Pagers and walkie-talkies over cellphones – a security expert explains why Hezbollah went low-tech for communications.
Pagers and walkie-talkies over cellphones – a security expert explains why Hezbollah went low-tech for communications.
Smartphones may be indispensable to modern life, but they’re also perfect tools for spying on their owners. Anyone looking to avoid being tracked – like, say, militant groups – tends to ditch them.
It's why critical equipment has a very tight delivery deadline. If it arrives a minute late it's assumed somebody tampered with it along the supply chain and the equipment is rejected.
Also, Israel already assassinated someone by exploding their cell phone way back in 1996.
Yahya Ayyash nicknamed "The Engineer" was a Palestinian terrorist, one of the founders of Hamas's Ezz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades And one of those responsible for introducing the method of suicide bombings in the 90s as part of Palestinian terrorism in Israel. These terrorist attacks claimed the lives of over a hundred Israelis. Israel Shin bet Service assassinated Eish using a booby-trapped cell phone in 1996.
Hey now 1996 is not way back! ... Or is it? ... Am I old?
Does that mean, all of us are wearing a bomb with Lithium battery, most of the time? On the other hand: does such battery really be this hazardous? I thought they catch fire and burn down slowly.
I thought they catch fire and burn down slowly.
Correct. Both the recent pager and radio attacks, and the 1996 cell phone attack, were performed by planting military explosives inside the devices in advance.
There is no magical way to hack the electronics to make a lithium battery straight up explode.
Your pocket bomb doesn't have any actual bomb in it (unless the Israelis put some there, like the Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies.) They can burn fast, but afaik they don't explode, just like gunpowder doesn't explode. It burns very fast. On the other hand, they can produce gas and burst the battery pack, which might be considered an explosion, but I'd argue it's not actually one.
Which isn't going to make someone who has it happen in their pocket feel any better.
If I have my physics wrong, please correct me, I'm not a lithium bomb expert :)