September 26, 2024 • 35 mins
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)
Study reveals robust performance in aged detonator explosive (lanl.gov)
How Israel Built a Modern-Day Trojan Horse: Exploding Pagers - The New York Times (archive.is)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
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 (00:19):
Now, today we are building a common commonly used explosive
nodicators called Oh what's that?
Speaker 3 (00:27):
That is? We cannot give those instructions on air?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Oh oh oh, well, what about what about for our
DX like hexogen safe? We can make hexogen?
Speaker 4 (00:35):
Right?
Speaker 3 (00:35):
I think you need a special uh tech stamp or
permit to teach that.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Sorry, all right, what if we talk about how to
make it in roadblocks?
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Oh? Yeah, no, that's fine. They haven't They haven't cracked
roadblocks yet. You have a correct minecraft.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
That's good, that's good. The FEDS don't know about that one.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Okay, they don't know about that one yet.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
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
(01:14):
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
(01:36):
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,
(02:00):
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
(02:21):
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
(02:42):
to be talking about today.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
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 (02:53):
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 (03:02):
I mean, I also have one main question. What's a pager?
Speaker 2 (03:07):
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 (03:21):
Oh so like a text message, Like a.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Text message, except for you can't really respond to it.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Oh okay, but it looked pretty.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
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 (03:36):
Were you too young for that. That's the George Clooney show, right.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
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
(04:01):
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
(04:21):
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,
(04:43):
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
(05:06):
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
(05:27):
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 (05:38):
Is all of our electronics just one hack away from
turning from being turned into a bomb?
Speaker 2 (05:42):
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
(06:03):
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
(06:24):
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
(06:47):
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
(07:07):
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
(07:30):
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
(07:53):
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
(08:16):
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
(08:39):
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,
(09:00):
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
(09:21):
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.
(09:45):
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
(10:07):
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
(10:31):
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
(10:52):
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 (11:02):
Right.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
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
(11:23):
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
(11:44):
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
(12:04):
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 (12:16):
Right.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
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
(12:38):
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
(13:00):
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 (13:12):
Why were hesblow using pages in the first place?
Speaker 4 (13:15):
Oh yeah, I can talk about that.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
Couldn't they afford it an iPhone? Great question or something?
Speaker 2 (13:22):
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 (13:39):
Yah.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
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
(14:01):
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 (14:12):
These products and services that support this very podcast.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
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 (14:34):
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
(14:54):
less attention is that so Lebanon's economy has been an
absolute shit show for probably like eight nine years now.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
There's a massive dollars front.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
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 (15:13):
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
(15:34):
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
(15:58):
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
(16:18):
move down the technology chain because it's just expensive.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
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
(16:43):
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,
(17:06):
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
(17:29):
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
(17:52):
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
(18:14):
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
(18:37):
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,
(18:58):
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
(19:20):
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
(19:41):
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
(20:02):
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
(20:24):
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
(20:46):
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
(21:07):
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
(21:27):
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,
(21:49):
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
(22:11):
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
(22:34):
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 (22:44):
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,
(23:06):
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 (23:17):
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
(23:38):
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
(23:58):
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 (24:06):
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
(24:27):
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 (24:38):
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
(24:58):
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 (25:19):
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 (25:28):
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
(25:48):
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 (26:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (26:00):
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 (26:10):
A degree of competition.
Speaker 4 (26:11):
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 (26:21):
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 (26:33):
Just like a rich guy. Yeah, not even that rich
guy can pull this off.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Yep, which is.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
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 (26:56):
It seems to have been a message.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
That made the explosive debtonates because they.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
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,
(27:23):
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 (27:36):
This is going to be the one that gets all arrested.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
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
(28:00):
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
(28:21):
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
(28:42):
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
(29:05):
where you put it.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
Oops.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
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.
(29:30):
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
(29:52):
to supply lines by carrying out an attack like that.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
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 (30:03):
We would be we would be bombing them right now.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
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 (30:23):
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 (30:31):
What is airport screening going to look like? If this
keeps happening?
Speaker 2 (30:34):
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 (30:43):
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 (30:59):
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
(31:19):
political capital together to try to do something about it,
But like there's no way.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
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
(31:46):
or the way in which like digital merchandising works, right,
which is again why the Masad probably shouldn't have done this.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
No, what many reasons?
Speaker 2 (31:55):
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
(32:18):
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
(32:40):
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
(33:01):
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
(33:21):
everyone can agree on.
Speaker 3 (33:23):
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 (33:33):
What a great fresh hell for us all.
Speaker 4 (33:36):
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 (33:44):
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
(34:07):
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 (34:19):
That like is common like demolition, right, yeah, it's.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
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
(34:44):
it's again not something that is like impossible for people
who are not the masade to gain access to.
Speaker 4 (34:50):
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 (35:02):
Anyway, everybody, have a good night, enjoy your next plain flight.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
It could happen.
Speaker 5 (35:09):
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 (35:20):
You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 5 (35:22):
You can now find sources for it could happen here,
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
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 (00:19):
Now, today we are building a common commonly used explosive
nodicators called Oh what's that?
Speaker 3 (00:27):
That is? We cannot give those instructions on air?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Oh oh oh, well, what about what about for our
DX like hexogen safe? We can make hexogen?
Speaker 4 (00:35):
Right?
Speaker 3 (00:35):
I think you need a special uh tech stamp or
permit to teach that.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Sorry, all right, what if we talk about how to
make it in roadblocks?
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Oh? Yeah, no, that's fine. They haven't They haven't cracked
roadblocks yet. You have a correct minecraft.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
That's good, that's good. The FEDS don't know about that one.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Okay, they don't know about that one yet.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
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
(01:14):
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
(01:36):
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,
(02:00):
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
(02:21):
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
(02:42):
to be talking about today.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
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 (02:53):
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 (03:02):
I mean, I also have one main question. What's a pager?
Speaker 2 (03:07):
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 (03:21):
Oh so like a text message, Like a.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Text message, except for you can't really respond to it.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Oh okay, but it looked pretty.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
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 (03:36):
Were you too young for that. That's the George Clooney show, right.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
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
(04:01):
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
(04:21):
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,
(04:43):
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
(05:06):
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
(05:27):
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 (05:38):
Is all of our electronics just one hack away from
turning from being turned into a bomb?
Speaker 2 (05:42):
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
(06:03):
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
(06:24):
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
(06:47):
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
(07:07):
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
(07:30):
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
(07:53):
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
(08:16):
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
(08:39):
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,
(09:00):
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
(09:21):
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.
(09:45):
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
(10:07):
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
(10:31):
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
(10:52):
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 (11:02):
Right.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
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
(11:23):
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
(11:44):
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
(12:04):
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 (12:16):
Right.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
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
(12:38):
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
(13:00):
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 (13:12):
Why were hesblow using pages in the first place?
Speaker 4 (13:15):
Oh yeah, I can talk about that.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
Couldn't they afford it an iPhone? Great question or something?
Speaker 2 (13:22):
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 (13:39):
Yah.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
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
(14:01):
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 (14:12):
These products and services that support this very podcast.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
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 (14:34):
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
(14:54):
less attention is that so Lebanon's economy has been an
absolute shit show for probably like eight nine years now.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
There's a massive dollars front.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
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 (15:13):
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
(15:34):
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
(15:58):
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
(16:18):
move down the technology chain because it's just expensive.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
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
(16:43):
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,
(17:06):
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
(17:29):
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
(17:52):
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
(18:14):
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
(18:37):
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,
(18:58):
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
(19:20):
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
(19:41):
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
(20:02):
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
(20:24):
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
(20:46):
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
(21:07):
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
(21:27):
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,
(21:49):
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
(22:11):
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
(22:34):
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 (22:44):
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,
(23:06):
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 (23:17):
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
(23:38):
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
(23:58):
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 (24:06):
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
(24:27):
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 (24:38):
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
(24:58):
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 (25:19):
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 (25:28):
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
(25:48):
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 (26:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (26:00):
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 (26:10):
A degree of competition.
Speaker 4 (26:11):
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 (26:21):
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 (26:33):
Just like a rich guy. Yeah, not even that rich
guy can pull this off.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Yep, which is.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
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 (26:56):
It seems to have been a message.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
That made the explosive debtonates because they.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
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,
(27:23):
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 (27:36):
This is going to be the one that gets all arrested.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
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
(28:00):
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
(28:21):
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
(28:42):
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
(29:05):
where you put it.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
Oops.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
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.
(29:30):
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
(29:52):
to supply lines by carrying out an attack like that.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
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 (30:03):
We would be we would be bombing them right now.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
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 (30:23):
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 (30:31):
What is airport screening going to look like? If this
keeps happening?
Speaker 2 (30:34):
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 (30:43):
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 (30:59):
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
(31:19):
political capital together to try to do something about it,
But like there's no way.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
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
(31:46):
or the way in which like digital merchandising works, right,
which is again why the Masad probably shouldn't have done this.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
No, what many reasons?
Speaker 2 (31:55):
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
(32:18):
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
(32:40):
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
(33:01):
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
(33:21):
everyone can agree on.
Speaker 3 (33:23):
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 (33:33):
What a great fresh hell for us all.
Speaker 4 (33:36):
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 (33:44):
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
(34:07):
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 (34:19):
That like is common like demolition, right, yeah, it's.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
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
(34:44):
it's again not something that is like impossible for people
who are not the masade to gain access to.
Speaker 4 (34:50):
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 (35:02):
Anyway, everybody, have a good night, enjoy your next plain flight.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
It could happen.
Speaker 5 (35:09):
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 (35:20):
You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 5 (35:22):
You can now find sources for it could happen here,
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
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Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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