It Could Happen Here - Gig Economy Terror: What Israel's Pager Bomb Attack Means for You

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

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.

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and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Calls on 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. Now, today we are building a common, commonly used explosive in detonators called... What's that, Garrison? We cannot give those instructions on air. Oh, oh, oh. Well, what about for RDX? Like hexogen safe?

We can make hexogen, right? I think you need a special tech stamp or permit to teach that. Sorry. All right. Well, what if we talk about how to make it in Roblox? Oh, yeah. No, that's fine. They haven't cracked Roblox yet.

Yeah, they cracked Minecraft. That's good. That's good. The feds don't know about that one. Okay. They don't know about that one yet. Well, in that case, I'm going to read this ingredient list for PETN that I found in a torrent of Taylor Swift songs.

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 carried out an attack against Hezbollah, a militant organization in Lebanon, using PETN, which is one of the two ingredients in Simtex. 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 hexogen. 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 Mossad 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 PETN. 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 Hezbollah here is something that anybody with roughly $30,000 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 portends 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 do you think like the the either like hijacking or infiltration of the supply chain is

as replicable for yes a non-like state agency yes that is the 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 of the attack. I mean, I also have one main question. What's a pager? So Garrison, once upon a time, 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. Oh, so like a text message, like, like a text message, except for you can't really respond to it. Oh, okay.

But it, it looked pretty cool to clip on your belt in the late nineties. If you were like one of the doctors on, on the set of ER, did you ever watch ER Garrison? Were you too young for that? That's the George Clooney show, right? Cloontang, 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, but certainly hundreds of these walkie-talkies, particularly in the batteries. By the end of the first day of attacks, around a dozen people were dead and 2,700 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 0.11 grams, I think, of explosive agent actually in each walkie talkie, which was enough to kill and maim a shitload of people. Some of these folks were members of Hezbollah. I think Hezbollah 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 20 people were

killed and hundreds more wounded. So you're talking about a very sizable attack. Israel has not claimed credit for this, but the New York Times has done some pretty deep reporting on this. And per that, quote, 12 current 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 that was 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. Is all of our electronics just one hack away from being turned into a bomb? 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 try to, I hope we usually manage 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 laced with explosives, experts who spoke to CNN said. Justin Kapos, 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 lithium ion battery, I would not be over-concerned about this, Capo said. 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 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, 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 traditional 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 Mossad crafted batteries themselves for these walkie-talkies and wove PETN into the battery. 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 assembled 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. PETN is, they actually just conducted in 2020 a study to show that it can last for years. This is like the compound we use in the detonators on 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 Huang at Bunny 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 lithium 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 want. You can buy an entire pouch cell production line that will allow you to make your own custom lithium ion batteries using Alibaba.com. Yeah. Oh, boy. Yeah. So that's great, right? Or lithium. Yeah, these are lithium pouch batteries. And it cost about $15,000 in order to be able to make somewhere between like a few dozen and several hundred of these, right? So 15 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 cell 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. Right. Andrew is obviously a very smart guy with a lot of capabilities that, you know, a lay person 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 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. 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. And this was effectively what they were doing was creating like an Amazon, like shipping company, right? In 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 particular, 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, right? 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 like, even someone who is moderately trained is not going to be able to recognize a battery that's had some PETN 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 Mossad 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 intelligence officers briefed on the operation. BAC did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pagers. But the only client that really mattered was Hezbollah, and its pagers were far from ordinary. Why were Hezbollah using pagers in the first place?

Oh yeah, I can talk about that couldn't they afford it an iphone great question or something well i think we'll let me talk about that a second but gary i will say an initial response to that you know how like all of the activists in the united states after 2020 especially are saying like hey your phone isn't safe don't use your phone you know for for for any kind of like actions the state can listen in on it. Well, Hezbollah has been paranoid about that for a long time. And the Mossad actually has spent a lot of effort spreading rumors within Hezbollah about how capable Israel's smartphone exploits are, like how strong their ability to listen in on

conversations. And that played a significant role in changing policy from the top in Hezbollah to like, we are going to use the lowest tech communication solutions possible. And we're going to talk some more about that. You know, it's not low tech. These products and services that support this very podcast. That's right. High tech and absolutely no explosives in them, probably. But really, there would be no way to tell if there were. online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together.

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to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Mia, you wanted to talk. Yeah, the only thing I want to mention about that is, so there's been a lot of focus in terms of the pager use on, like, on Hezbollah trying to build this that so there's been a lot of focus in terms of the pager use on like on hezbollah

trying to build this communications grid that's like more difficult to like do to compromise yeah yeah but well to compromise from like digitally right but yeah 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 there's a massive dollar crunch kind of the the terminal like heart attack moment was that barge exploding but it had not been doing it had been on the road down it was for a while i mean there were there were i mean there were there been huge riots there over so part of what's going on is like there aren't dollars in the economy um 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 pagers for things in order to set up what a phone call is going to be because like if you're if you're going to have a phone call with someone you have to make sure that both of you are like there yeah 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 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 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 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. Yeah. And again, it's this kind of perfect storm of like paranoia and economic sort of factors colliding here. But the sort of gist of it is Israel definitely wanted to push Hezbollah to adopting. to push Hezbollah to adopting, like they clearly had an understanding of like 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. Very famously back, I think it was the nineties, there was this, uh this Palestinian man, Yaya Ayyash, who was, I think, generally credited as like kind of an architect of like car bombing attacks, who the Mossad killed with a cell phone that they had put explosives in.

But 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 Baka Valley in the village of Sarain, one young girl, Fatima Abdullah, 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 Hezbollah 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 pagers and radios were generally seen as part of a defensive measure. If there is an attack, if we go to war again, these are our safe comm system, right?

This is our low-tech comm system to allow us to 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 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 Mossad or that Netanyahu, 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 Hezbollah 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 15 grand will get you the capacity to manufacture battery packs like this.

You can just go on Alibaba 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 Alibaba 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 Mossad did. You could stick this and you could buy 2000 batteries. And it's not the kind of thing where you have to be capable of doing this on the scale that the Mossad did. You could stick this and you could buy 2000 batteries. You could stick this in 200 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 shipping through the air, right? And trigger in the air while they're being shipped to a destination. 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 care taken in the manufacturing process and i want to

turn back to andrew huang'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. If the 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 PETN 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 SORS, spatially offset Raman 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 posit that a lithium battery constructed with a PETN layer inside is largely undetectable. And this is, from folks I have talked to who have a degree of expertise in the matter, I think very accurate. And I think even if you're not striking air travel here, number one, it would be easy to get stuff like this on planes. And there was, in December, somebody attempted to, and just kind of their detonation method failed, 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 Mossad has effectively provided people with a perfect plan of attack to fuck with air travel or to fuck with the supply lines. Because 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 extent to which that would be disruptive in society is like the potential is enormous. And the potential for like runaway terror is enormous yeah i mean that that was one of the first things that we talked about

once news of this drop is like beyond the actual like physical injuries and death cockpit caused by this attack this is like primarily an infrastructure attack in this case it like completely destroys like the communications infrastructure of Hezbollah. But in the strategy behind this attack, it can be used just to target various types of infrastructure, whether that be supply chains, travel. It puts distrust in your own equipment. And certainly, its application on airlines is obviously very worrying. 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? No. You can get, I mean, you have to ship 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 are having 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. It's like terrorism in the era of the gig economy. Yeah. And that was one of the reasons I liked Fincher's recent movie, The Killer.

Yeah. Just in terms of how much of the gig economy was like worked into these like traditional like industries, whether that be like worked into these like traditional like industries whether that be like terrorism uh because like hitmen aren't really real but uh certainly terrorism is and i think there's a lot of ways that these things can be uh applied in this kind of bizarre uber amazon yeah world that we've created where the economy is just so fractured in all these little ways there's also i think the the sort of production angle too 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 like 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 Alibaba, 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. Yeah, there's no quality control. There's no quality control. There's no intense vetting. It's all extremely accessible. It's very easy to infiltrate this process.

Yeah. Here's, here's another line from that Andrew Huang article on bunny at bunny studios, B-U-N-N-I-E 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 was 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. Yeah.

And, and the other, 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 a degree of competence yes but the actual cost fifteen thousand dollars like that's not even like you're looking at like a millionaire like that's something your local dentist can afford to pull off. 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 just like a rich guy. Yeah. Not even that rich guy can pull this off.

Yep. Which is. Not even that rich guy can pull this off. Yep. Which is... I guess 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 a message that was sent out that triggered something within the device.

It seems to have been a message. That made the explosive detonate. Because they did send a message immediately before. So it seemed to have been tied message that made the explosive detonate because they did send a message immediately before so it seemed to have been tied it's to some extent with a message andrew huang 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 massad doesn't have any trouble getting a hold of military detonators playing also walked through how you could build a circuit into the actual battery itself, like a trigger circuit.

You know what, I'm just 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 detonate plastic explosives. This is going to be the one that gets all arrested. Yeah. this is gonna be the one that gets all arrested yeah hey guys i'm kate max you might know me from my popular online series the running interview show

where i run with celebrities athletes entrepreneurs and more after runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real inspiring stories from the people, you know, follow and admire join me every week for post run high. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to post run high on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant

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podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Off offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse, and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology, I just hate the people

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Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez,

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and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeart

radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 may conflagrate, burn fast instead of detonating and creating a much more damaging shockwave. However, the Wikipedia page notes that an electric spark with an energy in the range of 10 to 60 millijoules is sufficient to initiate detonation. Based on available descriptions of the devices getting hot prior to detonation, one might suppose that detonation is initiated by a trigger circuit shorting out the battery pack, causing the internal polymer spacers to melt and eventually the cathode-anoid

pairs coming into contact, creating a spark. Such a spark may furthermore be guaranteed across the PETN sheet by introducing a small defect, such as a slight dimple in the surrounding cathode-anoid layers. Once the pack gets to the melting point of the spacers, the dimpled region is likely to connect, leading to a spark that then detonates the PETN layer sandwiched 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 TSSOP8 package, and at least one or more large transistors capable of handling the current capacity of the battery. And basically, that's where you put it. Oops. Oops. And again, I did talk to someone with expertise in 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 set up, but because this is the Mossad, they have access to detonators and a detonator guarantees,

right? That you, you, you get the proper kind of explosion. But again, even if you're using kind of the, the less Gucci method here that would be available to a non-state actor, if only 50 out of the 300 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 and to the economy, to supply lines by carrying out an attack like that. This is so terroristic in nature. And like if any other group did this, like if Hezbollah did this attack, if Hamas did this attack. Oh, my God. We would be we would be bombing them right now yeah if some like just random like accelerationist network somehow pulled this off like yeah we would be pulling our hair out we 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 is just i don't know what to do anymore they've endangered they're they have endangered everyone right like like every single person listening to this is less safe because israel carried out this attack what is airport screening going to look like if this if this keeps happening importantly am i going to be able to take all of my batteries on the planes that i can play video games on a 14-hour flight garrison you know yeah the the plugs in the seats don't always work well 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 airplane yeah 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 yeah how things have been this past year i guess yeah 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 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 Mossad probably shouldn't have done this. One of many reasons. One 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 masse 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 chemical suppliers can moonlight and elicit 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 grenades should be a crime as it blurs the line between civilian and military technologies. And that should be something everyone can agree on. Yeah, yeah, i think i think so jesus christ it 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 what a great fresh hell for us all

yeah very excited for us to have our first drop shipping terrorist attack it's going to be great it's going to be it's going to be great yeah It's going to be great. 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 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 that like is...

It's common in demolition, right? Yeah, it's common in demolition it's also something artists use a good amount there is a specific formulation of petn where they make it like a thin sheet that you can use to suddenly weld metals together explosively um 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, not something that is like impossible for people who are not the Mossad to gain access to.

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

Anyway, everybody have a good night. Enjoy your next plane flight. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys,

and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept,

but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for therapy gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming.

This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.