Old Tech, New Dangers: The Role Of Pagers In Hezbollah’s Communications Strategy
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- William D
- September 18, 2024
A terrible explosion that struck Lebanon on Tuesday left hundreds injured and nine people dead. The explosives came from a cache of radio equipment, mostly pagers, that the potent militant organization Hezbollah, supported by Iran, was using.
Investigations showed that these pagers, which were allegedly modified with by Israel’s Mossad espionage agency, were explosives-rigged, illuminating an uncommon but lethal application of antiquated technology in contemporary warfare.
This incident has revealed Hezbollah’s persistent reliance on equipment that was previously believed to be outdated.
Pager usage by Hezbollah is tactical and motivated by security considerations. While most people now use smartphones and encrypted communication platforms, pagers provide a low-tech alternative that can get past advanced tracking and spying techniques.
These beepers enable Hezbollah members to communicate covertly in a time when cell phones are readily intercepted and tracked, making it more difficult for intelligence services like Mossad to determine their precise whereabouts.
Since of its straightforward functionality, pagers are a preferred means of communication in high-risk scenarios since it minimizes its digital trace.
Pagers are still relevant in some situations even though they are outdated, particularly when asymmetric warfare is involved. Pagers provide an unexpected level of protection in a world where smartphones rule, especially for individuals who want to stay away from sophisticated surveillance systems.
But as the devastating explosion in Lebanon demonstrates, even antiquated technology may be used into a weapon, demonstrating that no communication tool is completely secure in a contemporary fight.
The incident is a sobering reminder that there are risks associated with both new and old technologies in battle.
A Pager: What Is It?
A pager, sometimes referred to as a “beeper,” is a compact, handheld communication device that uses radio frequency signals to receive brief messages, frequently consisting of numbers or letters.
The pager’s primary purpose, which is to notify the user that a message has been sent—usually by means of a beep, vibration, or flashing light—is what makes it so basic.
When pagers were first introduced, they could only receive messages that contained digits, much like phone numbers, and asked the user to return a call from a landline.
With the development of technology, pagers became more versatile by adding screens that could show brief text messages and facilitate a wider variety of communication.
In the 1980s and 1990s, pagers gained popularity as a dependable means of prompt and effective communication—particularly in sectors requiring instant alerts. Pagers filled a crucial communication need and were widely used at the height of their popularity, prior to the widespread usage of mobile phones.
Pagers were a great option for important industries because they could send immediate notifications in circumstances where landline phones were not always available and because their signals could frequently reach places with weak mobile reception.
Pagers were especially useful in professions including emergency services, journalism, and healthcare. Pagers were the primary means of emergency notification for physicians and other medical staff, allowing them to act promptly.
Pagers allowed field workers, technicians, and journalists to stay in touch while they were on the go and receive vital updates from any location.
Law enforcement and firefighters also benefited from pagers, which made it possible for them to respond to emergency calls without having to find a phone right away.
In high-stakes professions, pagers significantly improved communication and operational efficiency despite their relatively simple design. They worked in places where cell phone signals would not reach, were robust, and had a long battery life.
Because of this, they were a vital tool for professionals who required dependable, prompt communication, particularly in settings when time was of the essence.
LMAO 🤣
— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) September 18, 2024
European journalist in Lebanon just admitted that his friend is a Hezbollah terrorist 🤡 pic.twitter.com/i6RRYC28t7
How Do Pagers Operate?
Radio frequencies are used by pagers to send and receive messages. Every pager is given a unique identifying number, sometimes referred to as a cap code, which enables it to be reached separately.
A central terminal or dispatch system receives messages sent via pagers, and then uses a designated frequency to broadcast the messages via radio waves.
After being set to that frequency and recognized by its own code, the pager picks up the signal and notifies the user that a message has arrived with a beep or vibration.
Pager message delivery and reception are straightforward but efficient processes. The sender typically uses a phone to telephone the pager’s number and leaves a message with a number, frequently a phone number to be called back.
After handling the call, the central paging system sends the message across the radio frequency to the recipient’s pager.
The pager notifies the user to check the message as soon as it receives the signal. Early pagers could only show numbers; to answer the call, the user had to locate a phone.
Pager technology progressed from basic numeric displays to versions with alphanumeric characters throughout time. These upgraded models were much more useful because they had little screens that could show brief text messages.
Users might now receive brief written messages with directions, addresses, or other relevant information instead of merely numeric codes or callback numbers.
This increased the versatility of pagers and made them more appropriate for sectors like emergency services and healthcare, where having access to comprehensive instructions while on the go was essential.
These 12 Druze-Israeli children were murdered when Hezbollah indiscriminately fired rockets at Israel, striking a soccer field where children were playing.
— The Persian Jewess (@persianjewess) September 17, 2024
Their body parts were strewn all across the soccer field.
Where was your condemnation then? pic.twitter.com/I6toPPPLF8
With the quick development of mobile phones in the late 1990s, pager use started to fall. The people could now purchase and obtain cell phones more easily as mobile technology advanced.
Mobile phones offered two-way communication, allowing users to send and receive text messages or make calls from a single device, in contrast to pagers, which could only receive messages.
Pagers’ limited utility was soon eclipsed by the ease of mobile phones, which caused a gradual drop in pager use in both personal and professional settings.
The primary benefit of mobile phones over pagers was their increased adaptability. Voice conversations, text messages, and eventually internet access were all merged into one small, portable device to create mobile phones.
Because of this, they were a much better option than pagers, which required users to find a different phone in order to reply to messages. Mobile phones allowed people to communicate instantly instead of having to locate a landline, which was a big improvement over the pager system.
In most industries, the move away from pagers was quick. Mobile phones have replaced pagers as the main means of instantaneous professional communication in industries such as healthcare.
Pagers were originally considered essential for emergency communication. Pagers became redundant in most businesses as people could make direct calls, send messages, and eventually use smartphones for more sophisticated communication.
Businesses discovered that mobile phones could offer significantly more capability and still be just as reliable as pagers, thus they completely replaced pagers.
Pagers had mostly vanished from common use by the early 2000s, but they were still useful in certain applications due to their special qualities, which included a long battery life, dependability in remote locations, and low sensitivity to electromagnetic interference.
However, the majority of industries saw the move to mobile phones as an unavoidable development brought about by the need for faster, more direct, and more versatile communication techniques in an ever-expanding world. The demise of the pager signaled both the end of an era and a significant advancement for mobile communication in the future.
It may come as a surprise that Hezbollah still uses pagers in this day and age, but the organization does it for strategic purposes. In a time when encrypted communication and smartphones rule the roost, pagers provide a more safe, low-tech option in some circumstances.
Hezbollah is able to reduce its digital trace by depending on these basic gadgets, which makes it more difficult for adversaries, such as Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, to follow them around or intercept their communications. Because of this, pagers are a useful tool for covert operations where avoiding discovery is essential.
The fact that pagers avoid the complex surveillance techniques frequently employed against more sophisticated technologies, like cellphones, is one of their key advantages.
Due to the continual signals that smartphones send out via cellular networks, Wi-Fi, and GPS, intelligence services are able to monitor and track them. Conversely, pagers don’t transmit signals continually, which makes it possible for Hezbollah to communicate in less obvious methods.
Hezbollah can lower the chance that enemies will find out where they are by staying hidden in their communications.
In addition, compared to smartphones and other high-tech gadgets, pagers offer a smaller danger of interception. Despite providing a certain amount of security, smartphones and encrypted messaging apps are nevertheless susceptible to hacking or monitoring by malicious parties.
Because pagers only communicate in one direction and are not connected to the internet, they present less of a target for cyberattacks.
For Hezbollah’s fighters, who work in a high-stakes atmosphere where preserving operational secrecy depends on encrypted communication, this makes them a more secure option.
Pagers have practical advantages that meet Hezbollah’s needs in addition to security advantages. They can work in secluded or harsh locations where cell phone coverage may be spotty or nonexistent.
They are also robust and have a long battery life. For Hezbollah, whose members frequently operate in isolated areas with limited access to contemporary communication equipment, this dependability is essential.
Pagers are a useful tool in these contexts because of their dependability and longevity, which ensure that crucial messages are received even under difficult circumstances.
The devastating explosions that occurred in Lebanon on Tuesday exposed a highly skilled cyberattack against Hezbollah that was purportedly orchestrated by Israel’s Mossad.
Mossad allegedly put explosives in 5,000 pagers that Hezbollah imported; when these detonated, many more were injured and at least nine others were killed.
The hack entailed the surreptitious placement of explosives within the pagers that Hezbollah members were using for communication. The episode demonstrates the extent intelligence services will go to, including using ostensibly low-tech gadgets, to thwart adversary operations.
Earlier in the year, Hezbollah was said to have purchased 5,000 pagers from the Taiwan-based company Gold Apollo. Because they could elude sophisticated tracking systems, these pagers were included in the group’s communication system.
The lethal detonations were caused by devices that were carried into Lebanon and given to members, but had been inadvertently tampered with. In addition to leaving a large number of people dead, the attack destroyed a vital component of Hezbollah’s antiquated communication system.
The Taiwanese company Gold Apollo, which was connected to the pagers, released a statement after the explosions in which it denied any direct participation in the device’s construction.
Although Gold Apollo admitted that their name was linked to the pagers, they made it clear that BAC, a business that has a license to use the Gold Apollo brand, was the one that really manufactured the devices.
This distinction absolved Gold Apollo of liability, but it raised concerns about the supply chain and how the corrupted pagers ended up in the hands of Hezbollah.
The Mossad hack, which combines low-tech communication methods with physical sabotage, represents a dramatic increase in the use of unconventional warfare tactics.
Hezbollah relied on pagers in order to evade sophisticated digital surveillance, but this episode shows how even seemingly innocuous technologies may be turned into weapons.
The attack highlights how contemporary conflicts are dynamic and that intelligence services are always coming up with new ways to take advantage of weaknesses, even in antiquated technology like pagers.
The latest explosions in Lebanon involving Hezbollah’s communication equipment show how vulnerable using antiquated technologies like pagers is in modern battles.
Because older technology don’t have the digital connectivity that makes computers and cellphones vulnerable to hacking, they are typically thought to be more secure. But as the cyberattack against Hezbollah demonstrates, even outdated technology may be used maliciously.
Pagers were previously thought to be a secure substitute for contemporary communication tools, however they were later compromised, underscoring the dangers of using outdated technology in combat.
The cyberattack by Mossad on Hezbollah serves as an example of how cyber and physical combat are increasingly overlapping. Pagers, which are basic messaging devices, were turned into explosive weapons in this instance.
This intersection of cyber manipulation and physical sabotage shows how outdated instruments, which were before believed to be safe from the dangers of contemporary technology, can nonetheless fall victim to an attack.
Even the most antiquated gadgets can become targets for intelligence services and adversaries, who can weaponize them in novel ways. The combination of cyber and physical combat poses new risks to organizations that still rely on outdated technology.
The consequences of sticking with antiquated technology, like as pagers, are dire for Hezbollah. The purpose of the group’s reliance on these gadgets to evade sophisticated surveillance was to safeguard their communications.
Nonetheless, this event demonstrates that outdated systems are still susceptible to hacking and can be used for hostile purposes.
Relying solely on outdated technology is no longer a safe method in a world where cyber and physical combat techniques are becoming more and more combined. Devastating outcomes are still very likely as long as enemies are able to access and control these technologies.
This attack should serve as a cautionary tale for those organizations operating in contemporary warfare contexts with antiquated systems.
Older systems are significantly more vulnerable to physical manipulation and new types of cyber sabotage, even though they could appear safe from attack.
The Hezbollah pager attack’s flaws imply that no communication technique is completely impervious to exploitation.
Organizations such as Hezbollah and others may have to reconsider their approaches, weighing the dangers of sticking with outdated technology against the growing power of their enemies.