Oh hey – the 90’s called… and now you’re dead! Jeebus Crispy, the world is a weird place. Over the weekend another assassination attempt on a current presidential candidate, and again nobody seems to be especially surprised or concerned – at least not as much as they care about a fabricated story about people eating cats & dogs (and yeah, there’s *sides*, somehow), and it all kind of feels like a deep candyflip gone very sideways.. still – for a looong time.. like the train is locked on the rail and we set for a hell-bent-for-leather thrill ride minus the fun. But I have HOPE. Thrill rides are *always* designed to go UP after the DOWN, right? Anyway, back to the exploding pagers/cell phones thing. 
So, booby trapped pagers? Getting dozens of them slipped into the EDC of a large number of political officials, undetected? That seems like some serious Q-Branch James Bond shenanigans, that. Story’s fresh, so nobody has specifically verified that they were booby-trapped – I’ll keep an eye on the story for that verification… Otherwise… Um.. Are we carrying bombs in our pockets right now?!? >.> <.< O: 
Weapon of Choice: “Thunderbird 4” 1968 Montgomery Ward Signature 440T #C8899610
Reuters reported in July that Hezbollah transitioned from cell phones to pagers because pagers present fewer means for Israel to spy with (no mics, no cameras, less sophisticated). It seems, however, that some party (Hezbollah accused Israel, but Israel has not taken responsibility) was able to access the manufacturing supply chain of the pagers and booby trap them.
The pagers are branded Gold Apollo, but the Taiwan-based company has said that these particular batches were made by a company in Europe (not named) with license to produce them.
-sourced from the Washington Post and New York Times.
Well, that’s a little reassuring, but then I have strategic questions about what the point was. if you’re going to detonate booby traps to cripple the leadership of an opposing political organization, that’s a “softening” operation – you want to follow that up with a column of tanks while the chaos is high. It has no point otherwise other than tipping your hand about what you *can* do, and informing everyone they need to be more careful about supply chains. Makes me wonder if someone accidentally hit the big red button, cuz what they’ve done is strategically little more than a terror attack rather than anything militarily useful.
Whatever the goal, it has ramped up hostilities in the region, increasing the likelihood of a much larger open conflict. I can’t see Hezbollah letting this go without a response.
I read somewhere that the October Hamas attack surprised Israel because they too abandoned mobiles and reverted to face-fo-face or old-fashioned written communication
Re: Hezbolla response – yeah, that’s part of the “political cost” I mention below. It probably won’t go down well even with their allies, and they really didn’t get anything worth the price.
The purpose, I think, is to demoralize and injure as many Hezbollah members as possible while degrading their communications (they already can’t use cell phones). A pretty ingenious bit of spycraft.
If anyone rigs iPhones to do this, I’ll definitely be injured, because the $@!! thing is nearly always with me.
Heh, gotta disagree – terrible spycraft if that was the whole plan. You don’t burn that kind of infiltration for a few dozen fighters and commanders taken out. I’m thinking this was meant to be a part of an invasion of Lebanon, and someone blew the op before the military was in place. Otherwise, it was incompetent and politically risky. It has the stink of terrorism, and a real state don’t want that if it can help it.
Someone has put out the idea that perhaps Hezbollah was close to discovering the compromised devices, and rather than let that happen…. Bang…. Seems rather heavy handed, but given the insanity going on in the region…. Maybe a “certain party” decided to use the opportunity to send a message message… Sadly, escalations are going to lead to escalations…
Didn’t Stephen King have a vaguely similar idea in a book? Wasn’t it called *Cell*? Some sort of bizarre trigger signal sent over cell phones turns everyone into mindless killer zombies or something…. (Uhmmm…. *That’s* a bit too on the nose, in and of itself…)
Ahh, yeah I read that – slowly programmed everyone to be hive mind zombies. The thing that I found interesting so far is that there doesn’t seem to be any detectable explosives in the devices. Hezbolla had these things for near a year and almost certainly took commercial flights where the devices would have been x-rayed and swabbed for explosives – yet none got detected. That’s the part that’s real scary. The fact that they lobbed a buncha missles into Lebanon yesterday just convinces me that it was supposed to be a combined op, and now they’re just executing the bits of the plan in parts.