The original thread on the exploding pagers is closed, but enough new details on their construction has come out to warrant an update.
The battery pack for the pager contained a thin 6 gram sheet of PETN along with a strip of flammable material placed between two normal Li battery cells. As suspected, the pager model (AR-924) was an entirely “fake” product with fake web pages put up just for Hezbollah’s benefit, as was the battery model (LI-BT783).
I saw the Reuters article earlier today. It’s a fascinating read. So much had to go right, and a cone of silence was maintained. The level of detail employed so that ONLY the targets got the pagers shows some real creativity and imagination. No matter how you feel about the event itself, you gotta give Mossad some credit.
The Washington Post ran an article about ten days ago about the pagers, including the fact that unlocking secure messages required the pager to be held in two hands. So when some users received a page, “You have received a secure message”, they followed the process for reading it.
The part I can’t quite wrap my head around is this:
When Hezbollah realized their cellphones were compromised, they had a specific and urgent need for pagers. Yet they did not seek out suppliers themselves. Instead, they apparently agreed to do business with a salesperson who, from out of the blue, sought out the terrorist organization and offered just what they needed, when they needed it. It just seems counter-intuitive.
@Dewey_Finn’s article sort of implies that the salesperson was known to Hezbollah beforehand and had some kind of business relationship with them already.
Bunny Huang, a well known hardware hacker, has a blog entry describing why this is not a difficult hack, and that it sets a very dangerous precedent.
The bottom line is that equipment to manufacture lithium ion battery pouches is readily available in the tens of thousands of dollar range. Not quite garage-hobbyist budget, but well within the means of a moderately funded terrorist group.
He posits that detecting a carefully manufactured explosive pouch would require a detailed scan from a CT machine. It would not be detectable with an airport X-ray machine or by swabbing the exterior.
It’s the way business works. Somebody smelled a profit and stopped caring about the downstream impact. There were likely additional personal incentives provided to the decision makers.
this is my concern as well. It was ingenious, but the idea is now out in the wild, and you can bet the next group to try this is not going to be concerned with collateral damage. In fact, their intent may likely be to inflict as much as possible.
Wouldn’t this apply to pretty much everything though? You can arguably hide 6 grams of high grade explosives in anything.
Looking into it, the shoe bomber tried to use PETN too.
In 2001, al-Qaeda member Richard Reid, the “Shoe Bomber”, used PETN in the sole of his shoe in his unsuccessful attempt to blow up [American Airlines Flight 63]
Planting the explosives in a pager, laptop computer or whatever is one thing. The more complicated thing is getting it in the hands of your intended victim, unless you’re just trying to kill random people.
I think one of the differences is that with a battery the explosive is inside a sealed aluminum bag. As stated in the article, if after sealing you wash the bag with acetone to clean off explosive residue, the presence of the explosive will not be detectable by any of the methods typically used to detect explosives.
It may be easy to hide a small amount of explosives in a way to avoid visual detection, but avoiding chemical or x-ray detection is more difficult. There may be other bags that could hid explosives, but a battery also makes it easy to locate them near a radio receiver without being suspicious. “Why does your granola bar have wires coming out of it?”
I could not agree more strongly. Taking a commercial flight hostage and then flying it into a building worked three times (Tower 1, Tower 2, and the Pentagon). It failed later that same day when passengers on a flight over Pennsylvania heard what happened, fought to take back control of the plane from the hijackers, and (this is somewhat conjecture on my part) the hijackers in questioned realized that they could not achieve their objective and crashed the plane into a field instead.
The box cutters the hijackers took over flights with were not even the big, macho kind. They were the kind that could be mistaken for a mechanical pencil. Does anybody honestly think it would be remotely possible to take control of a plane with one of those today?
Because once they put in that rule, they can never roll it back, because nobody wants to be the bureaucrat or politician that changed the rule to allow Shoe Bomber Jr. to get on a plane.
However, pretty much everyone involved knows it is silly, so the compromise they’ve reached is that if you pay\approx$80, they’ll roll the rules back to 1999 for you, and you can keep your shoes on, don’t have to unpack your electronics, and can use the metal detector instead of the naked scanner.
As @DocCathode alludes to, this is all defending against prior attacks. The pager attack was committed by one of the most sophisticated intelligence agencies in the world, but the point of the article I linked is that the actual construction of the devices does not require anything near that level of resources.
Thanks for the replies. I always assumed that the risk was minimal, but that the measures at least did something. “Security theater,” very apt description.
Agreed, but let’s not forget the other reform: after 911 the FAA required stronger cockpit doors, ones with actual locks. That’s a pretty significant security layer, probably the single most effective step taken after 911.