Comment by minkles
Comment by minkles 3 days ago
Their comms and command infra is now hosed and all the operatives concentrated in hospitals. They are dead in the water.
Comment by minkles 3 days ago
Their comms and command infra is now hosed and all the operatives concentrated in hospitals. They are dead in the water.
Hezbollah has been warning its members not to use cell phones because they get targeted by using them too. Seems like the pagers were supposed to be the workaround for that.
Not having a Hezbollah issued phone is very different from never using a phone.
The idea that Hezbollah members have and had no means of communication other than pagers in a country full of cellphones and landlines is a farce.
Now that their pager-wielding C&C is wiped out, all that cell phone traffic isn't dark anymore.
Two birds with one pager.
Which is dumb, because pagers are just as trackable as phones.
Lots of pagers operate in one-way only mode. Towers transmit messages without expecting acknowledgement a few times, pager is configured to filter out and only alert on messages routed to its ID.
Sure, theoretically one can detect a receive-only radio, but its massively more difficult than detecting something which actively transmits.
Many pagers are receive only. The tower has no idea who's listening; it just broadcasts out the messages that it's told to. Pagers are much less trackable than phones.
They might have watched The Wire: you page Alice, and she uses a public phone to call you. Undetectable unless you wire all public phones in the city, or someone is dumb enough to always use the same phone (which is what happens in the series; they eventually switch to burner mobiles).
That’s what I am thinking. These were not sent to a few thousand random guys, but almost certainly the highest level targets that could be identified.
Cell phones that, if distributed from the organization like the pagers were, could be compromised as well.
The people with the pagers could be the more important people in the organization.
And the 100k number seems quite exaggerated.
They have about 100'000 members, and this attack has killed about a dozen, and injured about 2000. Only one recent shipment of pagers was affected. I don't think they are unable to respond.
Hezbollah has more than 100,000 fighters, so this would be what, one or two percent injured.
Everyone has cell phones that they can use in addition to the pager, so I don't think it's very accurate to say the communications are hosed either