On September 17, US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller, in the day’s briefing, said that America is gathering information regarding the pager explosion in Lebanon and underlined that the U.S. had no involvement in it. The haste to distance themselves gives off the impression of "protesting too much," given America's past similar actions. In 2010, for instance, a computer virus known as Stuxnet, jointly developed by the United States and Israel, remotely destroyed centrifuges at Iranian nuclear facilities, delaying the launch of Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant.
Following the pager explosion in Lebanon, Edward Snowden, a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), made a post on X, noting how the event reminded him of disclosures he made in 2013 when he exposed mass surveillance activities. He recounted how American intelligence agencies would intercept network equipment en route to target countries at airports, install implants, repackage them, and send them on their way to infiltrate target networks. Snowden commented, "A decade has passed, and transportation security has not improved," implicitly suggesting a connection between the Lebanese pager explosion and the intelligence agencies of the U.S. and Israel, with the CIA being the prime suspect behind the scenes.
