Ex-Mossad chief says pager operations extend to 'every country you can imagine'
israelhayom.com
israelhayom.com
So there are, potentially-speaking, explosive devices controlled by Israel planted in consumer-devices, in every single country on the globe.
I don't think the point is that it's not difficult to screen for, the point is that most people will not think to or do not have the means, the time, the knowledge, or the willpower to take apart all their devices, verify what is and isn't an explosive device, and then reassemble it intact. According to this report, there are a non-zero number of devices around the world, possibly in shipping containers, that contain explosives.
At least one of the suppositions I saw this last year, was that Ukraine was likely to be slapped on the hands for using consumer shipping for their military drone deployments. Because presumably, the majority of countries will not take lightly the fact that any given consumer shipping could now contain military equipment that could potentially be deployed against them, and that it is in the interest of every single country to react with prejudice to the mixing of consumer and military shipments.
An agent of the Israeli state has now admitted that since at least 2006 (so the better part of a quarter of a century), they have been planting bombs in consumer-grade electronics and subsequently using them to selectively blow people up in civilian places. How this is not a) worldwide news, and b) taken as an admission of overt terrorist activity, is utterly baffling. Can you imagine the reaction if an ex-NSA, ex-CIA, ex-MI7, or ex-MSS operative admitted that they had been planting explosives in consumer grade electronics?! There would be an international uproar.
I think it's fairly unlikely that these devices are being shipped to normal hardware customers as doing so would likely risk exposing the operation. These sort of operations appear to exploit the fact that terrorist organizations themselves are forced to covertly procure hardware without going through typical supply chain channels.
> At least one of the suppositions I saw this last year, was that Ukraine was likely to be slapped on the hands for using consumer shipping for their military drone deployments. Because presumably, the majority of countries will not take lightly the fact that any given consumer shipping could now contain military equipment that could potentially be deployed against them, and that it is in the interest of every single country to react with prejudice to the mixing of consumer and military shipments.
There is a rather wide range of technologies/services that have both military and civilian use cases, drones being the obvious example of dual use hardware and shipping/logistics being an obvious example of a dual use service. Plenty of civilian shipping companies provide services to military customers around the world. I think it's pretty hard to argue that a highly targeted attack using drones transported by enemy civilian logistics is unethical simply because civilian logistics was used as part of the operation.
> An agent of the Israeli state has now admitted that since at least 2006 (so the better part of a quarter of a century), they have been planting bombs in consumer-grade electronics and subsequently using them to selectively blow people up in civilian places. How this is not a) worldwide news, and b) taken as an admission of overt terrorist activity, is utterly baffling. Can you imagine the reaction if an ex-NSA, ex-CIA, ex-MI7, or ex-MSS operative admitted that they had been planting explosives in consumer grade electronics?! There would be an international uproar.
That's a rather disingenuous way to frame an operation which was arguably the most precise coordinated assassination operation against a terrorist organization in history. Virtually all individuals killed/injured by the operation were members of the terrorist organizations being targeted with only a tiny amount of civilian casualties(virtually all civilian casualties were family members of the terrorists that happened to pick up the devices instead of the intended targets AFAIU). These devices appear to have been exclusively sold to the terrorists and never distributed to normal customers. There doesn't appear to be any evidence that any of these devices ended up being sold to normal non-terrorist customers.
There's basically no accountability for these intelligence organizations preventing them from playing fast and loose.
On the other hand, there's various degrees of explosives spot checking all over international boundaries and the like. If random explosives are moving around surely someone would run across them, so it my just be some scumbag spook trying to get people scared.
I suspect in practice the spicy pagers would tend to be tracked quite closely by the intelligence agencies.
> There's basically no accountability for these intelligence organizations preventing them from playing fast and loose.
Intelligence agencies don't have a lot of accountability in general, but I'd hardly say operation grim beeper was playing fast and loose with how precisely the terrorists were targeted ultimately.
> On the other hand, there's various degrees of explosives spot checking all over international boundaries and the like. If random explosives are moving around surely someone would run across them, so it my just be some scumbag spook trying to get people scared.
Hard to say how easy to detect they would be, but it doesn't seem all that likely that random consumers would run into these sort of devices. Intelligence agencies would certainly not want these devices getting distributed to the general public.
Because these people totally wouldn't cut and run and leave someone else holding the bag if things went wrong. /s
Kinda like how the CIA spent the 90s quasi-protecting Al-Qaeda in an effort to penetrate the organization only to cut and run and be all "hey, FBI, y'all might want to look into these guys we really think they're up to something serious" in summer of 2001.
Say an operation was called off. I give it 50% odds between them finding a way to buy the devices to keep them from getting out into public vs 50% chance they just abandon them.
>, but I'd hardly say operation grim beeper was playing fast and loose with how precisely the terrorists were targeted ultimately.
I generally agree but I absolutely foresee some random company in the region having 1/3 of their laptops go boom because they bought tampered shit that "got out". Best case someone opens one up for service, goes WTF, snaps a picture, internet amplifies, it gets back to the OEM and the "questionable" lots are ID'd.
> but it doesn't seem all that likely that random consumers
The angry pagers were being bought under the guise of legitimate companies. I find it very hard to believe that some gravel pit or factory who needed 20 and bought 200 on a "we pay you for 250 basis" didn't have their 20 go poof while sitting on the charging shelf in the office or whatever.
This whole thing is just too "meta targeted" for my taste in the same way that "signature strikes" were. It's not like these organizations lack the capacity to kill people the old fashioned way, heck it might even be cheaper.
In all likelihood even if they were abandoned, probably nothing would happen since modern explosives tend to be designed to be rather stable unless intentionally detonated(an intelligence organization would want to design them this way to avoid detection due to accidental detonation of course).
> The angry pagers were being bought under the guise of legitimate companies. I find it very hard to believe that some gravel pit or factory who needed 20 and bought 200 on a "we pay you for 250 basis" didn't have their 20 go poof while sitting on the charging shelf in the office or whatever.
From what was reported it looks like Mossad essentially licensed the brand rights for the pagers through shell companies, manufactured the pagers themselves and then distributed them exclusively to the terrorists after infiltrating the terrorists hardware procurement process in some way. One would also likely assume only pagers actually connected to the network of the terrorists would get triggered.
> This whole thing is just too "meta targeted" for my taste in the same way that "signature strikes" were. It's not like these organizations lack the capacity to kill people the old fashioned way, heck it might even be cheaper.
I think there's a bit of a difference here, it's not like these pagers were random consumer devices actually being sold on the open market, they were in reality a highly exclusive device sold only to the terrorists through some sort of supply chain infiltration attack with what appears to be only the marketing material along with fake customer testimonials being distributed publicly to trick the buyers into thinking these were normal consumer devices. For such a precise attack against a terrorist organization it seems unlikely tradition methods would have been more effective for the cost of the operation. Most traditional methods would also likely incur far higher civilian casualties.