More and more of our electronic devices—including electric cars—can be controlled by others.
When the U.S.-manned space program began, its leaders told budding astronauts that their missions would be controlled from the ground. The astronauts, all former fighter pilots, refused and said that if they are sitting on the north end of a rocket and risking their lives, then they will be the ones controlling the vehicles. Their control showed its importance when Neil Armstrong flew his lunar lander like a helicopter until he found a safe landing spot with 15 seconds of fuel left. The astronauts of Apollo 13 were key to getting themselves back home after a disastrous explosion of a liquid oxygen tank. Houston advised them and they used their knowledge and insights to keep themselves alive and get back home safely.
The exploding pagers in Lebanon have shocked the world, including Israel. Keeping a secret in this small country is no small feat, but the reporting of thousands of devices exploding simultaneously on Hezbollah operatives was quite a shock here. I saw young men from one yeshiva dancing, but if you wanted people handing out sweets as Muslims do when Jews are harmed, then you would have had to go to members of the Syrian opposition who did just that. Early reports suggest that very small amounts of an explosive were added to the pagers during their manufacture. Israel used cyber methods to cause the lithium batteries to overheat and thus ignite the explosive. I don’t know who thought it up or who was able to get the explosives into the devices, but it was genius. A more direct attack on terrorists with minimal civilian casualties would seem impossible. Many online are suggesting that the cyber attack caused the batteries to overheat and explode, without a need for an additional explosive element.
While the world begins to learn more about the mechanics of the attack on thousands of Hezbollah members, a very important question arises: could others do something similar on cellular phones and other devices? Israel, like the rest of the world, has taken to Chinese electric cars in addition to Teslas. England has lots of such cars, and the government has become quite concerned that the Chinese could stop them cold or cause them to malfunction at a time of international crisis. Virtually every electronic device we have today has some level of communication and potential control from a vendor—or possibly a government actor. When Apple inserted U2 music into all iPhones without the consent of their owners, they were roundly criticized. But Apple showed that from afar it can manipulate and control the untold number of their devices currently in use throughout the world.
One problem that Westerners have is that we often do not understand our adversaries. In other writings, I have mentioned our abject failure to understand the Islamist mentality of praising death and the willingness to kill civilians for political goals. We have the same problem with the Chinese. Whereas in the West, companies tend to be private or public, with some level of governmental oversight, in China, companies are an extension of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). I saw this personally when my business partner and I tried to negotiate a deal to get our water sensors into the Chinese market. During our meetings with the billionaire owner of a chemical company, the local mayor sat in on the discussions. Doesn’t a mayor have better things to do, like open a new wing of a hospital? No, he doesn’t, because he was the official rep for the CCP at these discussions. And while we worked hours on getting a draft agreement that met everyone’s expectations, we never moved forward because the mayor scotched the understandings. To note, the billionaire was no dummy and moved much of his money out of China by buying assets in Russia and points beyond.
Since Chinese companies are an extension of the ruling party, the CCP can control both the company’s policies and its products. It is the reason they could throttle Jack Ma when he spoke in a manner that the CCP did not like. The US is belatedly waking up to 80 percent of all dockside cranes being from a single Chinese vendor and having a required modem that could allow the Chinese to simply shut down the cranes when desired. Maybe one can’t make a car explode, but what if software is used to heat up lithium batteries simply to cause a fire and not an explosion? Such fires are almost impossible to put out. Did Israel’s feat with the pager open the door to attacking individuals based on their phone number? Several Lebanese noted that their pagers were heating up enormously and threw them away before they actually exploded. If China attacks Taiwan and the West decides to help the latter, would China simply shut down the electric cars filling Western roads? Would they cause some of them to catch fire as a warning of how powerful they have become? The U.S. was alarmed enough at Huawei to ban their products; what of the other companies that the CCP controls from the board down to the actual products sold?
China is not the only one holding a long string attached to its product. A sticking point between the U.S. and Israel on the F-35 was the software control that the Americans have demanded from all users of the platform. Essentially, not only do the Americans know where any F-35 is going and what it is doing (like which bombs it is dropping), they can shut down the plane via its software. The argument for this arrangement was that the US can update software to always keep a plane in its best condition. The worry of course is not only tracking but the possible shutting down of units should the Pentagon decide to do so. As of this time, it is reported that Israel did not give the U.S. a heads-up on the pager caper as it often does with other military activities. I don’t know what the final resolution was on the F-35, but Israel is currently the top user of the plane and is probably providing more performance data to Lockheed and the U.S. Air Force than all other countries combined.
We love our electronic baubles, from ear buds to cars. The question is what risks are we taking in allowing vendors and possibly governments unfettered access to us and our equipment? It’s one thing to follow one’s online activities; it’s quite something else to set someone’s phone on fire by intentionally overheating the very high energy density lithium battery. What are the limits of privacy and safety? What will the U.S. do if the Chinese turn off all of their cars on American roadways? As is often the case in the past 50 years, the technological challenges are racing well ahead of the moral/ethical understanding on how to deal with them. We want our electronic devices but their manufacturers want to keep us tethered to them. What is the right balance between personal privacy and corporate/governmental access? This question will hopefully be answered by a future Trump administration, where personal rights will still have some meaning.