Gig Economy Terror: What Israel's Pager Bomb Attack Means for You - podcast episode cover

Gig Economy Terror: What Israel's Pager Bomb Attack Means for You

Sep 26, 202435 min
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Episode description

Robert sits down with Mia and Gare to discuss the recent Mossad attack on Hezbollah using pagers and radios impregnated with explosives. It turns out this is an incredibly easy thing to do, an attack that opens a massive pandora's box with the potential to change daily life for all of us in terrifying ways.

Sources:

Turning Everyday Gadgets into Bombs is a Bad Idea « bunnie's blog (bunniestudios.com)

We still don’t know how the Lebanon pager attack happened. Here’s what we do know about our own electronic devices | CNN Business

Study reveals robust performance in aged detonator explosive (lanl.gov)

What is the PETN explosive used by Israel in walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah? Can dogs detect them? (msn.com)

How Israel Built a Modern-Day Trojan Horse: Exploding Pagers - The New York Times (archive.is)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Speaker 1

Also media Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast in which every week I sit down with my friends Mia and Garrison and I walk them through a little backyard chemistry project.

Speaker 2

Now, today we are building a common commonly used explosive nodicators called Oh what's that?

Speaker 3

That is? We cannot give those instructions on air?

Speaker 2

Oh oh oh, well, what about what about for our DX like hexogen safe? We can make hexogen?

Speaker 4

Right?

Speaker 3

I think you need a special uh tech stamp or permit to teach that.

Speaker 2

Sorry, all right, what if we talk about how to make it in roadblocks?

Speaker 3

Oh? Yeah, no, that's fine. They haven't They haven't cracked roadblocks yet. You have a correct minecraft.

Speaker 2

That's good, that's good. The FEDS don't know about that one.

Speaker 3

Okay, they don't know about that one yet.

Speaker 2

Well, in that case, I'm going to read these this ingredient list for pet in that I found in a torrent of Taylor Swift song. So this is I'm certain the best information available right now. Anyway, we're talking this week about explosives. We're talking particularly about the fact that Israel just carry out an attack against Tesblah, a militant organization in Lebanon using pet in, which is one of the two ingredients in Semtex. It is commonly used as

the detonator. It's a stable, high explosive, so it's often used to like basically trigger the larger explosive charge, which is generally like hexygen. You know, you mix the two together with like plastic agents and you get like that's where you get the traditional plastic explosives. And it's come out recently that the Masad managed to sneak some of this stuff. Well sneak's not even really the right word, but they managed to impregnate a batch of pagers and

radios with pet in. Now, this was a pretty big story last week. I think a lot of people are

focusing kind of on the wrong parts of it. But yeah, that's what we're going to be talking about today because there's an element of this story that hasn't gotten out, which is the degree to which what Israel did to Hasblah Here is something that anybody with roughly thirty thousand dollars could imitate to a surprising degree of fidelity, Like this is an attack that is deeply easy to carry out, and the fact that Israel has kind of made the decision to pull this up is a kind of the

breaking of a seal in a way, and I think it portins some very frightening things for all of us, and particularly for air travel. So that's what we're going to be talking about today.

Speaker 3

Do you think like the the either like hijacking or infiltration of the supply chain is as replicable for yes, a non state agency. Yes, that is the.

Speaker 2

Thing that is scariest about this attack to me, and that is going to be kind of the meat of what we're talking about. We should probably start by this sort of laying out the scale the attack.

Speaker 3

I mean, I also have one main question. What's a pager?

Speaker 2

So Garrison, Once upon a time, Uh huh, we kind of had the ability to broadcast signals over large areas, but it was a real pain in the ass to like do that with a phone call or anything but a couple of words at a time.

Speaker 3

Oh so like a text message, Like a.

Speaker 2

Text message, except for you can't really respond to it.

Speaker 3

Oh okay, but it looked pretty.

Speaker 2

Cool to clip on your belt in the late nineties. If you were like one of the doctors on the set of Er did you ever watch Er? Garrison?

Speaker 3

Were you too young for that. That's the George Clooney show, right.

Speaker 2

Cluone tang, But yes, he looked great in it. Yeah, so that's where pagers came from. Was the television show Er written by Michael Crichton, which means pagers are related to dinosaurs. And yeah, so Israel managed to get We'll talk a little bit later about how, but they managed to get explosives in an unknown number of but certainly

hundreds of these walkie talkies, particularly in the batteries. By the end of the first day of attacks, round a dozen people were dead and twenty seven hundred had been wounded.

Many people. Seriously, there's like horrible videos of folks going flying off of bicycles and the like when this stuff detonates, Like it takes very little petn to create a pretty significant explosion, and we're looking at about like zero point one point one grams I think of explosive agent actually in each walkie talkie, which was enough to kill in may Mae shitload of people. Some of these folks were members of Hezbelah I think. HESBLA has confirmed that eight

of their fighters were killed. At least four of the dead are children and the second day of the attack, a bunch of radios went off as well. Another twenty people were killed and hundreds more wounded. So you're talking about a very sizable attack. Israel is not claimed credit for this, but The New York Times has done some pretty deep reporting on this, and per that quote, twelve and former defense and intelligence officials who were briefed on

the attack say the Israelis were behind it. And it's just also obvious that this was Israel who else, Like who else would do this? Now, one of the reasons I'm getting into this is that there were a lot like the first kind of concern that people had when this attack was carried out is like, oh shit, was

this some sort of a hack? Did Israel exploit some sort of a glitch in how these products batteries worked and basically like hack them to cause a runaway thermal escalation within the battery that led to it detonating.

Speaker 3

Is all of our electronics just one hack away from turning from being turned into a bomb?

Speaker 2

No, And I understand why people focused on that aspect of it, but it led to I think some articles that are this is going to be one of those we always we try to. I hope we usually managed to be the like calm voices in the room, but this is one of those cases where really people need to be less calm. And I do want to highlight an article that I think went in the wrong direction on that front. It's a CNN business piece called we

still don't know how the Lebanon pager attack happened. Here's what we do know about our own electronic devices, and I'm going to read a quote from that. In short, your communications device is not at risk for exploding unless

it's heavily tampered with and least with explosives. Experts who spoke to CNN set Justin Kappos, a cybersecurity professor at NYU, said that it's possible to cause damage to a variety of batteries, most commonly lithium batteries, but he said it seems like the devices were intentionally designed to explode when triggered, not a pager that everyone else in the world is using.

If you're a normal person with a lithian and ion battery, I would not be over concerned about this CAPO set and I think that that is an error and we're going to get into as to why. But let's talk about how Israel did this first. And this is again all kind of per the New York Times reporting how Israel built a modern day trojan horse. They seem to be the first piece people who have kind of put all of this together to an extent that is probably

pretty close to accurate. There are some debates as to like did they actually have a detonator in here or did they cause a thermal because PETN, while it's very stable, can be set off by heat. So it's theoretically possible to get a battery hot enough that it can detonate PETN, but it's not going to be as reliable as using something like a bridge wire cap like a like a

traditional like triggering device. Yeah, and so it's a little bit unclear as to how this was made, but whatever the case, basically what Israel did is they made their own batteries for walkie talkies that were clones of an earlier kind of walkie talkie made by a Taiwanese company that were no longer in production. Right, so this Taiwanese company had made real walkie talkies for a while, they stopped making them. Israel got their hands on some originals

and manufactured copies. Now that is the part of this that would be hard to replicate. But the copies of the walkie talkies themselves were not the explosive agent. What actually where the explosives were was in the detachable battery. And Masad crafted batteries themselves for these walkie talkies and

wove PETN into the batteries. So if you haven't really looked at a lithium ion battery, like one of the kinds of batteries that you're going to like, I mean, it's similar to the ones in your phone, but it's just also like any kind of electronics battery, they are kind of these weird folded things, Like they look just like a little square packet, usually with like a cord coming off of it if you actually look at the battery. But the way they're as symboled is they're like laminated

into an aluminum foil pouch. And while you are kind of doing that laminating process, you can basically just weave some PETN into like alongside the battery, and it will cost you a small fraction of the batteries like life like, you won't get as much actual battery time out of it, but it's not going to detonate on its own. Ptn is. They actually just conducted in twenty twenty a study to show that it can last for years. This is like the compound we use in the detonators in our nuclear devices.

Once you get a bunch of walkie talkies that are impregnated with this stuff out there, you could sit on them for years until like you needed to actually use them. Now, the key thing about this, it seems like when you're talking about wrapping a battery that's got you know, plastic explosives in it, well, that's the kind of thing that

only a state level actor can do. And this is going to bring me to the source that I really want to get to people for this episode, which is an article by a guy named Andrew Hwang at Bunny's Studios. Andrew is a computer scientist. He's got a doctorate in philosophy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and kind of

critically for some personal projects that he had done. Recently, he has manufactured his own the them Ion batteries, and in doing so he's figured out like how to actually build a personal production line to make batteries like this that you could customize to fit into kind of basically any kind of electronic device you want. You can buy an entire pouch cell production line that will allow you to make your own custom lithium ion batteries using Alibaba

dot Com. Yeah, oh boy, Yeah, so that's great, right or lithi. Yeah, these are lithium pouch batteries. And it costs about fifteen thousand dollars in order to be able to make somewhere between like a few dozen and several hundred of these, right, So fifteen grand will provide you with all of the materials you need to from the ground up make at least, you know, probably a couple

hundred pouch sell batteries. Right. And it's the kind of thing where it's not just any idiot could do it, but any reasonably intelligent person with the degree of like experience in engineering can do it.

Speaker 1

Right.

Speaker 2

Andrew is obviously a very smart guy with a lot of capabilities that you know, a layperson might not have. But basically any kind of competent engineer could figure this out pretty much. And you're talking again, a few thousand dollars to get potentially you know, hundreds or even more of these made now The other side of the attack here is that the Israelis created a bunch of shell companies.

You know, they started manufacturing copies of these walkie talkies so that they could put their own explosives impregnated batteries in them, and then they built a bunch of shady

ass companies in order to sell them. This was effectively what they were doing was creating like an Amazon like shipping company, right and the same way that like anybody who wanted to, can you know, get a business license and get access to like a bunch of electronics and sell them on Amazon, like you could buy a consignment of a thousand walkie talkies, make your own batteries for them, and sell them on Amazon. Amazon does not do a particularly like any really checking up on the people who

choose to sell through their site. And even if they were to do that, PETN is effectively impossible to find.

Speaker 1

Right.

Speaker 2

There is a way to scan for it, but it takes like a half hour per package, And it's the kind of thing where even if you're taking this stuff apart, unless you have someone who is like doing chemical tests on what's in there, anyone who's even someone who is moderately trained is not going to be able to recognize a battery that's had some pet and put into it

from like a regular battery. So I'm going to read another quote from that New York Times article about how the Masad kind of structured the shell companies here that allowed them to pose as a company making pagers. By all appearances, BAC Consulting was a Hungary based company that was under contract to produce the devices on behalf of a Taiwanese company, gold Apollo. In fact, it was part

of an Israeli front. According to Three and Tell officers briefed on the operation, BAC did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pages, but the only client that really mattered was Hesbelah, and its pages were far from ordinary.

Speaker 3

Why were hesblow using pages in the first place?

Speaker 4

Oh yeah, I can talk about that.

Speaker 3

Couldn't they afford it an iPhone? Great question or something?

Speaker 2

Well, I think we'll let me talk about that a second, But gar I will say an initial response to that. You know how, like all of the activists in the United States after twenty twenty especially, are saying like, Hey, your phone isn't safe, don't use your phone. You know, for for any kind of like actions, the state can listen in on that.

Speaker 5

Yah.

Speaker 2

Yeah, well Hesbelah has been paranoid about that for a long time, and the Masad actually has spent a lot of effort spreading rumors within Hesbola about how capable Israel's smartphone exploits are, like how strong their ability to like listen in on conversations, and that played a sgnificant role in changing like policy from the top and hes a lot to like we are going to use the lowest tech communications solutions possible, and we're going to talk some

more about that. You know, it's not low tech.

Speaker 3

These products and services that support this very podcast.

Speaker 2

That's right, high tech and absolutely no explosives in them, probably but really there would be no way to tell if there were. And we're back Mia, you wanted to talk. Yeah.

Speaker 4

Thelnlyst thing I want to mention about that is so there's been a lot of focus in terms of the page you use on like on Hesbela trying to build this communications grid that's like more difficult to like do to compromise. Yeah, yeah, well, well it's to compromise from like digitally, right. But the other thing that's kind of going on here that I think is getting a lot less attention is that so Lebanon's economy has been an absolute shit show for probably like eight nine years now.

Speaker 3

There's a massive dollars front.

Speaker 2

Kind of the terminal like heart attack moment was that barge exploding, but it had not been doing it had been on the road down.

Speaker 4

I mean there were there were, I mean there were there have been huge riots there over. So part of what's going on is like there aren't dollars in the economy,

and this has made everything unbelievably expensive. And one of the things that's unbelievably expensive is phone calls, and so there are I don't think there's been much coverage of this, but it's like there's also just regular people also use pages for things in order to set up when a phone call is going to be because like, if you're going to have a phone call with someone, you have to make sure that both of you are like there.

So it's it's not purely just a military thing. It's also just because of how unbelievably expensive like calling people has gotten and this sort of terminal crisis of the Lebanese economy in the sense that like there aren't dollars to pay for things, and so we've gotten to this point where even even sort of stuff that we consider like fairly basic and not that expensive, like phone service,

has just gotten unbelievably expensive for everyone. And this is sort of caused yeah, a lot of like regular people who have no affiliation with this whatsoever to sort of move down the technology chain because it's just expensive.

Speaker 2

Yeah, and again it's this kind of perfect storm of

like paranoia and economics sort of factors colliding here. But the sort of gist of it is Israel definitely wanted to push has a lot to adopting, Like they clearly had an understanding of what they could do and wanted deliberately to kind of push for this because it's a lot easier to get some a manufactured explosive and it would have been a lot harder to do this with like iPhones, right, not that Israel hasn't done this with cell phones in the past, sure, very famously, back I

think it was the nineties, there was this Palestinian man yah Ya Yash who was I think generally credited as like kind of an architect of like car bombing attacks, who the Masad killed with a cell phone that they had put it explosives in it. In that case, it was a very labor intensive process with a single phone meant to target and blow the head off of like one guy. This is like a much more reckless and much more like civilian casualty open operation. Again, I'm going

to quote from that New York Times article. In Lebanon's Baca Valley, in the village of Sarain, one young girl, Fatima Abullah, had just come home from her first day of fourth grade when she heard her father's pager begin to beep. Her aunt said she picked up the device to bring it to him and was holding it when

it exploded, killing her. Fatima was nine. It's probably worth noting here that while HESBLA is a militant group, they are also effectively the state in a decent chunk of Lebanon and a lot of the folks who would have these because these these pagers and radios were generally seen as part of like a offensive measure, like if there is an attack, if we go to war again, these are our safe comm system, right like this is our like low tech comm system to allow us to like

stay in touch. So a lot of these people would have been folks whose role was more on the social side of things rather than like actual armed militants. You have no way of knowing who you're blowing up. Everyone's just getting these devices. And it's interesting to me that the Masad or that that net Yahoo, because I'm sure this order had to have come from the top, gave the order to carry out this attack. Now, they had

had these in place for a while. Exactly when is a little bit unclear, but long enough that there was like a nickname for the attack itself that everyone knew they were going to carry out at some point. So it's a little bit like, I wonder why this was

specifically targeted for this point in time. I kind of suspect it may have been due to the fact that Israel's actual like ground forces are still tied up in Gaza, and so they were looking for a way to escalate with Lebanon, with Hesbelah that didn't necessitate the deployment of forces that you know, would still have a massive impact

and be disruptive, which this certainly was. But you know, when it comes to kind of us and like why we're talking about this today, it's the fact that this is I think a Pandora's Box style attack, right like, you have at this point opened up the possibility to doing this to any actor that has the resources. And as we've noted about, fifteen grand will get you the

capacity to manufacture battery packs like this. You can just go on Ali Baba and buy things like radios or other It doesn't have to be that you could get you know, like most a lot of people now carry around battery devices, right like external batteries to charge their phones when they're out. Sure, you can purchase those from Ali Baba by the thousand. You can disassemble them, stick in your own batteries, and it's not the kind of thing where you have to be capable of doing this

on the scale that the Masade did. You could stick

this and you could buy two thousand batteries. You could stick this in two hundred of them, your own replacement explosive packs, and you could just send those out into the world, right Especially, One of the things that scares me is the idea of you get a bunch of these shipped, you impregnate a few with explosives, but you have a bunch of batteries that you then have on you know, shipping through the air right and trigger in the air like while they're being shipped to a destination.

Like It's the kind of thing you would eventually be able to unravel who had created the front companies and the like. But there really is nothing built into the system that would very effectively be able to tell that you'd done this as long as you there was a degree of like caretaken in the manufacturing process. And I want to turn back to Andrew Hwang's article here, and this is him talking about the way in which you could hide the fact that you had impregnated these battery

packs with explosives. Once folded into the core of the battery, it is sealed in an aluminum pouch. Manufacturing process carefully isolates the folding line from the laminating line and or rinses the outside of the pouch with acetone to dissolve away any pet in residue. Prior to marking, No explosive residue can escape the pouch, thus defeating swabs that look

for chemical residue. It may also well evade methods such as X ray fluorescence because the elements that compose the battery separator and PETN are too similar and too light to be detected, and through case methods like sours spatially offset Ramen spectroscopy would likely be defeated by the multi layer copper laminate structure of the battery itself, blocking light from probing inner layers. Thus, I would pose it that a lithium battery constructed with a pet and layer inside

is largely undetectable. And this is from like folks I have talked to who have a degree of expertise in the matter, I think very accurate, and I think, you know, even if you're not striking air travel here number one, it would be easy to get stuff like this on planes and people. There was in December somebody attempted to and just kind of their detonation method failed, which is kind of with explosives. When people don't die and explosive attacks, what always saves them is it's kind of tricky to

get the detonators right. But I'm very worried that the masade has effectively provided people with a perfect plan of attack to fuck with air travel or to fuck with the supply lines, because it imagine, just like a couple hundred people over the space of a week or so have battery packs or other electronics detonate on their person,

like or a couple of dozen people. What that does both to the economy, to the supply lines, Like the extint to which that would be disruptive in society is like, the potential is enormous, and the potential for like runaway terror is enormous.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I mean that that was one of the first things that we talked about once news of this drop. Is like, beyond the actually physical injuries and death caused by this attack, this is like primarily an infrastructure attack. In this case completely destroys like the communications infrastructure of HASBLA,

but in like, yeah, the strategy behind the attack. It can be used just to target various types of infrastructure, whether that be like supply chains, travel, It puts distrust in your own equipment, and certainly it's application on like airlines is obviously very worrying.

Speaker 2

Well, it's very worrying. And one of the things that I keep thinking about is the degree to which the way Amazon has restructured the economy, and particularly the way that like digital commerce works, has created an opportunity for a malicious actor to carry out an attack like this with excellent security because you don't even have to be

the one shipping these out right now. You can get I mean you have to shift them at some point, but you can ship them to a third party that is the actual company that deals with Amazon, if you have enough kind of resources and ingenuity behind it, basically set up a drop shipping scam where you wearving someone else send explosives to Amazon, which provides a lot of opportunity for you to both get away and a lot of opportunity to you could seed with a couple of

different manufacturers, different devices.

Speaker 3

It's like terrorism in the era of the gig economy. Yeah, And that was one of the reasons I like to Fincher's recent movie The Killer, Yeah, just in terms of how much of the gig economy was like worked into these traditional industries, whether they be like terrorism, because like

hitmen aren't really real, but certainly terrorism. And I think there's a lot of ways that these things can be applied in this kind of bizarre uber Amazon world that we've created where the economy is just so fractured in all these little ways.

Speaker 4

There's also I think the sort of production angle to which is that because the way that manufacturing is happening has become so decentralized, and because it's become based on these it's kind of less so now. But a lot of like Chinese manufacturing had worked like this, where you'd get these sort of like smaller pop up things, and each of these sort of like fairly small production facilities is like shipping stuff to like a larger one who's

like doing assembly or whatever. But that means that, Yeah, like as you're saying with Alli Bob, it's like all of this stuff is just available to purchase because it's designed to be sold to these people who are like starting their sort of like small scale like production line.

Speaker 3

Yeah, there's no quality control, there's no intense vetting. It's all extremely accessible. It's very easy to infiltrate this process.

Speaker 2

Yeah, here's another line from that Andrew Huang article on Bunny's at Bunny's Studios, Be You in an Ie Studios, which is his blog. You don't even have to go so far as offering anyone a bribe or being a state level agency to get tampered batteries into a supply chain. Anyone can buy a bunch of items from Amazon, swap out the batteries, restore the packaging and seals and return the goods to the warehouse. And yes, there is already a whole industry devoted to copying packaging and security seals

for the purpose of warranty fraud. The perpetrator will be long gone by the time the device is resold.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 4

And the other worrying part about that too is that you know, okay, so getting the explosives to work is kind of difficult, right, Like bomb making is not easy, but you have to have.

Speaker 2

A degree of competition.

Speaker 4

Yes, yes, but the actual cost fifteen thousand dollars like that, that's not even like you're looking at like a millionaire, Like that's just something your local dentist can afford to pull off.

Speaker 2

You could carry out an attack like this in terms of cash expenditure for the cost of like a reasonably nice car, which is not prohibitive to a large scale international terrorist organization, or even.

Speaker 4

Just like a rich guy. Yeah, not even that rich guy can pull this off.

Speaker 2

Yep, which is.

Speaker 3

I guess the kind of the main inhibiting factor is we still don't quite know how Israel got these two detonates. Yes, whether that is some sort of hack that overheated the battery, whether it was like a message that was sent out that like triggered something within the device.

Speaker 2

It seems to have been a message.

Speaker 3

That made the explosive debtonates because they.

Speaker 2

Did into message immediately before, so it seemed to have been tied to some extent with a message. Andrew Hwang kind of looked into and came to the conclusion that you could very well do a thermal runaway to set this off, but obviously the messade doesn't have any trouble getting a hold of military detonators. Wlang also walked through how you could build a circuit into the actual battery itself,

like a trigger circuit. You know, I'm just gonna go ahead, and I'm going to go ahead and talk about this a little bit when we come back. But let's do our second ad break now before we tell everyone how to detonated plastic explosives.

Speaker 4

This is going to be the one that gets all arrested.

Speaker 2

Yeah, and we're back. Here's a quote from Andrew on how these might have been detonated. Detonating the PETN is a bit more tricky. Without a detonator, PETN make conflagrate and fast instead of detonating and creating the much more damaging shock wave. However, the Wikipedia page notes that an electric spark with an energy in the range of ten

to sixty millidules is sufficient to initiate detonation. Based on available descriptions of the devices getting hot prior to detonation, one might suppose that the detonation is initiated by a trigger circuit shorting out the battery pack, causing the internal polymer spacers to melt, and eventually the cathode anode pairs coming into contact, creating a spark. Such a spark may furthermore be guaranteed across the pet and sheet by introducing a small defect, such as a slight dimple in the

surrounding cathode anoid layers. Once the packets to the melting point of the spacers, the dimpled region is likely to connect, leading to a spark that then detonates the pet and layer sandwich between the cathode and anode layers. But where do you hide this trigger circuit? It turns out that almost every lithium polymer pack has a small circuit board embedded in it, called the PCM or protection circuit module.

It contains a microcontroller, often in a TSSOP eight package and at least one are more large transistors capable of handling the current capacity of the battery, and basically that's where you put it.

Speaker 3

Oops.

Speaker 2

Oops, And again I did talk to someone with expertise and explosives who said that they thought it was likelier that there was a conventional detonator, not because it would have been impossible to do with a thermal runway or the way that Andrew's set up, but because this is the masade they have access to detonators, and a detonator guarantees right that you get the proper kind of explosion. But again, even if you're using kind of the less Gucci method here, that would be available to a non

state actor. If only fifty out of the three hundred devices you impregnate with explosives do a proper explosion and the rest just kind of conflagrate, well, that's still a very successful attack. You can do a tremendous amount of damage to people's sense of well being, into the economy to supply lines by carrying out an attack like that.

Speaker 3

This is so terroristic in nature, and like if any other group did this like it has blitded this a Yeah, if homosits attack, oh my god.

Speaker 2

We would be we would be bombing them right now.

Speaker 3

Yeah, if some like just random like accelerationist networks somehow pulled this off, like yeah, we would be pulling our hair out. We would we would like go to war over something like this. And the fact that it's like it's this type of attack is only okay when this one military does it is just I don't know what to do any They've endangered.

Speaker 2

There, They have endangered everyone, right, Like, like every single person listening to this is less safe because it is real carried out this attack.

Speaker 3

What is airport screening going to look like? If this keeps happening?

Speaker 2

Importantly? Am I going to be able to take all of my batteries on the planes that I could play video games on a fourteen hour flight? Garrison? You know, yeah, the plugs in the seats don't always work well.

Speaker 3

I mean, and even like what if you're able to do this to like the electronics of like the pilot jeez, and then you just you just like take out an entire area. Yeah, It's like it's such a fucked up Pandora's box that it feels like there's gonna be no real consequences for which is just kind of how things have been this past year, I guess. Yeah.

Speaker 4

And the other the other issue with it is that like the only way to fix this would be an actual like you would you would have to change how our supply chains work. And it's like, well, no one's gonna do that, no one. There is no number of people that you like, maybe if they literally killed the president of the United States, maybe you could get enough political capital together to try to do something about it, But like there's no way.

Speaker 2

No, and there's there's no way, And like the way the state will respond to this is by making air travel vastly worse. Right, Yeah, it's probably not the only

thing that they will do. But that is like because there's just not an actual, It's not really with present technology, there's not an easy way to actually find these things like within kind of the context of like air travel or the way in which like digital merchandising works, right, which is again why the Masad probably shouldn't have done this.

Speaker 3

No, what many reasons?

Speaker 2

What of many reasons, the dead kids being another. Yeah, I do want to conclude. I've quoted a lot from Andrew Huang's wonderful article. Turning everyday gadgets into bombs is a bad idea, but I want to quote from his conclusion here. Not all things that could exist should exist, and some ideas are better left unimplemented. Technology alone has no ethics. The difference between a patch and an exploit

is the method in which a technology is disclosed. Exploding batteries have probably been conceived of and tested by spy agencies around the world, but never deployed en Moss because while it may achieve a tactical win, it is too easy for weaker adversaries to copy the idea and justify its redeployment in an asymmetric and devastating retaliation. However, now that I've seen it executed, I am left with the terrifying realization that not only is it feasible, it's relatively

easy for any modestly funded entity to implement. Not just our allies can do this. A wide cast of adversaries have this capability in their reach, from nation states to cartels and gangs to shady copycat battery factories just looking for a big payday. If chemicals players can moonlight and illicit drugs, what stops battery factories from dealing in bespoke munitions. The bottom line is we should approach the public policy debate around this, assuming that someday we could be victims

of exploding batteries too. Turning everyday objects into fragmentation to grenades should be a crime as it blurs the line between civilian and military technologies, and that should be something everyone can agree on.

Speaker 3

Yeah, yeah, I think so. Jesus Christ. He just is enacting terrorism through like the gig economy ecosystem. Yeah, and oh boy, what a fun time we've we've built for ourselves.

Speaker 2

What a great fresh hell for us all.

Speaker 4

Yeah, very excited first to have our first drop shaping terrorist attack. It's going to be great. It's going to be it's going to be great.

Speaker 2

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, folks, maybe drive next trip you got to take. Probably should note before we come out here. The obvious question, and there's not a long answer to this for obvious reasons, is like, well, could a non state actor get their hands on PETN or RDX, you know, these kind of explosive compounds that you can make into plastic explosives. And the short answer is yes, any moderately competent chemist with the right ingredients could make this stuff

and they're not super hard to find. But also a lot of people in commercial spaces particularly have access to PETN. It's a kind of thing.

Speaker 3

That like is common like demolition, right, yeah, it's.

Speaker 2

Coming to demolition. It's also something artists use a good amount. There is a specific formulation of pet in where they make it like a thin sheet that you can use to suddenly weld metals together explosively. And there are a couple of specific famous artists who like use PETN in order to like make bob relief sort of artworks. So it's again not something that is like impossible for people who are not the masade to gain access to.

Speaker 4

You need a chemist, an engineer, and someone who knows how to set up businesses, and between the three of them, they are going to have enough money to do this, which is yeah, not great, Yeah, not great.

Speaker 2

Anyway, everybody, have a good night, enjoy your next plain flight.

Speaker 3

It could happen.

Speaker 5

Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website foolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever.

Speaker 3

You listen to podcasts.

Speaker 5

You can now find sources for it could happen here, listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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