Oddbean new post about login | logout Remember when no one feared that their battery powered devices would be deliberately detonated by State actors? Good times.
We’ve gone from “account suspended” to “ka-boom” real quick
I’ll bet they’ve been sitting on this type of attack for years too. Waiting for the right time to pull it off. The thing about this type of attack is its effectiveness drops off dramatically after using it once. It may not be usable again.
Not sure if this is the case. Apparently the batteries looked not suspicious and I'm pretty convinced these pagers went through TSA checks many times over the years. Sure, Hezbollah will be paranoid about devices now but others are by far not paranoid enough yet.
That’s surprising to me if that’s the case. I think the batteries would have to be chemically different and have different (less) capacity when integrated explosives are inside. I’m no chemist though so IDK for sure. Perhaps the power use of pagers is low enough that it’s not noticeable if the batteries have 25% the capacity they should.
Apparently the company was setup to do this, so they didn't need to clip capacity of otherwise good pagers but could design them with explosives in mind. Until now, a 4x over-sized battery wouldn't have raised a red flag.