Still, if you have the capability of such a supply chain attack, I would imagine the rewards of silent surveillance (tracking, audio) would be of much higher value than this kind of attack where 3 out of 1000s targets were killed.
Everyone has cell phones that they can use in addition to the pager, so I don't think it's very accurate to say the communications are hosed either
It was cool to see that it was in fact an opsec fail (the guy buying the phones all over the country got lazy and bought too many from the same shop) to break through that. Pretty realistic. Like most of the wire in fact.
Although one thing in the wire I don't understand. Pagers are really easy to intercept, anyone with a scanner (with discriminator output) can do it and could do it in those times. I did it many times during the days when pagers were still in full swing. I really don't understand why they needed a court order for that (in season 1).
Paper mail and landlines are incredibly easy to intercept and tap, but that doesn't make it legal.
The show creator worked for years as a journalist on the crime beat in Baltimore, I expect most of the opsec seen in the series comes from real cases.
> really don't understand why they needed a court order for [wiretapping pagers]
As others said, you need it from a legal perspective rather than a technical one. This is particularly true in the US, where the "fruit of poisonous tree" doctrine is pretty strict: if your evidence was not gathered in the proper manner, it must be discarded and it invalidates any further effort based on it. In specific, wiretapping is illegal even when done by authorities, unless they've been authorized by judges - the relevant US laws were tightened up after it emerged (with Watergate) that president Nixon was eavesdropping on his political rivals.
Sure, theoretically one can detect a receive-only radio, but its massively more difficult than detecting something which actively transmits.
But the impossibility of any kind of location tracking is definitely a plus of one-way pagers. Not just for terrorists. I'd get one if there were still a network where I live. It'd be really nice to be reachable and not be tracked 24/7 for once.
The market closes at 5, dinner at the hotel, Grandpa will bring home the wine, bring your hat. Charlie 5 Alpha 2 4 7 3 Bravo. Maybe this is just discussing someone's evening, maybe its coordinating a group action.
They generally are!
Some systems required the sender to select a geographic region to increase bandwidth efficiency, or alternatively the pager owner to update their coarse-scale location with the operator after moving significant distances.
The latter is what the old Iridium satellite pagers did (do?), for example. (Not sure how the new GDB-based ones work.)
I think the service is finally being decommissioned due to the Iridium Next satellites not supporting it anymore. It has been supported for more than a decade without onboarding new customers though.
Apparently that's optional:
> Iridium Burst-enabled devices can be configured as receive-only so that no transmissions are made, a feature valued highly by some customer segments.
(from https://www.iridium.com/services/iridium-burst/)
> I think the service is finally being decommissioned due to the Iridium Next satellites not supporting it anymore.
If that's the case, it would have been inoperable since 2017 – they deorbited the old satellites immediately after confirming deployment of the new ones.
But yeah, you'd usually pay for service in a certain (large) geographic area, and if you wanted to take your pager out of that area while on a trip, or if you moved, you'd have to let the pager company know so they could start broadcasting in the new area.
The idea that Hezbollah members have and had no means of communication other than pagers in a country full of cellphones and landlines is a farce.
Two birds with one pager.
And the 100k number seems quite exaggerated.
I realize that this is not widely known, attacks against Israel receive far less attention in the news than do Israeli retaliations.
Quick sampling of examples:
https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20240908-hezbollah-f...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/4/hezbollah-fires-reta...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw9y7wqn8j5o
https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-israel-hezbollah-hamas-ro...
It doesn't make a big splash in the news because it tends to be severely ineffectual, but it has been pretty widely and continuously covered.
Not only are there specific providers for specific worldviews, but major providers seem to spit out articles catering to every viewpoint. You can find probably find multiple pro Israel and anti Israel articles coming from a single news source on a single day.
So, I dunno maybe we need some kind of cumulative news app to get any kind of meaningful idea of how things are actually leaning. Like an AI summarizing sentiments of the 20,000 articles on Israel in the last week to determine if the news is slanted.
They advertise pretty heavily, and I’ma bit skeptical of their ability to make money. but it basically uses AI to summarize stories, and it groups stories from many media outlets, categorizes their bias, and shows the slant of the topic overall.
I think retaliations are pretty fruitless anyway. Both sides have been lobbing missiles at each other for decades. This eye for an eye thing keeps going even though both sides have run out of eyes a long time ago.
Maybe talking might be an idea? Just saying...
Well, one's hitting civilians with missiles, the other's hitting them with rockets.
Netanyahu seems to be very much against negotiations and keeps blowing the situation up because he doesn't want to 'look weak'. But this does nothing to actually help the Israeli people get safer. The only way they can actually be safe is to sit down and make peace. And of course not to keep taking more and more territory as Israel has been doing (and was even condemned by the UN).
Seriously, this shit has been going on since the founding of Israel. If they keep it up they will never feel safe. Neither side will ever be fully bombed into submission. Remember both Russia and the US tried that in Afghanistan, it didn't work there and it won't work here. All it does is keep the military industrial complex fed and wrecking lives in the process.
Someone has to take the first step and stop retaliating. And make some agreements which are fair to both parties. Then they can both build up a society and have less reason to upset things because they have a thriving society to lose.
I'm not defending Hamas nor Hezbollah. But this has to stop and 'responding' or 'retaliating' isn't going to help.
Israel widely acknowledges that they kill civilians - including Israeli hostages emerging from captivity (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/israeli-military-says-it-...).
There's disagreement on how carefully they try to avoid doing it, but even their closest geopolitical ally the US has urged them to do more to prevent civilian casualties.
this is false
the rockets in northern Israel have been going on for years (as are rocket attacks into Lebanon), so just not much news anymore
If you're getting GPS data, collecting people's movements for a month or three probably provides 99% of what you will ever want to know. Once the patterns have been established you're into diminishing returns territory, while the risk of discovery goes up, which would neutralize the value of the explosive attack.
The strategic value of such a perfectly targeted surprise attack is massive, notwithstanding the relatively low fatality rate. Injuries are expensive and often devastating, and the psychological impact is brutal. Logistically, Hezbollah (and many other organizations, militant or not) are going to have to review and/or replace part of their communications tech. That's a massive technical disruption, a significant economic cost, and risks further exposing supply chain information. It's also going to create paranoia about many other electronic devices, poison in the food, and so on.
I'm not sure about the ethics of this. If one were certain that only Hezbollah officers were being targeted then it would be an acceptable kind of asymmetric attack through a novel vector.
However this also seems to have impacted quite a few civilians, and there is a claim (unverified so far) that a hospital just replaced all its pager equipment a couple of weeks ago and would otherwise have been impacted: https://x.com/SuppressedNws/status/1836080190855795092
If this happened in the US pursuant to one of the wars we've been involved in, we'd definitely be calling it terrorism and/or a war crime. It's a big strategic win for the Israelis in the short term but can hurt them two ways in the longer term. Hezbollah and other enemies of Israel will be significantly more motivated retaliate in some equally creative/unpredictable fashion, and non-aligned economic partners of Israel are likely to view Israeli products with renewed skepticism, hurting exports.
Notably, this doesn't apply to anyone who hasn't supported such strikes in the war against terror.
or to any US ally; the hypocrisy has been around for a long time already
if 20 Mossad agents had been assassinated in Israel _in the same way_, we'd be hearing the story told in a whole different way
Edit: my comment is 100% factual and unopinionated. I'm just quoting an NPR report. To downvote this is to be a propaganda agent.
The downvotes seem reasonable to me.
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/17/g-s1-23452/hezbollah-pagers-e...
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/17/g-s1-23406/scores-of-hezbolla...
Dumb and cruel, could have used it to nearly the same effect by just telling hezbollah.
1. It appears that the AUMBC referenced replaced their equipment but that had nothing to do with this and their doctors weren't impacted.
2. Your note of "...other enemies of Israel will be significantly more motivated retaliate in some equally creative/unpredictable fashion..." is strange considering that this is already the norm. Almost all (perhaps all) of the attacks against Israel have been from terrorists targeting civilians.
Although as as per an WSJ article: "The affected pagers were from a new shipment that the group received in recent days"
The reason they were using pagers, as opposed to phones, was to avoid exactly this kind of potential attack.
Pagers are (typically) a broadcast technology, the pager has no transmission capability. A page is broadcast from every tower, it has no idea where the receiver is. A targeted page is done by the receiver filtering out and ignoring pages that it isn't the recipient for (eavesdropping all pages is trivial).
The pager device is simple, it doesn't contain a GPS or have any concept of it's own location. No microphone or audio capability, very little processing capability. And adding such capability with something like a bug would be reasonably apparent to anyone opening one up and inspecting it.
How did they make sure a large percentage ended up in the hands of the targets? Seems like this could hit a lot of random people, just anybody using pagers. Unless they had way to target certain customers.
Much more likely is they compromised someone in Hezbollah that was doing the ordering, or the distributor/vendor they ordered from, modified a couple thousand devices and sent them pretty much directly to their enemy, and only their enemy, to distribute among themselves. Then waited a bit, and set them off.
I mean that in the sense of spectacle, of gruesome theatricality, not to glorify maiming people.
Radio signals can be detected of course but it's possible to mitigate that a lot by only doing that at specific times and locations, or on request. And send the data out in batch. Ideally while you have the subject under observation so you know they're not monitoring for signals.
The same way Volkswagen hid their engine manipulation from tests by recognising the test and adjusting parameters.