Comment by tptacek
Comment by tptacek 2 days ago
Allegedly hidden well enough that a casual X-ray of the pager wouldn't have revealed it.
Comment by tptacek 2 days ago
Allegedly hidden well enough that a casual X-ray of the pager wouldn't have revealed it.
Simply because "bomb" dogs, like "drug" dogs are a scam to give the police a legal excuse to violate your rights. The dogs don't detect bombs/drugs, they detect cues from the controlling officer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detection_dog#Criticism
The law was reviewed in 2006 by the New South Wales Ombudsman, who handed down a critical report regarding the use of dogs for drug detection. The report stated that prohibited drugs were found in only 26% of searches following an indication by a drug sniffer dog. Of these, 84% were for small amounts of cannabis deemed for personal use.[27]: 29 Subsequent figures obtained from NSW Police in 2023 revealed that between 1 January 2013 and 30 June 2023, officers had conducted 94,535 personal searches (refers to both strip searches and less invasive frisk or "general" searches) resulting from drug detection dog indications, with only 25% resulting in illicit drugs being found.[28]
"According to Sky News Arabia; Mossad was able to Inject a Compound of Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate (PETN) into the Batteries of the New Encrypted Pagers that Hezbollah began using around February, before they even arrived in the Hands of Hezbollah Members, allowing them to Remotely Overheat and Detonate the Lithium Battery within the Device."
This wasn't something magical that turned the battery into an explosive, they allegedly injected an explosive compound into the battery which would be triggered by intentionally overheating the battery.
Like if you packed C4 into an electric car battery, it would be a bomb, much the same way if you packed it into an ordinary empty box. Sure the battery adds some extra energy, but the explosive is the explosive, ya know.
I am extremely skeptical.
High explosives rarely require only heat to detonate, and most can be quite literally set on fire by an open flame and burn without detonating. PETN is not terribly sensitive, and should require a detonator of some sort. What's more, that doesn't jive with the other claim that they added a daughterboard to the device.
the idea TSA security has always been a farce, detecting only the crudest methods of attack.
It might have looked like a normal pager under xray, but I bet it looked _different_ than an unmodified pager. Not suspicious on its own but suspicious because it was changed.
Interesting that it wasn't discovered by any bomb sniffing dog in Lebanon. They had thousands of devices. There must be at least a few bomb dogs in Lebanon right?