I was listening to Matt Bracken on Rumble, and Matt brought up point I had not considered.
Israel just demonstrated a capability that should make all of us pay attention: the state use of wireless devices to execute a mass time on target attack.
What if, in the future, someone does this to cell phones of MAGA voters? Or, to get at Elon Musk, they do this to Tesla cars?
Cell phones? Think bigger.
They've just rendered pretty much any product of their nation and affiliated businesses unpurchasable.
Because it might explode. I wouldn't even buy gummy vitamins originating in Israel now.
This was a strategic blunder.
Hezbollah didn't buy pagers from Pagie Blowstein, the shipment was intercepted.
https://archive.ph/Kv6cP
Say what you will about the NYT generally, but I don't think they have incentive to make that one up. If anything it makes The Tribe look worse
That's one theory. Could be a lot of things. If they'll taint someone else's products there's nothing to say the stuff they make is safe either.
Yeah, it seems that the new info claims they didn't just intercept, they MADE them from the get go and were involved in basically every step of the production and distribution (though they bought the license and blueprints).
What matters is Israel had control over these products at some point and planted explosives.
They have control over any product originating from their country, so anything you buy from them might explode.
If you knew your iPhone was intercepted in shipment by Israel then that's another and even more reason to reject delivery of it.
Like the support structures of a building? Or two buildings...
They didn't intercept a shipment. They were the manufacturers from the start. Nobody can resist Mossad's great bargains (through shell companies). https://archive.ph/Kv6cP
This was my question as well. If we already have the devices, how can they put explosives into them without having them in their possession?
This would have to mean that they can remotely make the battery pack overheat and explode somehow, or that the explosives were already installed way ahead of time, and they've been carrying them around for days? months? ... years?
Who says they can't just overload your battery and make it explode Samsung style?
Not destructive enough.
These devices were rigged with small amounts of explosives. Lithium will burn like crazy but it doesn't react fast enough to cause overpressure. A lithium battery failing in your hand might fail fast enough to burn your hand, but it won't happen fast enough to blow your fingers off. It's not about the energy, it's about the chemistry. You need the right KIND of reaction. RDX and HMX get most of their energy from the extremely weak N-N bond, which REAAAALLLLY wants to become N≡N. Lithium batteries will get hot, they'll burn, they'll burst and vent hot gas... but they won't detonate.
I've seen a cordless lithium ion tool battery burst into flames at work about 8 years ago. Kind of a mini explosion. Only once, but it got me thinking years ago and I don't store my batteries in the house now. I have a feeling all lithium ion batteries are potentially mini explosives.
That'd swell and get hot and burn but not explode.
Also, modern lithium batteries have devices built into them to stop that. That's the problem - you could use software to try to tell a device to overcharge the battery, but the stuff that's built into the battery is pretty much inaccessible to the device and it'd go "hmm this isn't right" and turn off. Ever leave your phone sitting in the car and came back in and it was turned off because it was too hot? That's the battery reporting that to the phone, not the phone itself.
in theory you could find an exploit that overrode the circuit, assuming the battery circuit isn't read-only, but it would be so piecemeal that it wouldn't be worth the hassle.
they'd be better off going after us the old-fashion way at that point... "car accidents" and the like...
This is one of the reasons I don't consider the idea of it being intercepted and planted with high explosives to be reasonable. There's way to many things that can go wrong.
What? Shit moves around in cargo containers. And it's not guarded 24/7. Pretty ez for a SO team
Electric vehicles would be SOOOO fucked.
Like a small nuclear bomb inside your house.
This
batteries don't do that. it'd burn like hell and maybe set your garage (and your house) on fire with some bad luck, but batteries don't explode like high-explosives. like, ever. they just burn.
They wouldn't do it with smartphones as why waste time making them into bombs when you can easily GPS track your targets with said phone for a predator drone strike.
This is a demonstration of why you need to secure your communications logistics at home, relaying on other countries for communications opens you up to these kinds of attacks.
UK: Okay, but what if we sell our entire telecom infrastructure to China?
It sure is interesting how many handshakes come out of the woodwork in defense of Israel and how quick their comments get deleted.
$2 of c4 vs $40 million missile
Yes, it makes sense for them to be economical.
Mossad is one of the best intelligence agencies in the world, in part because they play for fucking keeps. America has done some absolutely insane stuff, but we are still generally more limited in what we can do.
A very typical Mossad operation involvings entrapping agents. For example, target a wealthy Egyptian businessman with a lucrative business deal using shell companies. Set up a meeting somewhere public. Have the businessman meet with someone--could be a male prostitute, a known Jew/Israeli, someone with Iranian ties, whatever, someone this person would not want to be associated with. Show them signing documents, shaking hands, exchanging money, whatever, and record and get photographs of the whole thing.
What, this rich Egyptian dude doesn't want his pictures meeting with a male prostitute made public? He doesn't want pictures shaking hand with an Israeli government agent shared with the Egyptian government? etc.
Now he's controllable, and every single thing you get him to do, you record, and you gain even more leverage over him.
This is really the typical method of operations for all intel agencies, but Mossad is particularly good at it.
CIA, KGB, everyone has, for many decades, intercepted shipments of electronics and other products. The French intelligence agency bugged all of the business class seats of all Air France airplanes so they could spy on international businessmen discussing deals and then share that information with French corporations. (And when I say intercept, this can be done at any time from production to delivery.)
That's exactly what the CIA did to the Iranian centrifuges. That was a multi-country operations involving multiple levels of companies that were controlled or infiltrated by intelligence services.
Blowing up thousands of pagers and walkie talkies remotely is one of the more audacious things I've ever heard about it. I personally feel like it was pretty fair. Hezbollah considers themselves fighters, so I think they're a fair target.
no, it's because Satan is the prince of this world and is currently seeing to it they have few enemies. it's easy to do much of anything even as an inbred jew if nobody with any power opposes you.
the most plausible theory with the pagers is as following: they set up a fake company in Hungary, they buy pagers and such from Gold Apollo, they stick explosives in them, do some advertising in Lebanon as being the cheapest bestest around, then presumably just guess which shipment is going mostly to Hezbollah and send the bombs over. couple mohammedans blow up, couple little girls blow up, couple doctors blow up, all the same to them.
what part of that is impressive? what part of making people meet with male prostitutes or tricking them into entering pedo rape islands as Hellsbells00 mentioned is impressive?
the only impressive thing is just how much people like us will lie down and take it. once the boiling frog that is the White man jumps out of the pot, mossad's top agents will piss their pants just like their pitiful IDF does.
Partly, but I think you're missing some key parts. i think it's more likely that they used human intelligence and agents within Hezbollah to set up the purchase and it was done in such a way that it was certain the booby trapped pagers were going to Hezbollah. That explains the seemingly very low civilian casualty rate (maybe 4,000+ explosions, and a handful of civilians, including two children from what I am reading).
Additionally, for the pagers and walkies to have been modified this way, you should also immediately suspect that this means similar attacks have bugged or other compromised the communications themselves.
The attack maimed many Hezbollah members, but I think the bigger issue is the communications disruption. Hezbollah can't trust any of its technology and any of its network. They have to assume they have been totally compromised.
THe end result will make things harder for Israel, so my guess is Israel will something large soon.
Being evil is playing on easy mode. Fuck them. Do we worship all terrorists or just those who control our government?
Epstein island was a US operation just like the one you described, but worse.
You underestimate how evil our government is.
I really don't! And yes, I agree about Epstein island. If not CIA, Israel was certainly involved.
If it's technically possible, they can explode any device, or electric car that are connected from outside.
Almost anything that is connected to an outside network can be hacked. And backdoors exist and are intentionally introduced/not patched for government agencies. 3rd parties can obviously also find those then.
Keep in mind though that these were compromised pagers specifically sold to them, not random stuff picked up on the normal market. To target MAGA voters you would need to sell them a special "MAGA only" phone.
That said as soon as your piece of hardware leaves your eyesight it can be considered compromised. See airport checks.
bingo. expect the very goods you buy to be suspect when they are willing to sabotage civilian products.
militarily speaking this tactic was ingenious. they injured many enemy combatants while simultaneously hamstring their communications. they have an excellent window to invade right now, I'd be surprised if they aren't exploiting it.
ethically speaking, there was way too much collateral damage, and the people killed were not combatants but merely dudes to chilling in plain clothes. also their children.
I don't buy new phones very often. Rarely in fact. And this event makes me consider having to have the store open the phone to inspect the guts before I leave
Maybe that's why they make them so you can't open or remove the battery now
You would need to, at a minimum, x-ray the battery and other bulky components. Preferably with one of the fancy airport xrays that can tell you the material density.
Hamas was a bunch of retards who bought comms equipment from an Israeli front company. They can't actually make your random Samsung blow up.
Lol this guy thinks there are no voltage control algorithms and no effect of changing voltage on a lithium battery.
Remember the video "Micro Drones Killer Arms robots" from six years ago that everyone thought was farfetched and scaremongering?
That's what's next.
Yeah, that was basically my thought. I imagine the various three-letter agencies were busy writing down ideas after they saw the bullshit Israel pulled off.
Assuming Israel didn't steal the idea from said three-letter agencies to begin with.
They did.
This is not the first time israel has used exploding phones to assassinate people. They're really into double meanings and codes and tricky language and infiltration, so something about a communication device exploding just really tickles them.
They will. You need to seperate yourself from your phone before it explodes. You should probably just have a portion of your home that's a faraday cage.
I'm not even kidding. It's something you will need to think about going forward.
I agree but you can't transmit or receive in a faraday cage.
Buy 2nd hand ham radio equipment. Learn how to radio. Understand radio. Soon realize you are more sophisticated than the Secret Service (A guy was in place for 12 hours with a Go-Pro and cell phone, TX/RX devices, and no one did any basic electronic recon. Off the shelf stuff would have picked that up and it costs ≈ $100.)
Yes.
You should have places in your home where there is no wireless connection.
TIL off the shelf $100 equipment can detect a gopro that is off
Huh. I forgot. Is having a cellphone scrambler/blocker illegal to own, or is just using it that's illegal?
Probably to scramble other people's devices would be illegal. But not for your own devices.
Israel is a terror state that bombed civilian centers indiscriminately. They detonated bombs on streets and in traffic and in restaurants and shopping centers in order to intimidate their enemies. Remind any "Our greatest ally" boomers about that.
What do you expect them to do? Pack up and leave, surrender to Islam and antisemitism?
They're surrounded by Iran-funded enemies that won't stop until they're relocated or exterminated.
that would be tricky, especially with how this operation was (officially) undertaken. the pagers/walkie-talkies/solar panels in question were intercepted before they reached hezbollah, and physical explosives were implanted in the devices. I dunno if you've ever opened up a modern cellphone before, but there isn't enough room to fit a fart in one of them, let alone a wad of explosives and a detonator.
on the other hand, lipo/lion batteries are vulnerable to catching fire/exploding if the charging circuit fails for some reason, so in theory, you could simply hack the device using an exploit in the security, causing it to become a firebomb. All well and good, but which device to you target? the iphone 10? the samsung galaxy S23? some low-level knockoff? there's too many phone variants out there, so unless you find some major bug that affects 90% of phones to exploit, spread over (in some cases) five years or more, it's going to be like playing whack-a-mole with an eyepatch. And even then, the one example I can think of of a phone heating up so much it burst into flames, the man who owned it had enough time to remove it from his pocket and drop it. Not every one will, but enough will that even if you had some sort of super exploit, a good chunk of your targets would get away unscathed.
I'm not saying they can't do this, mind you, I'm saying it would be supremely difficult, and likely you'd be better off employing other methods if you were going to pull something like this off...
Cylinder batteries are not used in cellphones
That's why my ARs don't have electronics. Besides I like an LPVO over a red dot.