Most of the so-called civilised world was up all last night remembering what a pager is, and the people who work with the Middle East explained to them that snobbery is unnecessary: the pager is used there as one of the most reliable communication options. Or already used – past tense.
The pagers were made in Taiwan by Gold Apollo, and entered through a Hungarian company – now both are racing to deny complicity in the despicable and brutal terrorist attack.
But today Lebanon was rocked by a new wave: at the funeral of a Hezbollah activist, a walkie-talkie exploded in the crowd, and then it started. Electric scooters and even fingerprint readers – in short, anything with a lithium battery – have been reported exploding. People are panicking and throwing away all electronics and don’t know what to expect now.
We are lucky: all this is happening far away from us. So we can analyse it calmly.
Some say that explosives are planted in the devices, others say that the batteries themselves explode. There’s a lot of evidence in favour of the former. There is no guaranteed way to make a battery explode (and not, for example, heat up and then catch fire). And certainly the default device of a walkie-talkie or electric scooter does not implement this method (or is there something we don’t know?). Besides, there are reports of car stereos exploding – and there are no batteries in them.
However, reports about car stereos and finger scanners may be the result of panic. And if we accept the first version, then we have to admit that someone has been deliberately bombing all electronic devices entering Lebanon for months, if not years. I cannot personally imagine an operation of that scale.
Further: only in films can an evil hacker make a remote device do something it doesn’t want to do with a few clicks of a button. But a pager or a radio is not a computer, you can’t get inside them through the network. You have to re-flash them by hand, connecting to each one, one by one – and that’s in the best case. In the worst case, you have to unsolder one chip and put in another, specially designed for such a task.
But that’s not all. Even if we put a malicious programme into the device, which is activated by receiving a certain code over the radio, it needs to activate an explosive device (or make the battery explode), and the circuitry of a walkie-talkie or pager does not provide for such a function, as we said. That is, we can’t get away from a rather radical redesign of the device.
Add to this the fact that, for example, a walkie-talkie and a pager are different devices, differently designed, with different boards and different chips, and therefore the realisation of the same function requires different approaches.
So either we have a huge garage where a couple of hundred people with soldering irons sit and modify electrical devices – month after month, year after year. Or the devices were originally, at the factory, manufactured with a function sewn into them – perhaps without knowing what this function is for. That sounds horrible and sinister. All the more so, since this practice was used in Lebanon, it could be used elsewhere – where they are just as dependent on foreign technology.
Dmitry Petrovsky, RT