are you kidding me? this is what i read. i take this to mean that israel has figured out how to remote in a worm that - what? - heats up the phone and explodes the batteries? or what? iphones exploding as you have them up to your ear? gruesome, but pretty damned ingenious. or is it just the pagers? which is still ingenious.
Not that recent or new. Maybe the simultaneous coordination is.
But even years ago, Mossad, has used exploding cell phones to take care of their business.
WSJ reported the Hamas leader has been elusive precisely because heâs avoiding electronic devices. Relying instead on coded handwritten notes passed along a network of people.
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/the-crude-system-of-coded-messages-keeping-hamass-leader-alive-c387b580?st=FN6Uz8&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
There was a TED Talk about 10 years ago with this as an example by an IT defense contractor guy. The talk was really more about how to analyze code, but the âexplode a terroristâs phoneâ was an organizing example for the talk.
I fully believe that the US and Israel have the capability to do this. I donât think itâs just pagers. I think itâs anything that has a cellular connection and software that helps manage the battery from rapidly overheating (which you can then hack to intentionally cause rapid overheating).
Donât start nothing. Wonât be nothing.
I read it that theyâd brought in the new pagers in recent months, so israel infiltrated their supply chain - youâd assume theyd have had to done this at source, so knowing they were goinf to order, where from and then get them. How youâd know which ones were going to >1000 individuals in multiple countries is quite the operation
That makes since. I can see that pagers or cell phones could be made to overheat through hacking alone.
But violently exploding?
And killing significant numbers of people?
It seems like explosives would be needed for that.
It would be insane if governments, hackers or terrorists- could just hack existing phones and pagers and kill large numbers.
Bet there lot of people putting their cell phones down todayâŚ
âOperation Wrath of Godâ v2
According to BBC each was packed with 20 grams of explosive
Your comment and windyâs make sense.
Does make me wonder how much damage could be done by very rapidly overheating a battery alone, without adding additional explosives. It seems like something UL must have looked at long ago, just basic safety-wise.
So, with this method (explosives in pagers), Israel is now joining with the other terrorist states and organizations.
Because it has stooped to the vicious methods of its enemies. It kills others with methods that are known to harm THOUSANDS of totally innocent people. As this attack has clearly shown.
And we americans fund this terrorism. Nice.
Hezbollah are âtotally innocent?â
It is concerning. This doesnât seem the same as a targeted assassination attempt, like a bombing or a drone strike, that has so-called collateral damage. It seems much more indiscriminate.
As an aside, it will make me think twice the next time Iâm pleasuring to â â â â on my iPhone. (Is that family friendly enough for this forum?)
Itâs actually brilliant from a psychological warfare perspectiveâŚthey have completely degraded and called into question their entire communications network while also making them call into question the manufacturing/ acquisition of everything they purchase. What other innocuous thing might go boom?
i agree. itâs a master stroke. youâre not only surgically targeting 2,700 combatants living behind civilian protection, youâve ruined their communications temporarily and placed them on guard permanently. thereâs a lot of hezbollah who probably thought they were too low on the totem pole to be targets.
that said, just because you can doesnât mean you should. there are some real negatives to a strike like this. itâs extremely clever. but itâs also pretty insidious. unless you can wipe out hezbollah and get them kicked out of lebanon altogether, what is the strategic downside to what you just did? i guess weâll find out.
one last note on that: as i was driving around doing errands today i was thinking that the supplier of that pager, and the freight forwarder, shipper, etc., will all be very worried about hezbollah retaliating against them too, not only israel. a lot of people are very busy saying âit wasnât us!! it wasnât us!!â but theyâre not saying that by pager ;-/
Master stroke is right. Iâd wager there is a much larger contingent of the Iranian government and military that will be offline for a while. A disruption in strategic and tactical communications like this will force Hezbollah to use human couriers even more, which is slow. Assuming the Israelis infiltrated the pager network, imagine how well they can track suspect courier movements.
Itâs like some serious Jason Bourne shit come to life.
What are the real negatives? Itâs not like Hezbollah is friendly or anything.
Mossad has been doing this since Mossad existed. They hold grudges, they play the long game of lulling enemies into a a false sense of security, and theyâre very inventive in ways to kill people. Mossad were still whacking people involved in the Munich Olympics massacre like 20 years later.
Considering Hezbollah is a terrorist organization Iâm guessing it was by way of a front company or what would be even more delicious Iran