from Hacker News

Israel Built a Modern-Day Trojan Horse: Exploding Pagers

by palidanx on 9/19/24, 12:25 AM with 26 comments

  • by hedora on 9/19/24, 3:05 AM

    According to the BBC, of the 12 killed by pages, four were doctors, so it looks like Israel targeted hospitals as part of this attack.

    They also must have known that many of these bombs would detonate in public places where they would injure many civilians. I suspect the be breakdown of the thousands injured will disproportionately be innocent bystanders.

    Claiming this was a targeted military attack is ludicrous.

  • by k310 on 9/19/24, 2:54 AM

    Here's the "how" --- shell companies

    He (Nasrallah) had been pushing for years for Hezbollah to invest instead in pagers, which for all their limited capabilities could receive data without giving away a user’s location or other compromising information, according to American intelligence assessments.

    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.

    B.A.C. did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pagers. But the only client that really mattered was Hezbollah, and its pagers were far from ordinary. Produced separately, they contained batteries laced with the explosive PETN, according to the three intelligence officers.

    The pagers began shipping to Lebanon in the summer of 2022 in small numbers, but production was quickly ramped up after Mr. Nasrallah denounced cellphones.

  • by sea-gold on 9/19/24, 1:32 AM

  • by myth_drannon on 9/19/24, 12:25 PM

    The point was not to kill them, but to maim and blind them. The thousands of blind, neutered and armless terrorists will for generations remind everyone in the Middle East that you don't f*ck with Israel. The same applies to Gaza which is now unsuitable for living.

  • by underlogic on 9/19/24, 2:59 PM

    This attack vector applies to all modern electronics and privacy conscious consumers will take note. Not only are electronics almost certainly willingly backdoored for the government but now tomorrow if the need is great enough your phone becomes a remote IED. With configure-to-order now standard, all those on a watchlist get a little something extra in their stocking. Why stop there? How about a little cyanide for their prescription? This is a rather terrible precedent for the economy. That said, it was fair game.

    Also this recent thread is worth revisiting I think;

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41551564

  • by DoreenMichele on 9/19/24, 2:50 AM

    It's extremely hard to say anything meaningful about anything and try to be PC without sounding like you are "lauding" something when you are merely reporting it. Furthermore, journalism isn't what it used to be. Newspapers are dying and can't afford staff writers like they once did and a lot of so-called "journalism" these days is written by some underpaid freelancer who doesn't actually have any particular expertise for that kind of writing and may not even be particularly good at writing diplomatically for an extremely diverse global audience which is quite challenging to do.

    The Internet fundamentally changed a lot of things and we still haven't sorted out all the bugs it caused in a system that was never perfect but worked better when your audience was more limited, among other things.

    Just stating clearly you see this as terrorism while indicating your sources say Israel is behind it but you can't prove it is a potential legal minefield for the publication, so the writer likely was explicitly told they absolutely could not make both assertions in the same piece.

    I took too long to write this and I can no longer post it as a reply to the now flagged dead comment which inspired it.

    Edit: it's also a dupe and this headline looks more hn neutral:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41580205

  • by bubaumba on 9/19/24, 3:23 AM

    if israelis can do it it's most likely not limited to hezbollah. will this be investigated or it will be like nord stream?

  • by pbiggar on 9/19/24, 2:10 AM

    Shocking to me that a terrorist attack by Israel is being lauded in the New York Times (and indeed on HN).