and violence in our world more broadly as a result of what Israel has done with the support of the United States and so many other Western countries. I knew Spencer was the perfect person to have this conversation with me, to not only ground what we have seen from Israel in the longer legacy of the war on terror that Spencer has spent so many years looking into and investigating, but also to look at the technological developments in weapons technologies and the use of AI and these other things that we have seen, given that Spencer, again, has been reporting on and writing about these things for a very long time, including for Wired in the past. So he understands these things well. And I think

the picture that he paints for us in this conversation is, unfortunately, a pretty dark one. When you consider not only all the people that Israel has killed and continues to kill in Gaza, Lebanon, and beyond, but also how its innovations in war technology will now proliferate and will be seen in conflicts in other parts of the world and the many threats that sets up for the future. So I certainly hope that this war is going to end soon, that Israel is going to be held to account for its genocide, and that the people of Palestine can have the rights, the dignity, and the state, if that also what could be coming in the future if we don't act very quickly to rein in not just what we've seen over the past year, but also what the war on terror more broadly has unleashed on the world for more than two decades. Before we get into the episode, I also hope that you're enjoying our Data Vampires series. The first episode

dropped on Monday, and there are three more to come on the following Mondays. But if you do want to listen to those early, you can become a Patreon supporter at patreon.com slash tech won't save us to do that. There was a lot of work that went into this series. So I do hope that you enjoy it. And I hope that you learn about the broader consequences of these massive data centers that these major companies are unleashing onto the world,

regardless of the consequences. So with that said, I hope that you enjoy this conversation with Spencer. If you do make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making Tech Won't Save Us every week, whether it is these weekly episodes or the occasional mini-series like Data Vampires, you can join supporters like Christine in Melbourne, Australia, and Jonas in Odense,

Denmark, by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Spencer, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you very much for having me, Paris. I'm really looking forward to speaking with you and, you know, learning about your insights about all these topics. But obviously, we are one year from the Hamas attack where they breached the fence that Israel had built around Gaza, you know, an attack that led to over 1,100 deaths and more than 200 people being taken hostage into Gaza itself. Since then, of course, we've seen Israel launch a brutal assault on Gaza, carrying

out what the International Court of Justice has deemed a plausible genocide with over 40,000 people killed, but some estimates put it much higher than that. Now Israel's aggression has spread to Lebanon and could go further. Given that we're a year from that very pivotal event, I wonder how you reflect on the events of October 7th and now everything that we've seen it has served to justify since then. It's a very painful reflection. It's a period of reckoning on the Jewish liturgical calendar. These are the days of awe in between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and reckoning with the devastation of the past year in which a Jewish state has inflicted such breathtaking damage at scale, not only to the Palestinians of Gaza, but now to the people of Lebanon, and standing on the precipice of a US enabled as all of this has been, war with Iran is an extremely daunting proposition. I look at it

first as an unbounded human calamity before I feel like we can talk about what the politics of this moment are, what technological changes in the landscape both contribute and accelerate and show themselves as symptoms of those political developments as well as economic ones. I think it's mostly important to talk about this in human terms because the essence of war is dehumanization. And with dehumanization comes the ability to treat other human beings as expendable, to treat their lives as means to an end, and to treat them ultimately as surplus to a goal of aggression. And we'll be talking a lot about scale throughout this conversation, but the scale of devastation that we've seen Israel inflict over this past year rather quickly exceeded, first rivaled and then exceeded the Russian devastation of Ukraine. And watching the ways

in which Western media and Western politicians treated Ukrainian lives as the precious things that they are, and treated Palestinian lives as an intolerable encumbrance to the preciousness of Israeli lives has, I think, for many people in the world, especially outside the West, but inside the West too, shattered the illusion of America's rules-based international order as an order that even just lived up to its promises of creating a world in which legal institutions and diplomatic mechanisms could preserve and expand the prospect of a peaceful future. That's gone now. The rules-based international order has been exposed as simply a system in which America and its allies operate as sort of super global citizens in a way kind of comparable on a macro level to the ways in which Israel enforces its apartheid in the West Bank with different designations of

subjecthood for Palestinians that inhibit their freedom. And we've seen the ways in which Western justification engines will either euphemize that or justify it outright as the desired outcome of a people that revealed themselves as nothing but terrorists. And that's a frightening proposition. I don't want for a second to get past the need to end this war now, to end this before this spirals even further out of control. But it is also hard not to recognize that digging the future that we want to see out of this rubble is going to take tremendous amounts of effort and solidarity at a time in which they look to be, I don't think in short supply, but not sufficient to overcome the war machine that has visited itself upon the Middle East this past year.

Yeah, I think you've made some really important points there. And I feel like that contrast that you were talking about, where we can see the response to Russia's aggression and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and then to compare that to the Western response to what Israel has been doing in Gaza, and now, you know, more broadly in the region, it really stands out, especially even the other day, seeing when Israel started launching these really significant strikes and attacks in Lebanon, and then seeing the Iranian missile attacks that hit Israel and how over 1000 people were killed in Lebanon in the course of less than a week, I believe it was. And there was not really the Western outrage about that. I think I heard like the French president get a bit more angry about than some of the other Western leaders. But as soon as these missiles

came toward Israel, it seemed like all the Western leaders were, you know, kind of out in front of the press and the podium saying about how immoral and how terrible it was that Iran was doing these things. And I don't want to see missiles being launched at Israel, but I also don't want to see Israel launching missiles at other people and killing so many in Lebanon or Gaza or wherever else, right? And it seems like the space available to vocalize that rejection and to point to the crucial ingredient, which always gets neglected in these discussions, which is that there is another way of moving forward. It has to do with the freedom of Palestine. And were Palestine free, none of this would happen. October 7th would not happen. Everything that has come as an emanation from October 7th would not happen and could not happen. And right

now, the current course continuing based on the momentum of previous catastrophes, based on what we're seeing right now as we record this from Israel and from the White House, frankly, of seeing a moment of opportunity to be seized in setting back Iranian regional power. All of that has to be understood as setting up the next October 7th. I don't know who will carry them out. I don't know how bloody and despicable they will be. But I know from the experience of watching 75 years of colonization and attack and reprisal and regional instability and counter mobilization, and so on, it is preordained along this course that there will be another October 7th. And if we want to honor the dead, whether they're Israeli or Palestinian or Lebanese or Iraqi or Iranian or Syrian or American,

this has to be stopped and stopped not only through a ceasefire, but through a sustained condition predicated on a free Palestine. Yeah, I think that's such an important point. And when you explain that, and when you talk about the possibility of future attacks, future October 7th, whatever that is going to look like, it brings me back to the piece that you wrote for Zateo, kind of in reflection on one year since October 7th, where you made this comparison that I know that you've made in the past between, you know, what Israel has done and the war on terror that the United States carried out after 9-11, and even how Israel, after October 7th, tried to frame that attack as being on the scale of 9-11 or many scales beyond

that to justify what came after. Can you talk a bit about the argument that you were making there and the comparisons that you see between those events? while the United States is no longer fighting at war in Afghanistan, has otherwise not ended, which is to say most of the authorities, the institutions, and even the operations of the wars begun after 9-11 persist. We'll talk about some of them, especially as they've transmuted over into structural aspects of global capitalism, but especially within the United States. First, there are a couple different lines of operation to look at for the sake of this comparison. One is as a military prospect, it is very hard not to see the deliberate ambiguity in defining an enemy and in defining an

end state for that enemy between the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, and indeed beyond to its hunt for not only, quote unquote, Al Qaeda, but quote unquote, Al Qaeda affiliates, the full list of which remains classified all of these years later in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Niger, Libya, and many other places indeed. And seeing how by around May, when the IDF started breaking from Netanyahu in Netanyahu's conception of total victory, it was hard not to see a bit of the resistance from within the Pentagon, still not predicated on the idea of breaking from the war on terror, but within the Pentagon of rejecting these goals set by the Bush administration as maximal and militarily unfulfillable, determined ultimately deep in a

quagmire and get away from a definable end state that looked like victory. And Israel in Gaza looked like it was at that inflection point in the late spring and early summer, where elements of the IDF general staff seemed to be pressuring Netanyahu for a hostage deal, only to have this pivot to the northern front, where I think between 85 and 100,000 Israelis had been driven from their homes by Hezbollah opening a northern front of rocketing basically the Galilee. And now Israel responds, again, with full American backing to gamble on the war in a manner that seems awfully reminiscent of around 2008, 2009, when the US national security establishment

viewed Afghanistan as a salvageable opportunity that made the United States look potentially more potent than an Iraq war, which in addition to showcasing American impotence, also exacerbated domestic political divides in a rather acrimonious way. Then we have the war as a culture, which manifests not only in journalism, in discourse, and in cultural products, but also through, as we saw, enormous disputes, very heated disputes about who gets to speak and who has to be silenced. Disputes that in this case were mediated by police violence on a lot of campuses. And one of the things that anyone who has looked at the war on terror would understand immediately is once the attack happened, the stunning rise in violent Islamophobia and constraint for support for not just Palestine, but for contextualizing

October 7th within the context of prior Israeli behavior, shrunk and took a kind of not just censorious, but potentially career-ending form, as you saw with students who signed open letters for Palestine or demonstrated on behalf of Palestine, getting letters of employment revoked from law schools in particular, the censure of the only Palestinian American member of Congress, Rashida Tlaib, for using phrases like from the river to the sea. I published an essay along with other Jewish writers, as well as Palestinian and other Muslim and Arab writers, in a Verso anthology called From the River to the Sea. The phrase is not a phrase that favors violence. The phrase is

a phrase that favors justice. And those who wish justice not to happen have no choice but to interpret it as a call for violence. Bank, you have legislators in states like Florida talk about this being a good thing as there being one less Muslim terrorist facing no censure. And the point is not hypocrisy. The point is to understand, illuminate how this reactionary political structure gains power from events like October 7th, like it gained power from 9-11 and feeds reactionary political currents, not just in Israel, but in the United States. And we have seen, to give just one example, just yesterday, as he is trying to cosplay as an anti-war choice, Donald Trump talk about how enthusiastically he looks forward when returned to office to bombing Iran and simultaneously recalling the way the Democrats, including the current President Joe Biden,

behaved throughout particularly the first decade of the war on terror before Barack Obama, but also through Barack Obama. We see Kamala Harris using more empathetic rhetoric behind a policy that she considers sacrosanct of selling weapons to Israel and providing it with diplomatic support and the framing of an aggressive action, not only in Gaza, but in Lebanon and perhaps very soon in Iran as a measure of self-defense that the United States is obligated to come to Israel's support for. And so it is hard to see the 2024 election as one with an outcome that while it will be very, you know, appropriately fought until election day in the United States, nevertheless has one outcome for Palestine and potentially for Lebanon and

potentially for Iran. And that's a very frightening proposition and also highly reminiscent of the way this operated after 9-11. You know, I want to get to this bigger point about, you know, the technologies that have been used and things like that, but I can't not comment after hearing you say all those important things about that comparison to the war on terror to think about how you were talking about what we have seen over the past year, and in particular, the political reaction in the United States. And I maybe naively have been surprised to see that, you know, as the death toll has risen, as the number of attacks on hospitals and schools and things like that have risen, how there has been

such a strong resistance within the United States kind of establishment to actually really changing much at all on their policy toward Israel. And now as we've seen the expansion into Lebanon, and now the talks of potentially strikes on Iran, how to me, it felt like the idea of going to war with Iran has been kind of off the cards for a long time in the United States. You know, the recognition that this would be a disaster for everybody involved. And to see that rhetoric kind of return in the past week or so, and how much it is taken seriously as something that should be considered has been truly shocking. It seems like an understatement. I tried to write about this in my book, Reign of Terror. What we are seeing is the consequence of normalizing the war on terror. The war on terror was full of incidents of atrocity, incidents of

torture, massive forced refugee flows, enormous amounts of public wealth extracted and redistributed upward for the maintenance of defense contractors that if you go to Northern Virginia, it looks different than it does a generation ago because of the amount of wealth created by this war machine. And once normalized, it becomes natural to be numb to the next time a hospital is struck by a US air-to-ground rocket launched from an Israeli drone. It becomes easy to put into the background noise an entire genocide when most of the United States experienced the war on terror as a media event that they could disengage from when it ceased being satisfying. The operations authorities and institutions did not experience it as a media event. Certainly, the victims didn't. And its persistence,

its entrenchment into the economy through surveillance capitalism, its codification of its operations, like the charge of material support for terror, which you saw the Anti-Defamation League baselessly hurl at students for justice in Palestine. Let's just think for a minute, how the fuck is a group of college students going to be funding Hamas? Just think about that for a second. Think about how absurd and foolish that is. But the point isn't to be rigorous. The point is to keep groups like that afraid and silenced. They will ultimately be imprisoned for a connection like this. One important tool of the war on terror is known as Section 702. Section 702 is a mass surveillance authority, very periodically renewed since its origins as warrantless bulk surveillance in the United States and for Americans' international communications done entirely illegally and unconstitutionally and in secret by the National Security Agency, and in particular by Dick Cheney, David Addington, and the then NSA director, Michael Hayden. You may notice that in 2016, Democrats started rehabilitating Hayden

as a never-Trumper, and now they're doing the same thing with Dick Cheney, the architect of the war on terrorism right now, because he's endorsed Kamala Harris. Anyhow, Section 702 was renewed over this past year with less of a fight than I and probably others expected, because in part, counterterrorism officials like Christine Abizade, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, started talking about the prospect of Hamas-inspired attacks inside the United States. Chris Wray of the FBI has spent all year talking about these things that haven't happened. And I hope they don't happen. We've seen the ways in which those institutions understood as violative when they were exposed,

certainly in the case of mass surveillance, material support for terrorism, I think less so seen as an inherent abuse. Nevertheless, those were central aspects, both slightly before and all throughout the war on terror being used right now against the political enemies perceived in real of the pro-Israel consensus in the United States. And it's important to acknowledge the heritage of this apparatus of unfreedom because it's so young and can still be excised. This can all be stopped if people organize to stop it. And unfortunately, that level of organizational strength has yet to mature. Yeah. And what you say there is so important, right? So many of these things that we think,

or that seem like they have been the case for so long are actually so new and came not long after this war on terror started. Now, you talked about mass surveillance there, and I wanted to get to another part of what you know, what you've been writing about what has been going on. You know, I've talked to Antony Lowenstein in the past about how Israel has used Palestine as a testing ground for new technologies that its weapon companies have then gone on to sell, you know, far and wide, including to some of the most repressive regimes in the world. You have been writing about how Gaza is a laboratory for future warfare. You know, one example of that is, of course, the mass surveillance and the AI targeting systems

that 972 Magazine has been writing about and reporting on. Can you talk to us a bit about this broader kind of framing of Gaza as a laboratory for future warfare that is being carried out? And also, you know, the specific part of it in using AI for targeting and what that means for the collateral damage, I guess, or the number of deaths that come of these types of wars. Thank you. Yeah. This is a circumstance in which the United States during the war on terror used mass surveillance to facilitate drone strikes in other form of extrajudicial execution, oftentimes without a standard of not needing to know the specific identity of who was being assassinated. Patterns of life surveillance, as it's known, would be sufficient to identify who was probably a militant. What we've seen over the past year, the IDF do in Gaza, and now Lebanon,

as we'll talk about afterward, is a different level of scale, but nevertheless, the kinetic end of a chain of mass surveillance. But that's not all that Israel has showcased in terms of technological achievement in Gaza. And I just want to preface this by saying, like, I used to write about this stuff for Wired magazine. And I want just to apologize in advance if in the discussion of tearing down how this technology operates, if my language starts to get somewhat inhuman. It's a danger of this kind of subject area focus. And I just ask for kind of everyone's grace. I'll try not to do it. But one thing, all of this stuff, because international media is barred by the IDF from Gaza, all of this stuff is underreported and

underexplored. But a tremendous amount has been revealed by Palestinian journalists in Gaza. And I think most important to that contribution is the deploymentBIT systems built quadcopter drones, which are, you know, the things you can see people flying in parks, things that previously held in civilian application, significant camera payloads, and in military application, very sophisticated camera and infrared gimbaled sensors. Now, we have moved to a point in which the Israelis have apparently introduced sufficient fireable stability to these wobbly and cheap platforms where they can fire guns and kill people at distance. And that is a substantial advancement in drone warfare. It follows the same laws of miniaturization over the course of the past generation of US invented drone warfare that you see in other technological fields. And so in that grim respect, it appears

almost horrifically inevitable that it would get to this size. But the implications of such a thing for proliferation of that platform, where you can send a quadcopter armed with a gun to remotely fire into a building and be able to hit a target, you know, I shudder. I don't want to make it sound like this is only a problem when it leaves Palestine. That's absolutely not my point. I just wish to, you know, building on Anthony Lowenstein's important work that you mentioned, point out that what begins in Gaza will not stay there. We know very well, not just from the war on terror, but from many, many decades, if not hundreds of years of experience that what happens in the imperial periphery will come back to the metropole. I bring this up as a matter of hoping to spark solidarity,

not hoping to indicate exceptionalism. Then we've got to talk about what, as you mentioned, the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham has exposed as weaponized AI at scale. Something that we haven't seen military AI do yet is target generation. And the idea of turning these broad pattern of life surveillance that Israel, certainly the West Bank, has collected since the Second Intifada, so for an entire generation, not so much so in Gaza because of the 2005 disengagement. But when Israel began its invasion, the IDF went in with additional surveillance arrays, particularly for facial recognition to capture Gazan's faces. We don't have the exact chain of custody of this, but what Yuval Abraham has exposed is that massive amounts of data, as is necessary, powers target generation through at least three different systems that we know of. One is called

Habsura, which basically turns low-level potential Hamas affiliates' buildings into what is known as power targets. Some of Abraham's sources have described seeing documents that convince them that the point is to inflict damage to civil society. There's another one, Where's Daddy?, which is for figuring out when a suspected militant is around their family to kill them all together. And another is known as lavender, which is about establishing a probability of militancy within some form of set AI parameter, which is an inherently absurd exercise, right? It's basically going to incline upward toward what the US military used to refer to in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere as military-aged males, males between the age of basically 15 and 45,

and use that as the basis for creating lists of people deemed legitimate targets to execute. It has been reported that Google has signed a contract for its controversial Project Nimbus AI with military application with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, something that Google has told many of its engineers that have objected to Project Nimbus it hadn't and wouldn't do. So that has been exposed. And also that Google has granted for its facial recognition efforts in Gaza access to Google Photos and Photos' ability to perform facial recognition as well. targeting generation to work exposes a level of complicity, not just in the American government, but major American surveillance capitalism corporations that in many ways helped ride the war on terror to essentially bestride the world as foundational engines of 21st century capitalism. I think what you're talking about there is so important for us to

understand, right? How these technologies are evolving, how they are being used in even more deadly and very concerning ways, right? How this kind of mass surveillance of a society can then be deployed to justify this targeting of a population and the much greater civilian casualty numbers that we're seeing, right? But then on top of that, you mentioned with the drones. I wanted to pick up on that piece because in one of the pieces of yours that I read, you mentioned how usually when we talk about this advancement of drone warfare, you know, noting that it basically comes out of the United States in the war on terror. And those were like really huge drones, very expensive back in the day and has become over time miniaturized. You mentioned in this piece that usually when we talk about

drone advancement, we're talking about Iran. I know that we've also seen, say, Russia and Ukraine, you know, kind of, I guess, innovating on the use of drones there. Can you talk about how what we're seeing in Israel is a notable difference or advancement from what we have seen, say, Iran doing or what we've been seeing in Russia and Ukraine? Sure. Iran has tended to go for drone swarming tactics, a lot like what you saw with the April attack on Israel with both drones and ballistic missiles. The second one was just ballistic missiles and more of them. The drone swarms are still using far, far larger airframes than these quadcopters are, and they're firing missiles.

In Ukraine and Russia, miniaturization of the quadcopter is also preceding a pace. In Ukraine, it's less technologically sophisticated out of necessity, but they haven't quite gotten to the point of mounting remote gun capability on a quadcopter. There is, however, loitering munitions and drones that can detonate, that can operate in kind of similar ways. Basically, something that, you know how like a Tomahawk missile is able to actually change direction in mid-flight because of avionics within it and all sorts of like engineering stuff that I don't fully understand. But the point is, is that it splits the difference between a drone and a missile. And that still is where miniaturized, weaponized quadcopters are in primarily the Russia-Ukraine battle space.

This is different. This is the Israelis being able to get machine guns of a small size and presumably small caliber onto something that is very easily commercially available. And all of the lessons of history is that this will not be the last battlefield where such things appear. Like I said, I don't want to use a dehumanizing vocabulary for this. But every time there's a drone innovation like this, it opens up a market for further destruction with a lower both financial and technological barrier of entry. That makes everyone less safe, but it will make a select few vastly more wealthy. As a person who is pretty visible and opinionated online, I'm hyper aware of safety and security.

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I guess the other main piece of this, you know, we've talked about the mass surveillance piece and how that's used in these AI systems. You know, obviously, there's the piece with the quadcopters and the advancement of this kind of drone technology. But, you know, there's also what we saw in Lebanon more recently with, you know, these pagers and walkie talkies and other kind of small electronics that were rigged to explode. And, you know, the question of what that means for supply chains and also how something like this can be done. What do you make of what Israel was able to achieve with that attack? Again, an important Rubicon has been crossed. The Israelis were able to insert a dummy company into the supply chain of, I believe the Taiwanese company is called Golden Apollo

or Gold Apollo, that manufacture this kind of low tech, which means low signal emission. So very, very difficult for the kinds of routine interceptions that occur over cell phone networks, data transiting the internet, transiting undersea cables and so forth, able to get inside the physical production of these pagers that were being shipped to members of Hezbollah. Now, members of Hezbollah tends to be a phrase that sort of shuts down a lot of people's moral imagination here. Hezbollah is not just a militant entity. It's a state. It is a mini state within Lebanon for however you want to feel about it. It provides services and employment to people way beyond the mission of attacking Israel. When any entity

would be able to break into a supply chain and put, essentially, we understand like a couple grams of an explosive called PETN. A lot of people's first thought was that the Israelis were able to set on fire and detonate the lithium ion battery that would have been in these pagers. But think about the delivery bikes that occasionally you've seen using much, much larger batteries that occasionally catch on fire and explode. It just wouldn't cause this kind of damage. There was clearly an explosive inserted into the process. To be able to do that is itself an indiscriminate attack, no matter how the ultimate shipment would have gone to Hezbollah, because you can't control once that explosive is placed in those pagers, who ends up with those pagers, where those pagers will be

when detonated. It seems also really significant that the Israelis could have not turned pagers into IEDs. They could have inserted something that probably with sufficient dampening emitted more signals so that you would have gotten the use of these pagers as more of a surveillance device. Given everything we've talked about before, I don't mean to suggest that that's a benign entity. Just that when you think about the implications of inserting explosives into these kinds of supply chains, it can obscure that this was never an inevitability. This was a choice Israel deliberately made. We have seen, thanks to the Edward Snowden leaks, indications that the NSA, through its element known as tailored access operations, has been able to get into the supply

chain of certain companies that manufacture communications technologies, never with any kind of scale like this. This is something that, while again, I don't want to make it seem like the technological innovation of this is the moral story of this operation, it is quite a significant intelligence operation to have been able to do that. And because of that, it operates on a scale of psychological terror. We've seen a lot of reports from Lebanon about how fearful people are to use electronic devices, pagers or otherwise. I think one of the major Gulf airlines stopped permitting such pagers from being allowed onto the flight because, again, who knows? Who knows what other shipments have been tampered with and so on.

And it seems only a matter of time before this starts happening within cell phones themselves. And could you go an hour, two hours, half a day, so on, without having your phone on you? What are we to think about what's coming next here and how much of it is just going to spread like wildfire while the first wave of attack is described as being targeted and precise and all of these other things that the scale of which means can't be true. This is also a point that really applies to AI. The point of AI target generation is not precision. It is scale. It's being able to scale up this violence, not to make it only like in, forgive me for this because of what I'm writing, but there's a scene in the first Iron Man movie, the camera is invited to see within

Iron Man's visor. And it's a bunch of bad guys who have a bunch of quote unquote human shields. And it says civilian militant, civilian enemy, civilian enemy, so on and so forth. And the, you know, Iron Man's missiles only kill the baddies. This isn't that. This is far more dystopic. It sounds incredibly dystopian, right? And it's not even like this kind of future possibility. It's something that we're seeing playing out in real time in front of our eyes. I was wondering on that supply chain question, is this something that there was just kind of like a general acceptance that you generally don't do? Like, you know, as you mentioned, the only story I had heard of something like that in the past was the NSA intercepting these devices and kind of adding its own stuff inside so

it could track things or get data or whatever. And beyond that, I had never heard of something like this before until we saw these walkie-talkies and pagers and things blow up in Lebanon. Was it just kind of like, okay, this is a thing that we don't do because this would risk these global supply chains and this kind of economic order that we've set up? Or is it that Israel has succeeded in maybe innovating is the wrong word, but figuring out how to do something that a lot of other militaries or bad actors in the world will now be seeking to try to replicate? I think it's probably the latter, that there probably was a lack of a certain immoral imagination to sabotage a supply chain at scale and transform

a low signal communications device into an IED. Most IEDs exist because they are a low cost weapon usually forged either, you know, in a garage, in an auto body shop, or something like that, converted into basically a small weapons factory, and manufactured because of the relative cheapness compared to how expensive its target is. This is really something different. This is not something that we have a lot of precedent for. But once Israel has been permitted over the course of many decades to institute an accepted collective punishment, and probably I am sure because there is something of an echo in IDF operations currently in Lebanon of the scars they bear from Hezbollah functionally beating it,

certainly beating its armor in 2006, certainly frustrating Israeli political objectives. The rockets kept firing on northern Israel after the 34, I believe it was, day war in 2006, seemingly reflective of Israel figuring out what short of invasion and short of a sustained air campaign it could have as a destructive impact on Hezbollah. And that imagination has been exposed as quite expansive. I can't imagine this will be the last time. It may not be that the Pager attack is the only one that's in the works right now. That's what makes it so horrifying. It becomes extremely difficult to not be suspect of commercial electronics now. And the question of where that goes, this has been a year of Pandora's boxes opening. And when opened, more Pandora's boxes jump out.

And they seem to be going around the world really quickly. There was a Tor Project article in, I believe, May, in which Tor discussed many of the different Israeli surveillance companies and their contracts, not just around the Middle East, but with the Department of Homeland Security in the United States and abroad and the ways in which this sort of both surveillance and strike capabilities are an engine of Israeli tech innovation and economic growth. These are structural aspects of our economy right now. Yeah. And when you talk about the structural aspects, you mentioned Google earlier. What do you see as the relationship of these American tech companies to not just what is happening in Israel and not just what the Israeli government and its weapons companies are doing, but also the growing relationship that they have with the Pentagon, the U.S. Department

of Defense, and how their businesses are increasingly trying to seek out these defense contracts and these relationships with the military that they see are going to be very commercially beneficial to them into the future. This is really important. We're at a moment in which the military-industrial complex is experiencing something of a turn of the ratchet from an earlier phase to a current one. There are five major defense contractors, and there have been since a period of consolidation starting at the late stages of the Cold War and immediately afterwards. It'll be hard to see them be fully displaced, but there may be another moment of consolidation where it comes given how incredibly capitalized this new generation coming in is, which is Google, Amazon, at something of the next tier down, Palantir, which was also

a very early entrant into contracting with the Pentagon. But basically, you can read a report on this from, I want to say February, from the Costs of War Project. But basically, we're experiencing a Silicon Valleyization and rise of Silicon Valley adjacent venture capital firms that are putting a ton of money into surveillance and AI corporations to provide the not just data infrastructure of the US military of the future, but also, you know, essentially far beyond data mining will come target generation and other AI applications that the Pentagon has spent 15 years saying, no, no, no, we definitely won't have a circumstance in which a machine, you know, decides for itself what a target is and then fires a weapon.

Ever since that's getting eroded and eroded and eroded. And the financial incentives for that erosion have accelerated, whether it's through a Obama-era Silicon Valley connector and accelerator known as DIUX, which has now been institutionalized after previously an experimental status, the ways in which you have seen Pentagon officials, CIA officials cycle through these companies and sit on their boards. Over the weekend, we saw a tremendous moment for post-911 surveillance capitalism history, where IronNet, which was a cybersecurity company founded by quite possibly the most consequential NSA director in history, General Keith Alexander, filed for bankruptcy because basically he and this company built a lot and scaled up a lot of promises about special sauce surveillance for

business purposes that did not apparently work very well. But nevertheless, he is now on the Amazon board. The KKR venture capital firm has on its board David Petraeus, the most important general of the war on terror. Many such cases, many more more cases to come, there now exist also questions of whether eventually, given the amount of public money up to be put into these contracts, you'll start seeing consolidation from some of the new entrants of dealings with the Pentagon start to buy the old five guys. One of the things that this Cost of War Project research paper discussed of the things that this cost of war project research paper discussed is the prospect that like, eventually you'll get a circumstance where because the revenue stream is so immense, that something like an Amazon will buy something like

a Raytheon. And then you have a circumstance in which I don't know how one of the most lucrative and largest companies in the world will ever feel meaningfully constrained and could ever be meaningfully constrained. If part of its business operations is also weapons manufacture and export. But if you're interested in exploring that, starting later in October, my run on Iron Man will debut from Marvel Comics. And I promise you, we're going to discuss that. Awesome. I'll have to make sure to read that. You know, that's one kind of at least uplifting part of this conversation to be able to read your Iron Man comic and your take on that. But you know, I feel like a lot of what we have discussed through this

conversation is, you know, a pretty grim look at where things are going, whether it is in the short term with, you know, what Israel is doing through the Middle East and what the future of what is happening there might look like as the United States seems to get behind this kind of broader campaign that Israel seems to be embarking on as it moves into Lebanon. And there's talk of what might happen with Iran, but also, you know, more generally with the innovations on these weapons technologies through AI, the quadcopters, the interception of supply chains, and what that is going to mean for us into the future. You know, I don't want to ask you to like predict the future or anything, but do you have any idea of where you see this going? And do you see any hope for trying to rein any of this in? I always have hope because democracy is always possible.

It is defeated pretty thoroughly in a lot of the countries in which people will be listening to this podcast. But there is a certainty that what we see happening in Palestine and Lebanon will be exported and iterated upon and fit to different circumstances around the world and fuel an industry that exists to make such a thing possible and profit from it. The forms that we'll take, that's the unpredictable part. When we see what both Israel and the United States' customer lists are, you can definitely see the UAE and Saudi Arabia being at the fore of this. We know that the Israeli NSO group's Pegasus iMessage malware, basically it's no-click malware installation, was personally given, the license for it was personally renewed

to Mohammed bin Salman by Benjamin Netanyahu. We will see this elsewhere. Particularly, we will see technological counter mobilizations from countries and from non-state actors that will seek to either blunt its impacts or kind of counter innovate. I don't think that you can really get to the vistas of horror that are yet to come. Because over this past year especially, we have seen how wide those apertures have been opened and the devastation at scale on human life. It's a grim picture you paint, but we need to be real about what we're facing

and to understand what is actually happening here. Spencer, I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the show to discuss all this with me. Thank you so much. My pleasure, Paris. Thank you. Spencer Ackerman is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Reign of Terror, a contributor at Zateo, and is working on a new series of Iron Man comics that come out soon. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham and transcripts are by Bridget Palou-Fry.

Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week. Thank you.