From a tactical standpoint, this is very similar, and the only big difference I see is that this is technologically more advanced/more complex than just planting a bomb or something.
If it's not terrorism, what is the differentiating factor(s)?
*side note: I'm quite sure other western countries have used tactics that I would call terrorism as well. This isn't meant to be a callout or anti-anything post. I'm genuinely curious where the line is drawn.
By those definitions, I think this is clearly not terrorism. (Though we might learn more information about who was targeted that could change this assessment.) Admittedly, my definitions only imperfectly track the way the word is used in the west, but I think that's only due to frequent misuse of the term for political ends.
I would worry about a definition of terrorism that creates an incentive to avoid this type of warfare in favor of dropping bombs.
There is no question if an enemy set off hundreds of bombs in American ambulances we would recognize it as a mass terrorist attack.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-09-18/second...
There's no way to know that 4000 devices are going to only harm their 'owner'.
Call it whatever you want, but these attacks are not responsible nor 'in the right'. This sort of tactic is reckless and evil.
Israel and Lebanon are not at war.
Also notably, it clearly did not intentionally target civilians, although there may be civilian casualties which is uncharacteristic of a terrorist attack.
But I think a general distinction is the targeting of combatants vs civilians.
There is a difference between infiltrating military or para-military organizations or operations and intentionally targeting mass casualties of civilians for attention.
You can't just walk across a recognized international border and do the "right" thing without a consent, regardless of how right or wrong it had been. That's an act of war, technically.
When Afghans took up arms against occupying American soldiers, they were routinely called terrorists in American press and media.
When Muslims fight America or Israel, they are called terrorists. When the situation is reversed, that label isn't applied.
I'm the opposite, in that I think it is incredibly uninteresting to obsess over semantics and try to neatly sort everything into a terrorism or non-terrorism box.
Definitions are generally not universal and are inherently inexact. The definition will simply be stretched by the interpreting party to put things they do not morally approve of into the terrorism box and things they do approve of in the non-terrorism box.
So I think it makes more sense to just skip that step and instead directly consider whether something is morally justified or not and to provide arguments of why or why not.
If the assailant and target were reversed, would Western media hesitate at all to call it terrorism?
Or, forget Hezbollah and Israel. If ISIS had detonated thousands of explosive devices all over, e.g., the UK injuring and killing hundreds of UK military personnel and some civilians, would that not immediately be condemned as an act of terror, by everyone in the entire world, East and West? And rightly so?
If the designation of "terror" or "not terror" depends on who's attacking and whom they are targeting, then there's not much point in talking about terror or not terror at all.
Without a doubt it’s asymmetrical… and the common binary is military/terror but I fear this is a distinction left to the last century.
The loss of children is always unacceptable, but Hezbollah has a history of courting child soldiers… so skepticism is not unwarranted.
https://www.refworld.org/reference/annualreport/cscoal/2008/...
If it is actually done to degrade the capabilities of the UK military so ISIS could use its fighters to chase them out of Iraq, or maybe, conquer a part of England - its an act of war and is actually worse from a UK POV. Calling it a terror attack would be silly.
People are biased to treat wars as better then terror because wars have rules and often involve good people trying to defend their country. But from a country's POV a terror organization is usually way less dangerous than a competent enemy military attacking.
Terror is usually done because someone lacks military competence and is willing to play dirty to even the playing field.
The establishment is so aggressive in condemning terrorism, because its easier to deal aggressively with a small terrorist organization before it becomes an established military and carves its own autonomous place on the world stage.
ISIS is a good example, it used a lot of terror tactics, but its goal was to create a country.
the crucial lines is "provoe a state of terror in the general public." That is to say, terrorism uses arbitrary violence in order to cause fear and panic leading to political goals. By contrast, the targets of this attack were directly against the personnel and leadership of a militarized organization currently in a shooting war with israel. The goal is not to instill terror in a population, but to directly target the capabilities of a military organization.
Note that doesn't mean its not a war crime (I don't think it is but...)! It could still be a war crime for all sorts of reasons... it just means it's not terrorism.
Doesn't have to be arbitrary, and a highly precise targeted attack killing high commanders can still instill fear in the general population - if the most guarded guys can be killed, nobody is safe.
"Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war against non-combatants."
There's a lot of disagreement about the international definition of terrorism, but most seem to agree that it is specifically violence against non-combatants and outside the context of a declared military action.
If the USA in 2001 could have waved a magic wand that killed all the Taliban and didn't touch a hair on any non-combatants head they would have waved it and called it a day.
That feels like an oversimplification to me. Some of those devices have surely injured civilians. I think the question is how many. Broadly it's the same question that's plagued Israel's actions since last October: there will always be civilian casualties as a result of military action, but how many is too many?
I'm disappointed that this thread has devolved into an angry and pointless political debate, when it could instead have been a cool technical exploration of how Mossad pulled it off. Come on, Hacker News!
If they could have executed this without a single civilian injury they definitely would have. I guess intent is what makes it terrorism vs war in my mind.
Why do you think that?
Look at what the leadership of the Israel government is saying when they aren't placating western audiences / media outlets:
Cabinet Member May Golan: "Proud of the ruins of Gaza" ( https://www.palestinechronicle.com/i-am-proud-of-the-ruins-o... )
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich: Starving 2 million Gazans to death is right and moral but the world won't let us ( https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-08-05/ty-article/is... )
Minister of National Security Ben Gvir: We should tear down the Al-Aqsa Mosque and build a synagogue in its place ( https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240826-israel-minist... )
Typically the differentiating factor is who the victims are and what the goal of the operation are - terrorists = victims are primarily civilian and the operation has negligible military benefit. Not terrorists = the targets are military. If there is collateral damage then it is not excessive (or not intended to be; intent matters) in relation to the military objective.
All this is subjective of course, and politics are involved, but that is what the difference is usually given as.
In this particular case - i would say it would be terrorism if it was random people's radios & pagers, but not terrorism if it was pagers/radios bought for military purpose that were primarily owned by soldiers. Initial reports suggest it is the latter, but i imagine more details will appear in time to better make that determination.
The Hezbollah attack that started this war was an act of terrorism.
The Ukraine placing bombs in cities where the Russians are about to march in is not terrorism.
Having that said: It would be better if the Hezbollah could be stopped by other less cruel means. But war is ugly. The Hezbollah has started it so Israel has all the right to defend themselves. Even if it's cruel.
I can't really wrap my head around it neither, is it terrorism or not ?
On one hand it sure is - we don't know if it was the main goal, but it sure did instil fear and terror. Even in people that have nothing to do with the region.
On the other hand, it's pretty much as targeted as it gets. From what we know, the explosives were really small, installed in devices specifically used by their targets. I have hard time imagining any other way one could eliminate or incapacitate thousands of legimitate (in their view at least) targets without firing a single bullet and with so few other casualties (and yes, of course even a single one is too much).
> Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants
Terrorism is variously defined [1]. People are debating whether this was "random or indiscriminate nature" relative to other terrorist attacks. But relative to any wartime strike on an enemy capital, it's been highly precise.
The reason it's open to intepretation is we don't know Israel's motivation. Is it to mark Hezbollah members? A prelude to a strategic strike? If so, it's not terrorism. If it's to scare Hezbollah and the Lebanese, on the other hand, it does start to look like terrorism.
What's the old saying? "One mans terrorist is another man's freedom fighter".
the term "terrorism" means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:22%20section:...
So really, terrorism is what people say is terrorism.
A terrorist org having their own ammo depo is probably a hint.
Lets then transplant the example to other ground lets say Poland lets a terrorist group operate within its borders and that terrorists org regularly sends rockets over to Germany.
What do you think Germany is suppose to do? Ask Poland to deal with an org that they openly support, and openly allow to attack Germany?
Pagers and radios are used for their communication. That means that it is a military equipment.
Most modern countries terrorize people by design, because they can use the 51% illusion to justify any of their actions.
They also use the same illusion to teach you what's terrorism and what's patriotism, and they will for sure try to teach you young — if they don't, it will be kinda hard to distinguish later on
Hezbollahs goal is to destroy Israel, so I wouldn't call any military action against them terrorism. They have a right to defend themselves and that right does include these tactics.
Maybe we should all just try to treat others the way we want to be treated? That’s pretty much what that hippy Jewish philosopher guy said back in the day.
however as already pointed out, even this happened in one instance, it all depends on which side you are on. being from a country that fought for its independence, we remember those who did the deed as "freedom fighters". during the time, from the "opressor's" point of view, however, they would have been seen as insurgents.
Mental gymnastics will be in full force here and in the media/politics to recategorize it.
I have no doubt a headline saying "Israeli politicians' hand-held radios explode, killing three, one day after pager blasts" would receive very different responses in this thread.
> Hezbollah is a Lebanese Shia Islamist _political party_ and paramilitary group
This is not as simple as it looks. Hamas does indeed target civilians, but what really put the wind up Israel on October 7 was that they successfully overran 2 military bases and mounted a serious attack on a third, although that was repelled. Per Israeli media, the government there had significant prior warning (months or maybe as much as a year) but dismissed the intelligence in the belief that Hamas lacked the military capability and was just LARPing.
I mean, maybe it meets the technical definition of terrorism, but at a certain point all military conflict becomes terrorism and the term becomes meaningless.
To my mind, there are two critical moral differences between war and terrorism. The first is that the soldier attacks those who are fighting him - if not exactly the guilty, at least the active and resistant. The terrorist doesn't care if he attacks the weak and innocent and in fact prefers it. The second is that the object of a soldier's attack is to break the resistance, and he minimizes evil and suffering in pursuit of that goal. The terrorist maximizes it as a point of strategy.
Of course, fighting is sometimes necessary - evil must be resisted or it will dominate the earth. And in a messy real world, fighting often unavoidably hurts the innocent and the uninvolved - or even the involved in unnecessary ways. The desire to do things perfectly has to at some point yield to the need to do something - insisting that only perfect actions be taken is the same as saying no actions can be taken.
So what makes a fighting action moral? There isn't a bright line. At the margins, this is a judgement call. What level of violence, of what sort, is acceptable is something good people will have differing opinions on. But to suggest that the existence of a spectrum and the necessity of exercising judgement erases the categories is to commit the beard fallacy. The fact that we cannot say exactly when stubble becomes a beard does not mean there is no such thing as a beard - it just means the edges of the definition are fuzzy. That's actually normal! Most definitions have fuzzy edges, and have weak meaning on those edges. If one person wants a clean shaven man for some purpose and another wants a bearded man, both may consider a week old shave unacceptable for their purposes. Definitional edges have their interests, but don't necessarily inform how we think about centers.
Most ethics in war and in fighting turn on these ideas of innocence or powerlessness and necessity. Soldiers take prisoners (and treat them well) because taking someone out of the conflict is the honorable goal of war, and causing suffering once that is accomplished is evil. Criminals in prison (should) still have human rights for the same reason. I once heard a federal law enforcement official describe a shootout with a criminal, stating that the criminal was shooting at him and didn't care who else he hit, while the LEO was unwilling to return fire against the backstop of an occupied apartment building because that would be evil.
It does cost something to do things right - you pay for it in the blood of your own soldiers and in your chances of victory. One reason to seek an overwhelming force is to have the luxury of doing things as cleanly as possible. In a more even fight, at higher stakes, necessity may look different. People do take capabilities and circumstances into account when they judge you.
Nonetheless, there is a very big difference between doing the right thing imperfectly or even badly and doing the wrong thing. There are matters of degree between going to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties and accepting more of them. That does not mean intentionally targeting civilians exists on that spectrum. That's crossing an entirely different line.
On a personal level, in a self defense scenario, you can be taking actions to stop a threat or to hurt a person. The first is moral and legal; the second is immoral and illegal. And while you sometimes do the second in the course of doing the first, the minute you are doing it for its own sake, you are over the line. While we may disagree over where exactly the line is, that doesn't mean you can put it anywhere you find convenient. There is a moral truth to the situation.
Every criminal says they're acting in self defense through some twisted line of reasoning. And every terrorist can tell you why their targets are legitimate and their actions necessary. It is entirely possible to argue along such lines and to be wrong. Further down the thread, someone argues that targeting civilians is justified when those civilians vote for the government you are fighting. This is an example of careless moral reasoning that seeks to justify evil - you cannot know who voted how, and we do not kill people for how they vote or we find ourselves in the position of killing huge numbers of people. This is a thin justification for violence as a goal in itself. Likewise, someone argues that targeting the innocent is justifiable in a very asymmetric conflict. Again, this is a very thin justification. It is true that you are judged by the precision of your weapons and the options available to you, but a tenuous relationship to some strategic advantage doesn't justify egregious and pointless violence. At some point, it starts to look like the violence is the point to you and you're just evil.
These lines of argument highlight why I feel the need to respond. This erasing of the line between war and terrorism, which has apparently happened in the minds of a lot of people here, has an effect that is doubly harmful. It has the effect of hampering necessary and legitimate war by miring it in endless criticism and confusion about legitimacy. This is bad - when we fight evil, we need to be able to have intelligent conversations about how to acceptably do it. Overly hampering our capabilities helps evil be a little more dominant - keeps the bad guys a little more in control on the margins. Calling war terrorism commits this evil. But perhaps a worse evil is committed by calling terrorism war - it has the effect of justifying it! There are people in this thread who think that targeting voters and children is okay because they are confused about the concepts of innocence and necessity and in their confusion are incapable of intelligently evaluating reasoning that involves those concepts. It is not a great leap between finding terrorism morally acceptable and being willing to support it.
The ethics and morals of violent conflict - whether writ small between individuals or writ large between nations - have been a topic of discussion for all of civilization. While we don't always agree, a lot of important, intelligent, moral things have been said on the topic - things worth learning. We have concepts like war crime and terrorism for reasons. Contrary to (apparent) popular belief, there are not merely ugly sounds, linguistic weapons wielded for power. They are important and specific ideas, given to us by generations of thinkers, that help us distinguish between good and evil and understand the moral meaning of things. You erase those in your own mind at the risk of supporting and committing atrocities. It is important to know when the price of winning morally obligates you to lose, and when the price of losing morally obligates you to win. The ability to tell the difference comes, not from erasing lines, but learning how they are drawn and why.
On a side note, I think people should strive to be more humble when they talk about issues they don't understand, or understand very little.
No iPhones exploded so far but I wouldn't be surprised if the paranoia takes over everywhere and local supply chains and local producers become a thing. "Foreign social media platforms" was already a concern but this is "foreign hardware is booby trapped as you can see". Another nail for the globalized world, united humanity, citizens of the world etc. If a big brand has a supply chain is infiltrated too, then its all over.
Also, are those people blind? Don't they see that booby trapping large number of devices rhymes with poisoning the well? It wouldn't help with antisemitism but that's another discussion.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/israel-opt-ne...
It's not a question of manufacturing but one of intercepting devices in the transit / shipping network. The brands most likely have nothing to do with it except allowing repair manuals to fall into the wrong hands - which they can't prevent even if they wanted to.
Phone? Check. Watch? Check. TV? check. Washer? Dryer? Fridge? Dishwasher? All there. Laptop? Well, they at least used to make those, not sure if they still do.
This is going to create a lot of distrust in the international supply chain.
Phone exploding in a market, doesn’t make it OK if the owner of the phone is a militant.
With that logic the Hamas terrorist attack last year isn’t a terrorist attack because many of the victims served in the IDF, which illegally occupies their territory.
This is getting ridiculous. Israel will loose the last drops of good will, which is a shame considering how much they achieved to do on that barely habitable piece of land. It breaks my heart.
Is it? If your threat model includes Mossad (or really any nation state) then you shouldn't have trusted those devices in the first place. Even if you didn't have "tiny explosives" on your bingo card, certainly bugs (hardware or software) should've been on there.
Given that those pagers are commonly used by doctors and none of them have been reported to explode, I think we can guess that it was targeted to the batches delivered directly to Hezbollah.
If there's one thing you learn quick in fintech - it's you absolutely do not fuck with sanctions.
Happiness is irrelevant, especially when it comes to geopolitics.
In the US, criticism of Israel is antagonistic to our Judeo-Christian values.
In the EU, criticism of Israel is tantamount to the rise of a Fourth Reich.
Germany, in particular, is scared shitless of this accusation, and will accept any and all actions by Israel. This is a country who can do no wrong, and will get away with whatever they feel like.
> This is going to create a lot of distrust in the international supply chain.
This reminds me of people who were legitimately shocked to learn about the Snowden disclosures. If you don't already know the supply chain is thoroughly poisoned, and has been for decades, there is no helping you.
could you expand on what you mean here? I don't understand either the argument or the conclusion. thanks!
I think we expect better of democracies, which is why these kinds of attacks shock us. But it is interesting that we are unsurprised when Lebanon/Hezbollah uses terror tactics but it quickly becomes a news event when Israel responds in kind.
Ironic because drone bombings like we did in Afghanistan would probably have a much more terrible collateral damage effect but be less newsworthy. But somehow boobytrapping radios and pagers pricks our conscience. Maybe because it feels more personal, intimate, and therefore retributive?
Israel conducts probably the most precise military action in the history of warfare and people still demand more.
See pages 10-30 of this report and the associated inline sources - https://www.academia.edu/112967602/Bearing_Witness_to_the_Is...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/11-killed-mostly-children-doze...
They've done much worse.
The UN found Hezbollah (on behalf of the Assad regime) guilty of massacring 700 civilians in Daraya in 2012 [0].
The Daraya Massacre is what ended the prospect of a negotiated end to the Syrian Civil War, and radicalized a significant wave of Sunni FSA fighters to join Jabhat al-Nusra and the then fledgling Daesh.
The same leaders in Hezbollah that Israel has targeted over the past several weeks are the same ones that lead the Daraya Massacre [1] as well as other human right abuses in Syria and Lebanon.
More recently, Hezbollah has been indiscriminately shelling Northern Israel, which itself has lead to incidents like the Madjal Shams attack, which left 12 children dead [2].
Israel absolutely has been indiscriminate in Gaza and Lebanon, but so is every other actor (Hamas, Hezbollah, etc) in this tragedy.
This is war.
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/aug/25/t...
[1] - https://www.cnn.com/2013/05/25/world/meast/syria-violence/in...
Similar to the spy chips implants within the Supermicro server motherboards.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/02/12/bloomberg-big-c...
If a state wants you dead you're cooked anyways
How much of it is an excellent question. It's remarkable that apparently (?) none of the devices went off prematurely and tipped off the targets. That implies a higher degree of QA than you'd expect from a more ramshackle organization.
And on a more serious note. Hizbolla is a blacklisted terrorist org, they can’t just order stuff from regular factories. Buying from an anonymous white label factory in Hungary with no address and little information is probably pretty normal from them - because anyone doing business with them in the EU will go to jail
As long as you’re not buying electronics from shady factories with no known owners you’ll be fine
In this case the people responsible must have discovered where these terrorists were buying their devices. Since basically no one except for them was buying large quantities of these, they were easy to target.
James Mickens explained this clearly a decade ago.
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
You cannot answer any security questions without a threat model. Are you worried about your neighbor putting a bomb in your phone? Mossad isn't putting bombs in random phones.
Bomb sniffing dog or chemical test of surfaces
So yeah, literally anything you buy can apparently just be stuffed full of explosives waiting to kill you and anyone near you.
I wonder if this was meaningful choice, or just a coincidence.
It looks more likely to just be a demoralizing psyop, expose a couple thousand Hezbollah members based on hospital records and to the Lebanese public, disrupt communications and attack south Lebanon
You'd be hard-pressed to find a day of the year without some plausible significance.
In this video, we'll be cutting the explosive battery. Hit the like and subscribe buttons, and let us know what kind of explosive you think this is in the comments. Also, don't try this at home kids, we're what you'd call "professionals".
There's some discussion of the mechanics of the modifications in this TEMPCO story, though how the information was ascertained isn't clear:
[S]enior Lebanese source said the devices had been modified by Israel's spy service "at the production level."
"The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It's very hard to detect it through any means. Even with any device or scanner," the source said.
<https://en.tempo.co/read/1917697/israel-planted-explosives-i...>
Presumably not by like-and-subscribe seeking YouTubers, however.
Edit: World Service broadcast, analysis note at ~52s: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w172zgf8tw4nqq5>
One can argue that there is some temporary remaining vulnerability for Hezbollah members who either didn’t hear about the first attack or had some insanely urgent need to communicate (and this vulnerability wouldn’t exist once they secure the supply chain). But I think the much simpler story is that these attacks aren’t possible only once; supply chain security is a continuum, and people will continue to balance risk of repeat attacks against the costs of security.
Separating them definitely increased the chances that somebody would check their radios - but taking out the pagers drove people to the radios. Now taking out the radios is making people worry what else might be compromised. Your enemy refusing to use their communication equipment is a definite win.
The pagers and radios were supposedly due to the worry that the phone system was compromised - but I'm guessing more people will be using it tomorrow.
I really doubt Israel can pull this off again next month or year. Hezbollah (and Lebanon) will switch all their electronics to Chinese supply chain or something, and double check it.
This will certainly be made into a blockbuster movie in ten years.
I'll re-iterate my previous comment on this matter: this is an impressive supply-chain hack with absolutely oversized results, and you gotta hand it to them for pulling it off.
I think this will go down as being significantly more impressive than Stuxnet.
If this didn't happen in real life, I would think that the scenario was too far-fetched and unrealistic. That's some seriously impressive attack.
If someone placed explosives in a radio device I'm sure it would be quite easy to detonate them on command with a signal tone.
But I also think a lot of radios look like Baofengs, or are whitelabeled Baofengs, so who knows...
Besides, if Israel or whoever can modify the supply chain, they can add whatever receivers/chips they want into it alongside the explosives. Or just some sort of analog radio detonator/trigger.
The pagers could have been set off with a page sent to a 'group' capcode in a hidden slot with a unique beep pattern that a little tiny MCU picked up and set off the detonator.
Radios -- same thing. Possibly a group calling feature of a signalling system was used with a "secret" group hidden away in the radio programming?
I wonder if it’s even dumber than that. Entirely separate from the paging network and tuned to listen for a pulse at a specific RF frequency and then blow up.
Also gives the ability to target certain geographic areas.
But even if listening to pager spectrum, the paging network is incredibly insecure. Anyone could send out fake pages with the right RF setup (e.g. from a drone).
Takes some upfront work but you don't have to mess with the device, any firmware that might leave traces, and the comms network itself. You just fly a big antenna nearby and everything goes boom.
You don't even know how many or which of your gadgets have been compromised to spy on you and for how long.
Massive, massive L.
I could even believe the supply chain infiltration was fake and radios were manually replaced day of the attack with a crude timer. Anything to give the appearance of omnipotence.
Videos show outright detonations (so far with notably little fire), nothing like the fiery deflagrations you see in “battery explodes” videos while someone is doing a repair.
I wonder if this operation had two sides - implanting something in the devices that will allow remotely triggering the explosion, and then also tampering with the batteries to include explosive material.
It also seems to be lionized in the media as something "impressive" and not "contemptible". I'm not saying it cannot be both! It could be contemptible and impressive, but the media seems comfortable just being impressed.
If North Korea or Iran or Russia pulled this off against another military, would we all still be here discussing only the technical parts of the attack? I suspect not. Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect there'd be a lot more condemnation.
Day two, blow up the backup device that Hezbollah had fallen back to using.
Perhaps on day three, now that Hezbollah has no effective communication and coordination and might even fall back to mobile phones, start ground ops?
I can't believe the full up and down owning of the communications supply chain.
Makes Hezbollah look like a clown show.
Makes Israel look like a terrorist organization, IMHO.
It's naive to call them an ally. It's an extremely complicated relationship, made more toxic by the extreme power that AIPAC holds over our politicians. Every president since LBJ has been duped, outwitted and embarrassed by Israel. Frenemy would be more accurate.
The radio in question: https://rigpix.com/icom/icv82.htm
I struggle to understand how they're imagining they're obviating the optics of this, unless they don't care what the dissenting population in Israel thinks (or the world for that matter) until "it is done".
Did you consider the US operation to take down Bin Laden an act of terrorism too?
Are there any public records indicating the CIA is capable of pulling off something like this?
I wish the US had been involved, but I seriously doubt it, if only because the opsec requirements are so high. If anyone in Hezbollah had even a whiff of concern that this could happen, the whole operation would have been a bust.
No agency in their right mind will even hint on whether they are capable of doing such things or not. Any whiff of information may put their people in mortal danger. They neither confirm nor deny. The fewer people know the better. The rest of the world learns about such operations by suddenly facing their results.
I'm curious if this type of remote activation could be achieved with just a single radio tower, or if it would require a network of geographically distributed radio towers to transmit the signal to the affected area. How would isolation conditions, like being inside a building or in a garage, affect it? Also, what kind of radio towers would be needed? Could it be disguised as a regular HAM radio antenna on a building?
https://batteriesamerica.com/collections/icom-ic-v8-ic-v82-i...
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/new-wave-blasts-rock-...
I'm thinking a scenario like this:
- China makes a rule that all cellphones leaving the country must go through an "inspection facility" (where the explosive hardware and the backdoor trigger chip will be installed)
- A year after the next big iPhone release, China sends a huge convoy of warships and troop transports toward Taiwan, telegraphing a major assault
- The US says "Stop!"
- China presses a button and a few thousand iPhones blow up in the US
- China says "That is just a small taste of our capability, we just pressed the small red button. If you tell us to un-hand Taiwan again, we'll press the big red button and un-hand a few million of your citizens"
Now that this kind of attack is frontpage news, every country in the world is by now aware it's possible -- and it appears to be super effective. So it seems entirely reasonable that some countries will start planning to do the same sort of attack against their enemies.
What I'm saying is, now that everyone's become aware this sort of thing is possible and effective, China might realize it has the means, opportunity, and possibly motive to attack the US this way on a large scale.
As I'd very much prefer not to be maimed or killed by my electronics, I hope the US government is actively looking into effective defenses against China or anyone who would try this sort of attack on US soil.
I suspect for Israel they have advanced ways of intercepting text and calls and (probably) even MITM encrypted communications over cellular networks. And this could just as easily be about seeding fear about using anything besides a cell phone.
And then those batteries "just" had to be swapped with the intercepted original ones. Still requires effort, but less than building pagers and walki talkies for this purpose.
The end of history will be over when we all recognize that this could just as easily be an operation against the Cartel or the Boogaloo Boys or whoever the fuck, with Feds blowing up pagers in a Whole Foods in LA instead of a market in Lebanon. Oh, but that could never happen here.
Can you imagine what must be like to be a rank-and-file Hezbollah soldier at this point? What the fuck is going to happen tomorrow? I'd throw away my socks.
This was before these surprise IDF attacks - i wonder how the conversation evolves.
- why not a larger charge intended to kill/destroy? restraint? or some technical limitation?
- why now, and twice? seems like a one-shot tactic, so what happened to make now seem like the right time?
Should a triger to explode 50000 mobile devices in these hands considered terrorism? In time of engaged war from israeli side!!
Hezbollah and iran do not seem to have somebody sampling hardware ordered for defects and alterations. Basic military and state ability . You couldn't do such attacks on functional organisations.
As a human being though, this is revolting. A new avenue of mass destruction. I sure hope I am never around someone a Mossad-like organization wants to kill.
