The Israeli government did not tamper with the Hezbollah devices that exploded, defense and intelligence officials say. It manufactured them as part of an elaborate ruse.
In Lebanon, as Israel picked off senior Hezbollah commandos with targeted assassinations, their leader came to a conclusion: If Israel was going high-tech, Hezbollah would go low. It was clear, a distressed Hezbollah chief, Hassan Nasrallah, said, that Israel was using cellphone networks to pinpoint the locations of his operatives.
. . .
Israeli intelligence officials saw an opportunity.
Even before Mr. Nasrallah decided to expand pager usage, Israel had put into motion a plan to establish a shell company that would pose as an international pager producer.
By all appearances, B.A.C. Consulting was a Hungary-based company that was under contract to produce the devices on behalf of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo. In fact, it was part of an Israeli front, according to three intelligence officers briefed on the operation. They said at least two other shell companies were created as well to mask the real identities of the people creating the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers.
You know the more that I think about it, the more I realize that if the CIA or NSA were tasked with eliminating Hezbollah using the same vulnerability, they probably would have set up the same shell company, but install a hardware wire backdoor into every device which would let them do insane espionage or setup widespread jamming or even fake intel, complelty remotely too.
They already have so many systems that do similar things, it wouldn’t even be that difficult for them to pull off and cause Hezbollah to disintegrate by having them run around falling into easily laid traps.
But of course this is Israel, so they went with explosives to maximize that sweet civilian collateral like they’re trying to top the bang for buck warcrime leaderboard.
I’m left wondering how they were triggered. Were they all just set on a timer? Or were they able to somehow remotely send a signal? And if they were able to send a signal, were they also able to intercept messages?
It’s a device designed to receive signals ;p
I think for the pagers the consensus is that a particular code would have been sent to the devices.
From the sounds of witness reports, it was either 1 message setting off a 5-10 second timer, or it was 2 messages in a similar spacing. It was designed to get someone to look at the pager before it blew up in their face. Apparently doctors have been dealing with it blinding shit tons of people.
Yes but only specific signals. That’s the whole point.
Yes, so if someone sent a very unique message, I’m not sure how many characters fit on a pager, but something nobody would ever send, then it could be the activation “password”.
I never had or used a pager, but I think it’s possible to send short alphanumeric messages to them via the cell phone network (GSM, or whatever)
https://pagersdirect.net/pages/how-do-you-send-a-page
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pager
I don’t think you understand. The whole point of the network they built was for security. If just anyone can send a message, that would be a huge security vulnerability.
I must admit I thought pagers used the gsm (cellular) network, but could only receive messages and therefore couldn’t be triangulated / located like a mobile phone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pager#Security
Reading deeper, if it’s radio signals then I can’t imagine Israel would have any problems replicating or spoofing them.
Got news for you, pretty much all wireless communication is via radio 😀
Yes, it sounds like Hezbollah built their own personal network. Yet another benefit of pagers, it’s far less expensive to communicate when you’re talking about just a few bytes of data.