Comment by Aerbil313
Pagers are one-way, not bidirectional like cell networks. That's their whole point. Their HQ can broadcast a message and you won't find out who is the receiver, because pagers don't transmit, only listen.
Pagers are one-way, not bidirectional like cell networks. That's their whole point. Their HQ can broadcast a message and you won't find out who is the receiver, because pagers don't transmit, only listen.
I never said they were two-way. I said you have the metadata of the sender and the receiver.
The page data contains the receiver/pager address, but remember this is RF. Triangulating source of transmission on a frequency you are actively monitoring is table stakes for nation states.
Once you flag receiver addresses there are techniques to work out who that party is, especially for a nation state sophisticated enough to intercept the supply chain in the first place. Correlating transaction data to people is tedious but doable. Even with receiver addresses only though you can work out how the network works and what cells there are and that's a ton of useful intelligence already.
Also if the "code" being used was in any way breached it could be used to trick receivers into self-identifying.
Israel just skipped all of that effort with "ring ring, boom" though.