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Comment by jfoster | Hacker News Reader

What's the threat vector that they are trying to mitigate against? The attack already happened and the vector that the attack used seems to be applicable to any device with a battery.

Are they worried about pagers that are affected but didn't go off in the original operation?

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You must be new to airport security theater

We all had to start taking off our shoes after the Richard Reid shoe bomber. Twenty plus years later we are still reacting to a terrifying attack with an ordinary object that didn’t even work.

And we are still bottlenecking hundreds of people in a crowd BEFORE the checkpoint and it won’t be until someone attacks there will we ever actually do anything about it

It has never been about preventing anything. It was about the appearance of doing something.

Agree. It is simply idiotic how they conveniently gather hundreds of people in a crowded spot who are all pulling and tinkering with stuff from their backpacks. A bad actor can easily cause more deaths there than on a plane nowadays.

Everytime I go through that charade, I roll my eye at everything they do since it is so obviously useless and unnecessary. The worst thing is, apparently, some people really believe in it.

The US particularly is extreme in this regard. The TSA has become such a large employer that it's now unthinkable to scale it back.

9.11 was of course tragic, but that problem was solved by locking the cockpit door. And yes, no-one wants to be on a plane with an explosive device, but those are really rare. Not least because that same device is easier to use, with more effective results, in pretty much anywhere else.

And after all that money spent, it's unclear that the TSA would actually prevent any serious attack.

Outside the US things tend to be a lot more relaxed. (So much so that special checkpoints are arranged for flights to and from the US to conform to US requirements.)

> 9.11 was of course tragic, but that problem was solved by locking the cockpit door.

Which caused its own problems, which were resolved by always having at least two pilots in the cockpit at the same time.

Well, by regulation, an aircraft is a “national property”, so a blast in an aircraft is seen as “national incompetence”. The security check is just a filter, an attack there is seen as general terror. The stakes are very different. It is also easier to de-escalate someone with a gun or other dangerous objects at the security check, people at that location are well trained to handle such situation and extra support is just a radio away, in aircraft, not only is the situation extra dangerous because other people sitting will act immensely irrationally or panic, the crew is only trained in minor de-escalation, and it is difficult to call a backup security in mid air and any shots fired in that environment is 1000x more dangerous.

> Well, by regulation, an aircraft is a “national property”

Do you have a source for that?

That is AirportSecurity101 training for anyone working in aviation.

I have performed the training in non-English, not sure I can quote it from somewhere online unfortunately. It is internal training material.

First of all, I doubt TSA agents are "well trained". They are incompetent at their main task, which is screening for weapons in luggages and they are assisted by state of the art technologies.

Second, I also doubt people waiting in lines at the airport will be anything but rational the moment someone take out a gun and or a bomb. At least on a plane, nobody can run anywhere. In the airport check in, there will be shoving and yelling and stepping on each other to get out faster.

Also, it is harder to smuggle a rifle onto a plane. It isn't difficult to bring something extremely destructive to the check in gate.

You can doubt, that is your prerogative.

The closed nature of the aircraft induced twice as more fear than in a crowded open area.

Also, even if we assume everyone is rational, the person holding the prohibited object is not guaranteed to be rational.

The difficulty of bringing a rifle is exactly the security check(also mocked as security theatre here), and anyone willing to risk a destructive object has zero incentive to bring it through security checks because they are discouraged by the security theatre, finally the risk is well worth in the air or blowing up something close to a massively valuable(i.e an aircraft).

They know who uses the airline and are worried of repeat. Stating outright "Hezbollah/IRGC passengers not welcome from now on" wouldnt be good PR for an airline catering to Iran https://www.emirates.com/ir/english/destinations/flights-fro...

I think the reason is clear - they suspect that there might be still devices in circulation that didn't go off and can risk a flight.

This is similar to the spontaneous igniting Samsung devices story from few years ago.

Other electronic devices (laptops, tablets, etc) are far less likely to contain anything like this, because Apple, Huawei, Dell etc manage their supply chains and don't just let anyone make products carrying their brand.

There are so many manufacturers of walkie-talkies and pagers, it's essentially a wild west. No one knows how many PETN-laced pagers were manufactured. The ones that exploded were the ones that happened to have certain phone numbers and were in range at the time.

It's unclear how many of those might have PETN, which is essentially undetectable. It doesn't give off any vapors, so sniffer dogs cannot detect it. 6 grams of it can blow the fuselage of the plane. It doesn't show up on X-Rays.

Ahh, so we must have more e-waste because terrorism means we can't replace our batteries with anything not under the full control of Buy n Large.

> The ones that exploded were the ones that happened to have certain phone numbers and were in range at the time.

Nitpick but the pagers don’t have phone numbers, right? As I understood it, they are using a completely separate network from the phone network and are waiting for a message starting with a specific code which identifies them. But I don’t think you could send an SMS to a pager for example, without some gateway in the middle.

Yeah they have a pager number, not a phone number.

This doesn’t match my understanding of the operation. The reporting I’ve seen said that Mossad became aware that Hezbollah was in the market for a large order of pagers and quickly set up a shell company to sell them the exact batch of compromised pagers that they subsequently detonated.

Good reporting would have sourced more pagers of this model and examined them to verify this, but regardless, how many copycats did this inspire?

DB Cooper's antics led to several security procedures and aircraft modifications being implemented - not because of a single incident, but because it inspired other threats.

> Good reporting would have sourced more pagers of this model

How exactly do you source more pagers from a now-defunct company that was a Mossad front formed specifically to sell a single order of explosives-laden pagers to Hezbollah?

Wrong. BAC also sold pagers to ordinary clients.

It’s funny how you say “wrong” and then fail to even contradict my claim.

I very specifically contradicted your claim. If you want sourcing, here is the New York Times[1] saying "B.A.C. did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pagers."

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/middleeast/israel-e...

My claim was not that Hezbollah was BAC’s sole client; it was that BAC was a Mossad front formed for the sole purpose of selling tampered pagers to Hezbollah. That’s perfectly consistent with having other clients. Its not like Mossad was trying to make money in the pager business.

And good reporting would have sourced some pagers from the other clients.

My Thinkpad can be definitely modified to insert an explosive object and it is fairly innocent looking as no one knows whatever the device has in it. Of course the scanner will detect some mild traces of certain explosive chemicals if the inserted object is not correctly shielded.

Airport security knows what laptops look like under the scanner. Modifications will probably result in it being immediately flagged - increasing done automatically by the machines themselves.

What is the likelihood that the manufacturer put explosives into your laptop? Very low, perhaps zero.

Additionally, laptops have lots of other components - unlike pagers - that absorb some of the damage, so that can reduce the damage to things outside the laptop.

There are also additional checks to laptops on international flights - they must turn on, for example.

The purpose is to reduce the risk, not to eliminate it.

Better safe than sorry. Especially when hundreds of lives are potentially on the line.

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