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Journalism of Courage
A day after the pager explosions in Lebanon, that killed nine people and injured nearly 3,000, the mechanism used to simultaneously detonate thousands of small devices operating on an outdated technology continued to remain a mystery. The most plausible explanation is that these devices were implanted with small amounts of deadly explosives before being sold, and that these explosives could be triggered remotely from a distance.
While Israel is the natural suspect, considering the target group and its known expertise in carrying out such attacks, there has been no confirmation. The big surprise has been the targeting of pagers, a low-technology device which, ironically, were being used precisely because they were not considered vulnerable to getting controlled remotely, the way mobile phones can be.
Humble technology
Pagers were the first generation of hand-held mobile communication devices, extremely limited in functionality compared to mobile phones that emerged years later. These were receive-only devices to which small messages, usually no longer than a sentence, could be sent. These messages were handy for sending out some instructions or for asking the recipient to get in touch through some other medium. Pagers themselves had no way to transmit messages back. In the era before mobile phones, even this limited functionality was extremely useful for people on the move.
First appearing in the 1950s, pagers were most popular in the 1980s and 1990s in the western countries. In India, they had a short life span between the mid-1990s and early 2000s. Pagers disappeared from most of the world with the advent of mobile phones, but some specific use cases have remained, because of the nature of technology that pagers use.
Messages to pagers are carried over radio waves. So, essentially a pager is a small radio receiver. Messages are signals over specific radio frequencies transmitted over a large area through a network of radio transmitters. Just like any radio can tune in to a nearby station, every pager can access the messages sent. It is like group messaging. But private messages can also be sent. Every pager has an associated number, just like a phone number. Messages that are combined with this number can be received only by the specific pager that is meant to receive it. Other pagers can sense the signal but cannot decode to read it.
Inconspicuous
Because they only receive messages over radio frequencies, pagers cannot be traced or tracked, just like the household radio cannot be tracked. A mobile phone’s location can be tracked because, apart from receiving signals, it also sends out signals. Any system meant to detect these signals can locate where they are coming from. This is the precise reason why an organisation like Hezbollah had been using these instruments. Another reason is the fact radio waves are more ubiquitous than mobile networks. They are available even in areas where mobile networks are not. Because of their limited functionality, pagers can sustain for months on a single battery, which is again a big advantage in remote areas where power supply is a problem. Also, in an army-like organisation that Hezbollah is, one-way instruction, addressed to the group as a whole, is often adequate communication.
These same characteristics result in certain other use cases because of which pagers continue to exist. They can be useful in areas where mobile phones are not allowed because their signals can interfere with other instruments, in an operation theatre for example. Disaster management staff also sometimes rely on pagers as an additional mode of communication.
Difficult to hack
Pagers, even the modern ones, have very few electronic components. It has a radio receiver, a small circuit, a tiny display screen, a battery, and a small speaker for beeping when a message is received. It does not have anything which can be gained control over from a distance. Hacking into the device, the way a mobile phone or a networked computer can be hacked is extremely improbable. The messages being sent to these devices can, of course, be easily hacked, because they are sent on open radio waves. The devices themselves are rather inert.
For these reasons, the theory that the explosions were a result of a hacking exercise that manipulated the device’s hardware to excessively heat up, have largely been discarded now. Because of the very humble technology it is based upon, pagers are largely immune to sophisticated methods of hacking. Implant of explosive material inside the devices is a more plausible mechanism to have been employed. The implants can easily be triggered by a remote device. However, it is not clear when or how were the pagers implanted with explosives before being delivered to the customers.
There have been reports that the pagers that exploded were part of a batch of newly-purchased devices from a Taiwanese manufacturer. The manufacturing company, in turn, is reported to have said that this batch of devices had been made by a European distributor.
Although Israel’s problem with Hezbollah is not new, their conflict has escalated in recent months following the October 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel. Its history of carrying out spectacular attacks to take out its enemy in different parts of the world makes Israel a prime suspect in this case. But the full story of how this mission was executed is still to come out.
