>I suspect in practice the spicy pagers would tend to be tracked quite closely by the intelligence agencies.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.