The prepper bag of European Commissioner Hadja Lahbib highlights the lack of understanding of what a hybrid conflict is. But above all, what it means to ‘survive’ a global attack on communication systems by Andrea Monti – Originally published in Italian on Italian Tech
Once again, Warhol’s Law has proven correct, and so the subculture of preppers — enthusiasts (sometimes bordering on fanaticism) of survival, who prepare for apocalypses of all kinds — has had its fifteen minutes of fame thanks to a video by the European Commissioner for Crisis Management showing the contents of the ‘survival bag’ she carries with her.
A superficial perception of the concept of crisis
Leaving aside analysis of the (meta) communication of such content, in factual terms, even without having passed the Navy’s Special Forces training or attended the ‘NBC’ (nuclear, bacteriological, chemical) at the Joint Forces School, you only need to have spent a few years in the Scouts or be a mountain enthusiast to be aware that having a few tools in your backpack is not enough to get you out of trouble, because you also need to be used to using them (antivenom serum, for example). Furthermore, as people who have survived even a ‘trivial’ serious car accident know, in a real crisis situation it is very difficult to remain calm and behave rationally when the whole world around you is collapsing.
In other words, it is true that Rambo, with a Randall 18 military knife and some cotton wool, managed to escape the evil sheriff Teasle until he decided to surrender to Colonel Trautman. But he was Rambo, and he was a character in a film.
The video posted by the commissioner — who, incidentally, does not make it clear whether it was posted in a personal capacity or not, even though it appears on the Commission’s official YouTube channel — not only shows a lack of awareness of what it means to operate in extreme conditions, but also fails to mention the importance of having alternative means of communication, as well as the ability and opportunity to use them. Really, when the sky is falling, is all you need to survive 72 hours a power bank to charge a smartphone?
The importance of low-tech communication tools
Strictly speaking, the video is not about war, but given the narrative of the moment, one example being the recently released Swedish brochure that explicitly uses the word ‘war’, it is difficult to think that it refers to natural disasters or accidents of any other kind. For this reason, it is reasonable to analyse it from the perspective of a hypothetical conflict.
The experience of the Second World War showed the importance of being able to build low-tech communication devices, and reading Der Totale Widerstand, the cursed book that became a classic in the field, written in 1958 by a Swiss army officer to help citizens in the event of a Soviet invasion, demonstrates how far we are from reality and the ‘suggestions’ on the importance of having a charged smartphone (and, moreover, if you run out of data, what do you do?) offered by Ms Lahbib’s video.
Even then, the complexity of having to manage a communications system in the event of an attack or invasion by an enemy required the creation of a clandestine network (not just made up of equipment) to circulate information, since having a transceiver that does not communicate with anyone is simply useless. Moreover, returning to the present day, the end-of-year overload of mobile networks is not such a distant event, and even the EU has realised that even in the event of natural disasters, mobile networks are not necessarily reliable or available.
Current complications
Today, the situation is made even more complicated by the fact that signal intelligence tools (the analysis of communications in the radio spectrum and network traffic) and jamming — the isolation of transmitting and receiving stations — are far more sophisticated than they were back then. So today, a mobile phone is not necessarily the only tool to use, and on the other hand, managing a clandestine communications network, for example based on mesh networks, is not exactly easy.
Furthermore, as the Russian-Ukrainian conflict has shown, telecommunications systems and power stations (necessary to keep them running) are at the top of the list of targets to be hit in enemy territory.
Therefore, on the assumption (yet to be proven) that in 72 hours the armed forces or public security structures can intervene to restore a minimum of order — or that civil protection can arrive to provide assistance — the ability to maintain a minimum communication system would require the availability of a solar-powered generator, antennas to connect to a computer, the ability to communicate even in encrypted form, other stations with which to interact… in short, the entire technological repertoire that has always been studied and practised in certain areas of hacker culture.
(In)dependence from electronic slavery
If the European Commissioner’s video has one merit, in its underestimation of the technological aspects, it is that it has demonstrated how much we take the availability of the digital ecosystem for granted and how unaware we are of the consequences of even its compromise, let alone its total shutdown.
It is clear that it is unthinkable to return to smoke signals or kites to communicate over long distances because one day mobile phone base stations could be knocked out. But it is equally clear that if we really have to prepare for war, we need continuous and widespread training on what can realistically be done to communicate, but above all, alternative infrastructures and systems should be developed alongside the amateur radio networks that have contributed so much during disasters and other dramatic events.
If we really have to think from this perspective, then, in addition to equipping ourselves with survival backpacks, we should rethink policies on the control of communication tools and the restrictions that the EU would like to impose with client-side scanning on the development of secure messaging software such as Signal and on encryption.
Because, especially in the event of war — pardon me, crisis — ‘the enemy is listening’.