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Unlike stuxnet, this attack had a lot of non-hezbolah civilian casualties. It’s "targeted" in a sense, but not really much more targeted than a drive-by assassi

Unlike stuxnet, this attack had a lot of non-hezbolah civilian casualties. It’s "targeted" in a sense, but not really much more targeted than a drive-by assassination attempt. Anybody close to these people could have sustained serious injury, and there are reports of children injured and dead. We’ll have to wait for details to emerge. Politically, this is the sort of action that invites comparison to conventional terrorism. It also begs the question of why Hezbollah or other actors shouldn’t try a similar attack against civilian targets. It’s almost like a chemical or biological attack, which most countries shy away from because it’s so hard to defend against (a big part of why it’s illegal). No country can perfectly safeguard its supply chain from intentional sabotage. I’m afraid that the entire world is a little bit less safe after this move. Maybe Israel is goading Hezbollah into all-out war, who knows, but this affects all of us.

wkat4242 2y ago
Stuxnet didn't have a lot of civilian casualties (if any?) but it did cause a lot of monetary damage to civilian companies. However this was of course unintended, the malware was never meant to make it out to the wider world.
- pesfandiar 2y ago
  It's implausible that any "civilian" company was involved. Pretty much all companies involved in the Iranian infrastructure, especially covert nuclear projects, are directly or indirectly owned by IRGC.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Yes but Stuxnet escaped to the internet and infected a lot of Western companies. This is in fact how we even know about it at all. That's the damage I'm talking about.
frabbit 2y ago
That's a good summary of the dangers of normalizing the actions that previously were the domain of only terrorists. The world works because most countries and people rejected amoral results-based reasoning and considered such actions in the light of another dimension: morality. It's difficult to define, but there was some sort of consensus. How long those agreements, formal and simply normative, will last remains to be seen. I do not look forward to their further erosion.
- tptacek 2y ago
  It does not make a whole lot of sense to distinguish the explosives packed into the warhead of an AGM-114 Hellfire missile from those of an explosive vest or a compromised pager. What distinguishes terrorism from military action is target selection, not weapons choice.
  - frabbit 2y ago
    I cannot see any comment in the immediate sub-thread making a distinction between explosives per se? Certainly to me I don't see the difference between explosives supplied in a missile produced with US tax-subsidies to arms profiteers or explosives produced by someone else. Except that in the first case US voters have some control over the supply -- not much, but some. The GP comment is clearly talking about the lack of precision or targeting. Here you may have a point if we consider absolute quantities instead of some relative measurement: a US-taxpayer-supplied-with-profits-to-a-private-company Hellfire missile fired into a refugee camp full of women and children might kill 10 obviously-innocent people for 1 presumed-to-be-a-terrorist-without-any-sort-of-trial person; whereas a pager bomb exploding might blow up the we-dont-know-yet-anything-but-he-was-in-Hezbollah and his ten-year old daughter. If I were a moral simpleton I might argue that the Hellfire missile murders were worse than the pager murders. But what do I know? After all hundreds of years of protocols and treaties and norms about this sort of thing are probably just old and in need of being re-envisioned by some clever code jockey.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      Do you honestly believe that "protocols and treaties" established "hundreds of years" ago have any bearing on modern conflict? Do you have any arguments that would be persuasive to those of us who believe them to be more or less irrelevant since the Franco-Prussian War? I'm an American. We firebombed Dresden and Tokyo, then got up the next day and made breakfast. Pick another major combatant nationality anywhere on the globe, and I'll tell you a similar story. By the standards of modern warfare, what happened today was probably weirdly humane.
ars 2y ago
I've seen multiple videos of the explosions, even people standing directly next to the target were not hurt. Contrary to what you said, this is pretty much the ultimate in targeted attacks.
spidersenses 2y ago
[flagged]
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  Based on the video shared by Reuters, I'm not seeing anything that would focus the attack to the pager's carrier. Anyone standing next to the target would also risk severe injury or death. ETA: I should perhaps clarify: focus the attack exclusively on the pager's carrier. It does appear to be modestly shaped in some way (in that we're not seeing the pagers go up in a 2-meter-radius fireball), but it's also not contained exclusively to the carrier, has no verification that the carrier is holding the device, etc. Whether one considers that "focused" is left as an exercise for the reader. Certainly more focused than a rocket; a bit less focused than poison.
  - ars 2y ago
    From the vidoes I saw for example: https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605 https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605 they would have to be touching the pager to be harmed.
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      Interestingly, we're looking at the same video. I'm seeing a person who's pocket explodes and the person standing nearest them happened to be lucky enough to not be in the direct path of the blast. I can easily see that detonation severely wounding a bystander if they'd been in the (un)lucky angle and height.
      - ars 2y ago
        They would have to be pressed up against the target - even a couple inches away they would not be harmed. Sure, it's possible theoretically for that to happen, but as a whole, this attack is incredibly precise and targeted.
        2y ago
tptacek 2y ago
For a non-infantry massed attack on a military asset, the ratio of military to civilian casualties here is probably going to end up being unprecedented in the history of modern warfare; this will probably end up being an extraordinarily surgical attack by any military standard. Civilians are routinely killed in targeted strikes, because targeted strikes are almost always conducted by air. This attack may end up being distinguished by how few civilians were harmed. Neither Israel nor Hezbollah is mobilized for all-out war here. Hezbollah is depleted from its disastrous efforts in Syria; Israel is fully committed to combat operations in Gaza. The north of Israel has been evacuated for months because of indiscriminate rocket attacks from Hezbollah. Hezbollah is an arm of the IRGC, which is more or less at open war with Israel. If either side could have launched an all-out assault (or, I mean, a more conventional all-out assault than this one), they would have done so already.
- frabbit 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - tptacek 2y ago
    Yes, they have.
    - frabbit 2y ago
      The New York Times does not agree with you: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/world/middleeast/israel-hezbollah-lebanon-war-impact.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/world/middleeast/israel-h...
      - tptacek 2y ago
        I don't know what it is that you think that article says, but nobody disputes that neither side has invaded the other. The funny thing to do would be to read your preceding comment and then Google something like [nasrallah israel]. I, uh, think Hezbollah's foot soldiers have been given sufficient notice at this point.
grotorea 2y ago
I feel this is just one more step away from "wild" globalized products and towards supply chain safety.
heraldgeezer 2y ago
[flagged]
dotancohen 2y ago
> Unlike stuxnet, this attack had a lot of non-hezbolah civilian casualties. It’s "targeted" in a sense, but not really much more targeted than a drive-by assassination attempt. You should know that Hezbollah recently shot a rocket at an Israeli playground, 12 or 13 children were killed. The chance of a few civilians being injured is calculated against preventing the enemy from dropping another rocket on another playground. I read the news in Arabic, there are credible reports of an 8 year old girl being killed in this attack. I haven't seen that yet in English language news. That is a horrible price to pay. But it is part of a calculated risk that, as per those same news sources, killed between 10 to 12 Hezbollah operatives and injured 2700 more.
myth_drannon 2y ago
You are assuming they didn't try, which is incorrect. Cyber attacks on water filtration plants attacks were done for example.
saintradon 2y ago
Completely disagree. I cannot think of a more successful, large scale, targeted attack in recent memory. The engineering behind this was incredible.
- jakeinspace 2y ago
  It was successful clearly, not disagreeing with that. So were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My point was more that this is a truly significant line that has been crossed for the first time by a major military at this scale. People comparing this to isolated assassinations with booby trapped phones, or to wiretapping and other surveillance, are massively downplaying this.
zer8k 2y ago
Hezbollah already attacks civilians indiscriminately for one. Second, "won't someone think of the children" is a tired argument. Hate to be that guy - but maybe this will be a lesson on allowing these terrorists to roam your streets. Avoiding civilian death in a warzone is an impossibility. Limiting it is all you can do. Knowing that, this was an absolutely amazing job at target selection. Of all methods of target selection this is probably the most precise you can get with the exception of snipers, AGM-114-R9X, etc. The psychological damage from this attack alone is probably worth more than any other method. Hezbollah will be crippled at least temporarily and likely afraid to use any technology they don't control the supply chain for. > which most countries shy away from because it’s so hard to defend against This is not why. It's shied away from because it's extremely difficult to target effectively without causing mass unwanted causalities and the associated killing mechanism is considered cruel and unusual. "Being hard to defend against" is exactly something factored in with weapons. Why would I want to use a weapon that is easy to defend against? If that's the case, the US would march with clubs and bows, you know, "to make things fair".

wkat4242 2y ago

Stuxnet didn't have a lot of civilian casualties (if any?) but it did cause a lot of monetary damage to civilian companies. However this was of course unintended, the malware was never meant to make it out to the wider world.

pesfandiar 2y ago
It's implausible that any "civilian" company was involved. Pretty much all companies involved in the Iranian infrastructure, especially covert nuclear projects, are directly or indirectly owned by IRGC.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Yes but Stuxnet escaped to the internet and infected a lot of Western companies. This is in fact how we even know about it at all. That's the damage I'm talking about.

frabbit 2y ago

That's a good summary of the dangers of normalizing the actions that previously were the domain of only terrorists. The world works because most countries and people rejected amoral results-based reasoning and considered such actions in the light of another dimension: morality. It's difficult to define, but there was some sort of consensus. How long those agreements, formal and simply normative, will last remains to be seen. I do not look forward to their further erosion.

tptacek 2y ago
It does not make a whole lot of sense to distinguish the explosives packed into the warhead of an AGM-114 Hellfire missile from those of an explosive vest or a compromised pager. What distinguishes terrorism from military action is target selection, not weapons choice.
- frabbit 2y ago
  I cannot see any comment in the immediate sub-thread making a distinction between explosives per se? Certainly to me I don't see the difference between explosives supplied in a missile produced with US tax-subsidies to arms profiteers or explosives produced by someone else. Except that in the first case US voters have some control over the supply -- not much, but some. The GP comment is clearly talking about the lack of precision or targeting. Here you may have a point if we consider absolute quantities instead of some relative measurement: a US-taxpayer-supplied-with-profits-to-a-private-company Hellfire missile fired into a refugee camp full of women and children might kill 10 obviously-innocent people for 1 presumed-to-be-a-terrorist-without-any-sort-of-trial person; whereas a pager bomb exploding might blow up the we-dont-know-yet-anything-but-he-was-in-Hezbollah and his ten-year old daughter. If I were a moral simpleton I might argue that the Hellfire missile murders were worse than the pager murders. But what do I know? After all hundreds of years of protocols and treaties and norms about this sort of thing are probably just old and in need of being re-envisioned by some clever code jockey.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    Do you honestly believe that "protocols and treaties" established "hundreds of years" ago have any bearing on modern conflict? Do you have any arguments that would be persuasive to those of us who believe them to be more or less irrelevant since the Franco-Prussian War? I'm an American. We firebombed Dresden and Tokyo, then got up the next day and made breakfast. Pick another major combatant nationality anywhere on the globe, and I'll tell you a similar story. By the standards of modern warfare, what happened today was probably weirdly humane.

ars 2y ago

I've seen multiple videos of the explosions, even people standing directly next to the target were not hurt. Contrary to what you said, this is pretty much the ultimate in targeted attacks.

spidersenses 2y ago

[flagged]

shadowgovt 2y ago
Based on the video shared by Reuters, I'm not seeing anything that would focus the attack to the pager's carrier. Anyone standing next to the target would also risk severe injury or death. ETA: I should perhaps clarify: focus the attack exclusively on the pager's carrier. It does appear to be modestly shaped in some way (in that we're not seeing the pagers go up in a 2-meter-radius fireball), but it's also not contained exclusively to the carrier, has no verification that the carrier is holding the device, etc. Whether one considers that "focused" is left as an exercise for the reader. Certainly more focused than a rocket; a bit less focused than poison.
- ars 2y ago
  From the vidoes I saw for example: https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605 https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605 they would have to be touching the pager to be harmed.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    Interestingly, we're looking at the same video. I'm seeing a person who's pocket explodes and the person standing nearest them happened to be lucky enough to not be in the direct path of the blast. I can easily see that detonation severely wounding a bystander if they'd been in the (un)lucky angle and height.
    - ars 2y ago
      They would have to be pressed up against the target - even a couple inches away they would not be harmed. Sure, it's possible theoretically for that to happen, but as a whole, this attack is incredibly precise and targeted.
      - 2y ago

tptacek 2y ago

For a non-infantry massed attack on a military asset, the ratio of military to civilian casualties here is probably going to end up being unprecedented in the history of modern warfare; this will probably end up being an extraordinarily surgical attack by any military standard. Civilians are routinely killed in targeted strikes, because targeted strikes are almost always conducted by air. This attack may end up being distinguished by how few civilians were harmed. Neither Israel nor Hezbollah is mobilized for all-out war here. Hezbollah is depleted from its disastrous efforts in Syria; Israel is fully committed to combat operations in Gaza. The north of Israel has been evacuated for months because of indiscriminate rocket attacks from Hezbollah. Hezbollah is an arm of the IRGC, which is more or less at open war with Israel. If either side could have launched an all-out assault (or, I mean, a more conventional all-out assault than this one), they would have done so already.

frabbit 2y ago
[flagged]
- tptacek 2y ago
  Yes, they have.
  - frabbit 2y ago
    The New York Times does not agree with you: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/world/middleeast/israel-hezbollah-lebanon-war-impact.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/world/middleeast/israel-h...
    - tptacek 2y ago
      I don't know what it is that you think that article says, but nobody disputes that neither side has invaded the other. The funny thing to do would be to read your preceding comment and then Google something like [nasrallah israel]. I, uh, think Hezbollah's foot soldiers have been given sufficient notice at this point.

grotorea 2y ago

I feel this is just one more step away from "wild" globalized products and towards supply chain safety.

heraldgeezer 2y ago

[flagged]

dotancohen 2y ago

> Unlike stuxnet, this attack had a lot of non-hezbolah civilian casualties. It’s "targeted" in a sense, but not really much more targeted than a drive-by assassination attempt. You should know that Hezbollah recently shot a rocket at an Israeli playground, 12 or 13 children were killed. The chance of a few civilians being injured is calculated against preventing the enemy from dropping another rocket on another playground. I read the news in Arabic, there are credible reports of an 8 year old girl being killed in this attack. I haven't seen that yet in English language news. That is a horrible price to pay. But it is part of a calculated risk that, as per those same news sources, killed between 10 to 12 Hezbollah operatives and injured 2700 more.

myth_drannon 2y ago

You are assuming they didn't try, which is incorrect. Cyber attacks on water filtration plants attacks were done for example.

saintradon 2y ago

Completely disagree. I cannot think of a more successful, large scale, targeted attack in recent memory. The engineering behind this was incredible.

jakeinspace 2y ago
It was successful clearly, not disagreeing with that. So were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My point was more that this is a truly significant line that has been crossed for the first time by a major military at this scale. People comparing this to isolated assassinations with booby trapped phones, or to wiretapping and other surveillance, are massively downplaying this.

zer8k 2y ago

Hezbollah already attacks civilians indiscriminately for one. Second, "won't someone think of the children" is a tired argument. Hate to be that guy - but maybe this will be a lesson on allowing these terrorists to roam your streets. Avoiding civilian death in a warzone is an impossibility. Limiting it is all you can do. Knowing that, this was an absolutely amazing job at target selection. Of all methods of target selection this is probably the most precise you can get with the exception of snipers, AGM-114-R9X, etc. The psychological damage from this attack alone is probably worth more than any other method. Hezbollah will be crippled at least temporarily and likely afraid to use any technology they don't control the supply chain for. > which most countries shy away from because it’s so hard to defend against This is not why. It's shied away from because it's extremely difficult to target effectively without causing mass unwanted causalities and the associated killing mechanism is considered cruel and unusual. "Being hard to defend against" is exactly something factored in with weapons. Why would I want to use a weapon that is easy to defend against? If that's the case, the US would march with clubs and bows, you know, "to make things fair".