Comment by some_random 3 days ago
We can't really do much more than speculate right now, but it seems like the most likely answer is that a shipment of pagers was intercepted and implanted with explosives. Israel has done this before to assassinate a prominent bomb maker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash#Assassination
A Russian helicopter pilot had his family escape Russia, stole a helicopter, fled to Ukraine with it and cashed out on the bounty money offered. Then he was found and assassinated in Spain by the FSB. We are living in interesting times.
> Then he was found and assassinated in Spain by the FSB.
And that only because he seems to have lost his sense of self-preservation and basically lived his life in the open, in a Spanish town full of Russian ex-pats. And scoffed at the idea that he'd be safer in Ukraine.
Apparently the worst mistake was contacting his former girlfriend in Russia:
>Exactly how the killers found him has not been established, though two senior Ukrainian officials said he had reached out to a former girlfriend, still in Russia, and invited her to come see him in Spain.
>“This was a grave mistake,” one of the officials said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/31/world/europe/russian-defe...
Or there's a mole in Ukrainian intelligence who sold him out
Questionable opsec is almost always the culprit. Even all these online black markets, it wasn’t some sophisticated operation to catch them. Many times, they use the same username on another website and now there’s a link. Hell, one of them used to send email verification for their black market using their personal email.
It doesn’t just stop there. A 49ers wide receiver got shot a couple weeks back because he posted on Instagram about buying a Rolex and he was lucky to survive. That’s also questionable opsec.
This story maybe continues - the killed pilot was allegedly seen alive in Czechia. Though this information is unconfirmed [1].
[1] https://denikn.cz/1510394/cesti-zpravodajci-resili-zda-byl-z...
I guess if your only exposure to spying is through spy novels you probably would feel that way? Nothing about this seems out of line to me.
You should check out any of the books written by Ben Macintyre, especially "The Spy and the Traitor". It turns out a lot of spy novels aren't that far off from reality.
Exactly. Snowball's chance anyone could get a series of capacitors and transistor to do too much more than "let the smoke out," even with the largest influx of EM energy. Most batteries give pretty big warnings before they do anything close to explode, making this a pretty obvious 'attack' vector they utilized. I'm also happy to offer political opinions for anyone that wants to hear ;)
Given history, given adversary, given all facts known thats practically sure. Usually Mosad doesn't say anything so we won't get much more anytime soon.
There will be few movies and documentaries about this for sure once things calm down a bit. I presume they used pagers instead of phones to not be so easily trackable via google/apple software and hardware?
A pager is passive receiver only. It never transmits. So you can't track it. That allows an operative to get to a secure line or obtain a burner device.
Whoever did this just killed that as an information channel as both the devices and the network are now compromised.
>Whoever did this just killed that as an information channel as both the devices and the network are now compromised.
This is also true for Hezbollah. They must now distrust their own network, equipment and procurement channels. The reshuffling resulting from the casualties will make the organization less effective, at least temporarily, thus delaying any attack plans and allowing moles to rise through the ranks.
That's not been true for well over twenty years.
You might as well be arguing all cell phones are iPhones, because here's a model which is an iPhone. Sure, some are two-way pagers and do transmit, but most aren't.
Loads of pagers are passive, receive-only devices. There's a reason why there's a common distinction between "pager" and "two-way pager".
Until we know the attack vector, I wouldn't say the network is compromised. Perhaps a specific message was used to detonate, that wouldn't require compromising the network. Perhaps there was a separate radio that wasn't using the pager network at all.
Its one thing to figure out how to wire the vibrator in a phone into an external explosive activation circuit.
Its a whole other thing to do a supply chain intercept on an entire factory run of pagers, build a difficult to detect explosive into them, get them into the hands of your enemies, and remotely trigger them over infrastructure you don't directly control.
This is an incredible level of execution. And, presumably, the IDF or some attached intelligence agency demonstrating how deeply they own their adversary's networks.
I'm not sure they necessarily need to deeply own their adversary's networks. I'd be impressed if Lebanese pager tech has any serious kind of encryption, for example. And we're already accepting at face value that they sabotaged the devices, so it's possible this was done with a separate RF signal than their own cellular network, even if it is locked down.
But yes, the supply chain sabotaging is certainly impressive.
You probably need firmware and some major component modification, such as a display or battery, but not more than this, to pull it off. So at a minimum, two components, or perhaps one smart component such as a display.
It seems the model was the AP-900, not the AR-924, which used alkaline (ie removable) batteries, so a new theory is an EFP (explosively formed penetrator) manufactured into the device.
It appears the devices do not function on cell phone networks but instead on internal radio networks such as those used within industrial or medical settings.
Best guess is the displays because:
1) there is enough room for the EFP,
2) you could modify the component to trigger itself, meaning it doesn’t need coordination between any other parts of the device
3) there are a lot of injuries to the face reported — with a display you could trip on button push without needing access to the button, when people tend to be looking right at the EFP
4) in the videos the explosions look very directional
If an entire shipment was intercepted and modified, how many other pagers are out there? How many non-targeted persons are walking around with a bomb in their pocket?
There's also plenty of bystanders who are being impacted by an explosion happening in the pocket of the person next to them.
I don't think whoever approved this was worried about innocent people getting hurt.
I watched a video of one of these exploding in the pocket of someone at a grocery store with someone standing directly next to him, so close they were rubbing shoulders, and the bystander was fine. No doubt there were many dozens of civilian casualties, but if the numbers net out the way you'd expect they would (ie: people carrying these pagers, which link to Hezbollah's own communications network --- they run their own phone company --- are overwhelmingly Hezbollah operatives) this is going to pencil out as one of the most surgical attacks of all time.
Every military strike in modern warfare will involve someone in some sense not worrying about innocent people getting hurt. This isn't Agincourt. Wars happen in cities now.
There are too many threads and this is too complicated a topic for a technology forum website so I’m not going to weigh in everywhere.
But you yourself recognize that a) Hezbollah is a de facto government, not just a military or terrorist organization and that b) its folly to do some sort of algebra on casualties in these conflicts and intent is what matters.
It’s hard to come up with a plausible intent for a strike that injured 2700 people, with only the weakest of targeting mechanisms across a population that ranges the gamut of occupations, other than terrorism.
We would certainly view it as such if Hezbollah blew up 2700 phones of the Israeli government and military.
If they didn’t care they would directly level the building.
And yet it took 5 hours for IDF to respond to Hamas breaching their border - where it only takes a maximum of 45 minutes via helicopter to get to any point along the Israel-Palestine border?
Is there any technology possible to help people more seriously see incongruences for what they are, technology to help prevent people from propaganda - or is that primarily simply a systems control issue - education system, information system, etc - that would be party to a censorship-suppression narrative control and distraction apparatus?
Hamas coordinated strikes against Israeli c4i to hinder the IDF response to the invasion. This is trivially verifiable. Not all of Hamas are barely-educated fighters capable of little more than being pointed at innocents and told to kill.
Most sophisticated-best funded military in the world doesn't have automatic alert systems in place, redundancies, etc, eh?
You probably also don't believe that the Hannibal Directive was deployed on Oct. 7th as well, even though Israel is known to have done the same as early as 1986.
P.S. There are IDF intelligence agents who are whistleblowers that say that this had to have been allowed.
I think the planners of the operation weren't your average terrorist: They outmatched the border barriers' design basis threat, they knew the default Israeli response and targeted critical c4i nodes to hinder it, and they had a bit of luck and a lot of audacity. Those added up to a black day for Israel.
How much confirmation bias do you think you're leaning into, in order to not have to swallow the equally, if not more likely case, that the IDF was ordered or purposefully delayed in their response by higher ups?
And about the Hannibal Directive you didn't respond? We can assume too then, since you like assumptions, that they were deployed to kill their own citizens as well - right?
Im assuming you’re saying they were looking for a casus belli. They well might have, but surely the assailants knew this was a likely consequence. Why did they proceed to breach the border if they didn’t want to trigger a war?
You can start spending time first studying these:
> Kamil Hamad disappeared and it is rumored that he received US$1 million, a fake passport and a visa to the US.
Given the chain of events detailed already sounds like it was ripped from a spy novel, I'm pretty skeptical of this claim.