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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29682 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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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.

It demonstrates complete and utter scofflawism.

This was the entire point. The video footage all the cameras on that island recorded would have been titillating but not really worth anything if there was no criminal element. "I have a video of you having sex with a barely legal woman" is nowhere near as compelling a blackmail tool as "I have a video of you having illegal, criminal sex with a child".

Having sex with a teen hooker in New Jersey is trashy. Having sex with an imported young callgirl on a private island makes you a man of wealth and taste (and connections), which is the whole lure of these exercises.

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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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