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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29680 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Technical part is not interesting. Many ways to do it. I am not sure how exposing this capability now helps Israel.

This is one of those - it can work only once things. So they either had some imminent threat to deal with or...?

This is one of those - it can work only once things.

It happened again today, this time with PTT radios. This is great, I hope it keeps happening and people treat known Hizballah members like lepers.

This is great, I hope it keeps happening and people treat known Hizballah members like lepers.

Do you really think that would actually happen?

Assuming you live in Israel (given your flair), would IDF soldiers randomly exploding due to surreptitiously placed Iranian bombs cause you to start treating known members of the IDF like lepers? I think it would just bolster your determination to fight back against the Iranians rather than treat the soldiers fighting for you like social pariahs. To use a specific example...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/middleeast/lebanon-funeral-pager-attack.html

I don't think that murdering this 9 year old girl (which I wouldn't really call "great", personally) is making these people support Israel. In fact, from the photos of the funeral, those Hezbollah scarfs look pretty new - and the quotes they give make it sound like this attack was one of Hezbollah's greatest recruitment efforts to date. I know personally that if my 9 year old daughter was murdered by a foreign state I'd be signing up for whatever military organisation wants to fight back against them as soon as they'd have me.

Did you know that, roughly speaking, Lebanon has 3 major ethnic/religious groups that aren’t super-friendly with each other? So everyone who isn’t a Shia Muslim isn’t really on their side anyway. Christians in Lebanon have already been blaming Hizballah for bringing Israeli wrath on Lebanon for a conflict they have no interest in. When Muslims from Beirut’s Dahieh started looking for places to move to, some Maronites and Druze simply refused to rent them. Now this is further pulling these groups apart, who would want to associate with a group that at any moment could either blow up or be bombed, and you already hated anyway?

You’re modeling this as if it’s all of Lebanon fighting Israel, while in truth it’s one part of Lebanon dragging the rest into unwanted war - AGAIN. Did western media not show you the Syrian opposition groups giving out candy in the streets after the pager attacks? Where do you think that comes from? Or did you not hear of the Sabra and Shatila massacre- blamed on Israel, but perpetrated by Lebanese?

Did you know that, roughly speaking, Lebanon has 3 major ethnic/religious groups that aren’t super-friendly with each other?

Yes. I just don't believe that will convince any Lebanese people who aren't already Israel supporters that the dying children are to blame rather than the nation which is currently bombing them as we speak.

Did western media not show you the Syrian opposition groups giving out candy in the streets after the pager attacks? Where do you think that comes from? Or did you not hear of the Sabra and Shatila massacre- blamed on Israel, but perpetrated by Lebanese?

I don't recall ever claiming that Lebanon was some kind of land of milk and honey where all men lived together in harmony, but I don't see how this really matters. If those distinct subpopulations were already murdering and massacring each other, it isn't like being targeted by Israel is going to change that all that much.

If those distinct subpopulations were already murdering and massacring each other, it isn't like being targeted by Israel is going to change that all that much.

You’re applying contradicting logic to the same group. Once, Shia can somehow hate Israel more because the daughter if a Hizballah operative died, then secondly non-Shia cannot hate Shia more since they’re already hostile to one another. Please pick one lane so we can further discuss.

By the way, you could just go to /r/lebanon and see what they think of Hizballah there.

The other explanation for the timing is that a limited time window to use it was closing, either because of an inherent limitation in the bomb design or because the cover was about to be blown.

a limited time window to use it was closing

If it is planted explosives, the time window to use it would have been very short to begin with as it would all be dependant on the explosives not being detected, and no accidental detonation occuring that would give away the plot. If I were planning something like that, I wouldn't wait more than a week or two after deployment. Apparently they waited 5 months.

Or because the political leadership was in crisis and needed something big and flashy to show off to the public to boost credibility. Or because there is a forthcoming military action that they needed Hezbollah leadership confused, partially-disabled, and disrupted for. There are many potential reasons this capability was triggered now.

True, I should have said "another explanation".

Technical part is not interesting.

I don't know about you, but I carry a cell phone close to my crotch daily, I am really interested as to whether this is a lithium battery detonation due to software abuse, lithium battery detonation due to physical tampering or the detonation of implanted explosives, as it would change my behavior, especially in times of heightened geopolitical tension.

If it's purely software, maybe I'll carry my phone in a bag instead of pockets. If it required physical tampering, maybe I'll reconsider used devices, or maybe it will increase my worry about letting my phone be handled by people I don't trust (airport security in a country I don't trust, for instance, or dodgy phone repair shops).

The videos I saw certainly didn't look like a plain lithium battery failure. There appeared to be much more energy in the explosion, then much less fire afterwards.

Later reporting apparently sourced from Lebanese security says that less than 20g of PETN (Pentaerythritol tetranitrate) was placed on the batteries and then detonated by remotely overheating the battery.

Which is still terrifying to me, tbh, as I have a device in my pockets that has a significant amount of components built in a country that my country could realistically be at war with within this decade.

Yeah, but Israel targeted pagers because few normies have or use them, so blowing them up is fairly constrained. On the other hand blowing up lots of cellphones is basically just carpet bombing, which is widely recognized by military theorists as pointless.

IMHO this doesn't scale well.

A few thousand targets, who are trying to stay in hiding, who you know you'll be hitting within months, who are already at war with you, and who are soldiers in that war? Sure, slip some explosives into their pagers. What are they going to say if they catch you, "Gosh, we only launched seven or eight thousand rockets at your towns this year, but now the gloves are off!"

A hundred million targets, a million of whom take their cell phones through airport explosive detectors each day, another 20,000 of whom have their cell phones dismantled for repairs each day, who are a mix of 99% civilians not at war with you and 1% soldiers who are also not at war with you but who still have a few thousand nuclear warheads ready just in case? You would have to be completely insane to start loading their phones with explosives.

China could realistically be at war with us within a decade, but it'll be a "gosh, Taipei really wanted to reunify with us and we just had to very suddenly send over a bunch of troops to what's really also our own territory to deal with the criminal terrorists who wanted to oppose the will of the people" sort of war, not a "the trouble with Pearl Harbor was it didn't piss off the US enough" sort of war. I wouldn't be surprised if every chip they manufacture for us is compromised with a you-can-find-it-under-an-electron-microscope plausibly-deniable-backdoor for SigInt or DDOS purposes, but I would be astonished if they tried to pull off a you-can-find-it-with-a-screwdriver obvious-killing-Americans-preparation for unclear purposes. Your phone may stop working when WW3 starts, or it may start transmitting every word spoken around you to Chinese AIs to sieve through for intelligence, but it's not going to explode.

It's not purely software. Too valuable to waste on such small target.

I doubt it is too, but I hope we'll find out more within the few weeks.

Or degrading hezbollah’s organizational capabilities for a few days was the goal of the operation, they won’t be able to get new devices out right away.

Maybe this phone trick only works once. But intelligent people can come up with all kinds of attack vectors. Next time it will be something else. This sends a pretty clear message: we are smarter than you and we can get to you. Whatever you do, it won't work, so don't try.

And, in fact, Middle East peace will be achieved when Arab countries stop trying to attack Israel constantly. The sooner it happens, the fewer Arab lives will be lost.

Someday, people will realize that Arabs are happy to fight wars that never end.

But today is not that day.

I don’t think the Israelis are uninformed about the Islamist view on martyrdom. But what other choice do they have? Their enemies refuse to even consider any victory condition in which they still exist, and overthrowing the Iranian government is not possible for a variety of reasons, so their only option is to continue the way they currently are.

But what other choice do they have?

Buy Sharks Bay from Australia and move there?

Huh, Shark Bay is apparantly bigger than Israel. I'd unironically be in favour of this if Australia made the offer.

As an Australian, nope. We're already going through a real estate crisis and have a population that's already causing strain on significant water systems - moving Israel there would make those problems substantially worse. But there's actually a better option on the table anyway - the Israelis should just be moved to the American deep south, where they can live with all the evangelicals who love them so much. There's plenty of room, and I'm sure the Israelis would be better migrants than the Haitians - dogs and cats aren't kosher, last I checked.

I prefer the "swap land with Taiwan" strategy, personally.

It doesn't just work once but it imposes an ongoing cost to your enemies operations to avoid the same thing happening again.

I mean... wouldn't they just make sure to dismantle a handful of pagers before distributing them from now on? They'd have to pack the things with high explosives to get a result like this, would be easy to find, not much of a cost.

They'll likely short term want to change up suppliers if that info is compromised, but by blowing up all the pagers Israel has revealed this which means it can't be used in the future and if there are other capabilities downstream from this supplier compromised like wire taps etc. Now Hezbollah knows to toss the electronics.

Supposedly the batteries were swapped with equivalent batteries with added explosives. Merely looking at its insides may not be informative. Are they also going to cut apart batteries and other components? On a sampling of units or every one?

As a trust issue: the next time a member of hezbollah is given a device for communication, will they trust it or fear it is a bomb or tracking device or otherwise compromised?

Yeah that'd still be pretty easy. You wouldn't need to sample every one. Just one per 50, a few per shipment, that sort of thing. I imagine they fear pretty much all electronics could be used for tracking since Israel or the US might drone strike them at any time and anywhere anyways.

You any I have a different understanding of easy.

Cutting apart every component large enough to plausibly hold a bomb and correctly inspecting it by people who know what they are doing on a sampling of every incoming shipment is an enormous burden. I have spent months of my life going to other countries and telling people who assemble and test electronics "do this thing like I'm showing you now". And then later they don't do what I showed them.

I think these people would have the obvious idea to check their equipment for bombs, and then almost entirely fail to actually check their equipment for bombs.

I mean... wouldn't they just make sure to dismantle a handful of pagers before distributing them from now on?

Depends. Could be their procurement or distribution functions are compromised.

Yeah with the phone hacking it’s plausible that they can always find another exploit, but with this kind of physical modification it doesn’t actually invalidate the pagers as a method of communication at all.

I think the main benefit is likely psychological. Conspiracies about Israel being behind everything are already very common in the Arab world, 22 year old Hezbollah recruits aren’t familiar with the specifics of what Mossad can and can’t do. If they’re handed the next pager and promised “I swear, this one won’t blow up”, they might not believe it.

Yeah with the phone hacking it’s plausible that they can always find another exploit, but with this kind of physical modification it doesn’t actually invalidate the pagers as a method of communication at all.

Depends what you mean by 'invalidate.' A system generally isn't validated when everything fails all the time, but when a critical mass of things fails enough that the reliability isn't high enough to keep doing. In some systems you only need one part to not work for the whole system to fail.

In this case I'd agree that pagers will probably still be used- I imagine they'd be used to prompt agents to go look at more secure means of communication- but if the psychological effect of the operation is that people don't trust the system enough to use it, you're going to the reliability issue alluded to.

Agreed. Even if they hide the explosive in the battery, using a sympathetic detonation one would still be able to find out if that battery was explosive.

Of course, next time, Mossad might not modify all of the pagers, but just 5%, so just testing a few is not enough to prove that the bunch is safe. So they either have to destroy 90% of the pagers they buy or live in fear that their pagers might explode in their face, perhaps not even granting you a martyr's death, but just maiming you for life.

Maybe not just in the Arab world at this point.

If I was the sort of person inclined to try to convince people that "They" didn't get Epstein, shit like this would certainly make my job harder.

The argument against ‘them’ doing Epstein was always obvious. If you want to convince a bunch of rich Jews to support Israel, you don’t need to blackmail them with footage of them fucking teenagers lol.

you don’t need to blackmail them with footage of them fucking teenagers

The operative word the media used tended to be "children", not "teenagers".

The masses are stupid enough to believe a 17 year old is a child, so it works.

True, and indeed it was rarely remarked upon in the Prince Andrew case that - unless he explicitly paid her for sex - sleeping with a 17 year old Virginia Giuffre was entirely legal under British law at the time and now.

More importantly, it was legal under New York law, which is where he slept with her. Interestingly, if he had slept with her on Epstein Island, she would have been jailbait, because the age of consent in the US Virgin Islands is 18.

To me one of the oddest things about Epstein is his habit of transporting 17 year olds from jurisdictions where they were legal to the USVI where they were jailbait in order to statutory rape them (or have his mates do so). It demonstrates complete and utter scofflawism.

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was entirely legal under British law at the time and now

Well, the world is a much less liberal place now. What the Junior Anti-Sex League says now carries de facto legal weight, in a way that people who grew up in the days of the Junior Pro-Sex League (typically known as "the 1970s") don't fully recognize.

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