Comment by s1artibartfast 3 days ago
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
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.
Most pagers do, yes. They are also usually unencrypted. And due to the one way nature, even if they are encrypted, PFS (perfect forward security) is impossible. Meaning that if someone captures the encrypted messages they can decrypt them all the way back when the encryption key is obtained.
But the impossibility of any kind of location tracking is definitely a plus of one-way pagers. Not just for terrorists. I'd get one if there were still a network where I live. It'd be really nice to be reachable and not be tracked 24/7 for once.
While the messages are not encrypted, you just have your actual message coded. Have agreed on phrases and what not discussed out of band. Send dummy messages to throw people off and not know what is a real transmission or a dummy one. Is that numbers station just spouting gibberish or communicating with spies?
The market closes at 5, dinner at the hotel, Grandpa will bring home the wine, bring your hat. Charlie 5 Alpha 2 4 7 3 Bravo. Maybe this is just discussing someone's evening, maybe its coordinating a group action.
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).
To be fair, they rotate the burners in the series every 2 weeks and it takes the police more than a week to get up on the new ones.
It was cool to see that it was in fact an opsec fail (the guy buying the phones all over the country got lazy and bought too many from the same shop) to break through that. Pretty realistic. Like most of the wire in fact.
Although one thing in the wire I don't understand. Pagers are really easy to intercept, anyone with a scanner (with discriminator output) can do it and could do it in those times. I did it many times during the days when pagers were still in full swing. I really don't understand why they needed a court order for that (in season 1).
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.
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.
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/sya00qlswa