Speaker 1: Also media Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a
Speaker 1: podcast in which every week I sit down with my
Speaker 1: friends Mia and Garrison and I walk them through a
Speaker 1: little backyard chemistry project.
Speaker 2: Now, today we are building a common commonly used explosive
Speaker 2: nodicators called Oh what's that?
Speaker 3: That is? We cannot give those instructions on air?
Speaker 2: Oh oh oh, well, what about what about for our
Speaker 2: DX like hexogen safe? We can make hexogen?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 3: I think you need a special uh tech stamp or
Speaker 3: permit to teach that.
Speaker 2: Sorry, all right, what if we talk about how to
Speaker 2: make it in roadblocks?
Speaker 3: Oh? Yeah, no, that's fine. They haven't They haven't cracked
Speaker 3: roadblocks yet. You have a correct minecraft.
Speaker 2: That's good, that's good. The FEDS don't know about that one.
Speaker 3: Okay, they don't know about that one yet.
Speaker 2: Well, in that case, I'm going to read these this
Speaker 2: ingredient list for pet in that I found in a
Speaker 2: torrent of Taylor Swift song. So this is I'm certain
Speaker 2: the best information available right now. Anyway, we're talking this
Speaker 2: week about explosives. We're talking particularly about the fact that
Speaker 2: Israel just carry out an attack against Tesblah, a militant
Speaker 2: organization in Lebanon using pet in, which is one of
Speaker 2: the two ingredients in Semtex. It is commonly used as
Speaker 2: the detonator. It's a stable, high explosive, so it's often
Speaker 2: used to like basically trigger the larger explosive charge, which
Speaker 2: is generally like hexygen. You know, you mix the two
Speaker 2: together with like plastic agents and you get like that's
Speaker 2: where you get the traditional plastic explosives. And it's come
Speaker 2: out recently that the Masad managed to sneak some of
Speaker 2: this stuff. Well sneak's not even really the right word,
Speaker 2: but they managed to impregnate a batch of pagers and
Speaker 2: radios with pet in. Now, this was a pretty big
Speaker 2: story last week. I think a lot of people are
Speaker 2: focusing kind of on the wrong parts of it. But yeah,
Speaker 2: that's what we're going to be talking about today because
Speaker 2: there's an element of this story that hasn't gotten out,
Speaker 2: which is the degree to which what Israel did to
Speaker 2: Hasblah Here is something that anybody with roughly thirty thousand
Speaker 2: dollars could imitate to a surprising degree of fidelity, Like
Speaker 2: this is an attack that is deeply easy to carry out,
Speaker 2: and the fact that Israel has kind of made the
Speaker 2: decision to pull this up is a kind of the
Speaker 2: breaking of a seal in a way, and I think
Speaker 2: it portins some very frightening things for all of us,
Speaker 2: and particularly for air travel. So that's what we're going
Speaker 2: to be talking about today.
Speaker 3: Do you think like the the either like hijacking or
Speaker 3: infiltration of the supply chain is as replicable for yes,
Speaker 3: a non state agency. Yes, that is the.
Speaker 2: Thing that is scariest about this attack to me, and
Speaker 2: that is going to be kind of the meat of
Speaker 2: what we're talking about. We should probably start by this
Speaker 2: sort of laying out the scale the attack.
Speaker 3: I mean, I also have one main question. What's a pager?
Speaker 2: So Garrison, Once upon a time, Uh huh, we kind
Speaker 2: of had the ability to broadcast signals over large areas,
Speaker 2: but it was a real pain in the ass to
Speaker 2: like do that with a phone call or anything but
Speaker 2: a couple of words at a time.
Speaker 3: Oh so like a text message, Like a.
Speaker 2: Text message, except for you can't really respond to it.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, but it looked pretty.
Speaker 2: Cool to clip on your belt in the late nineties.
Speaker 2: If you were like one of the doctors on the
Speaker 2: set of Er did you ever watch Er? Garrison?
Speaker 3: Were you too young for that. That's the George Clooney show, right.
Speaker 2: Cluone tang, But yes, he looked great in it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so that's where pagers came from. Was the television show
Speaker 2: Er written by Michael Crichton, which means pagers are related
Speaker 2: to dinosaurs. And yeah, so Israel managed to get We'll
Speaker 2: talk a little bit later about how, but they managed
Speaker 2: to get explosives in an unknown number of but certainly
Speaker 2: hundreds of these walkie talkies, particularly in the batteries. By
Speaker 2: the end of the first day of attacks, round a
Speaker 2: dozen people were dead and twenty seven hundred had been wounded.
Speaker 2: Many people. Seriously, there's like horrible videos of folks going
Speaker 2: flying off of bicycles and the like when this stuff detonates,
Speaker 2: Like it takes very little petn to create a pretty
Speaker 2: significant explosion, and we're looking at about like zero point
Speaker 2: one point one grams I think of explosive agent actually
Speaker 2: in each walkie talkie, which was enough to kill in
Speaker 2: may Mae shitload of people. Some of these folks were
Speaker 2: members of Hezbelah I think. HESBLA has confirmed that eight
Speaker 2: of their fighters were killed. At least four of the
Speaker 2: dead are children and the second day of the attack,
Speaker 2: a bunch of radios went off as well. Another twenty
Speaker 2: people were killed and hundreds more wounded. So you're talking
Speaker 2: about a very sizable attack. Israel is not claimed credit
Speaker 2: for this, but The New York Times has done some
Speaker 2: pretty deep reporting on this, and per that quote, twelve
Speaker 2: and former defense and intelligence officials who were briefed on
Speaker 2: the attack say the Israelis were behind it. And it's
Speaker 2: just also obvious that this was Israel who else, Like
Speaker 2: who else would do this? Now, one of the reasons
Speaker 2: I'm getting into this is that there were a lot
Speaker 2: like the first kind of concern that people had when
Speaker 2: this attack was carried out is like, oh shit, was
Speaker 2: this some sort of a hack? Did Israel exploit some
Speaker 2: sort of a glitch in how these products batteries worked
Speaker 2: and basically like hack them to cause a runaway thermal
Speaker 2: escalation within the battery that led to it detonating.
Speaker 3: Is all of our electronics just one hack away from
Speaker 3: turning from being turned into a bomb?
Speaker 2: No, And I understand why people focused on that aspect
Speaker 2: of it, but it led to I think some articles
Speaker 2: that are this is going to be one of those
Speaker 2: we always we try to. I hope we usually managed
Speaker 2: to be the like calm voices in the room, but
Speaker 2: this is one of those cases where really people need
Speaker 2: to be less calm. And I do want to highlight
Speaker 2: an article that I think went in the wrong direction
Speaker 2: on that front. It's a CNN business piece called we
Speaker 2: still don't know how the Lebanon pager attack happened. Here's
Speaker 2: what we do know about our own electronic devices, and
Speaker 2: I'm going to read a quote from that. In short,
Speaker 2: your communications device is not at risk for exploding unless
Speaker 2: it's heavily tampered with and least with explosives. Experts who
Speaker 2: spoke to CNN set Justin Kappos, a cybersecurity professor at NYU,
Speaker 2: said that it's possible to cause damage to a variety
Speaker 2: of batteries, most commonly lithium batteries, but he said it
Speaker 2: seems like the devices were intentionally designed to explode when triggered,
Speaker 2: not a pager that everyone else in the world is using.
Speaker 2: If you're a normal person with a lithian and ion battery,
Speaker 2: I would not be over concerned about this CAPO set
Speaker 2: and I think that that is an error and we're
Speaker 2: going to get into as to why. But let's talk
Speaker 2: about how Israel did this first. And this is again
Speaker 2: all kind of per the New York Times reporting how
Speaker 2: Israel built a modern day trojan horse. They seem to
Speaker 2: be the first piece people who have kind of put
Speaker 2: all of this together to an extent that is probably
Speaker 2: pretty close to accurate. There are some debates as to
Speaker 2: like did they actually have a detonator in here or
Speaker 2: did they cause a thermal because PETN, while it's very stable,
Speaker 2: can be set off by heat. So it's theoretically possible
Speaker 2: to get a battery hot enough that it can detonate PETN,
Speaker 2: but it's not going to be as reliable as using
Speaker 2: something like a bridge wire cap like a like a
Speaker 2: traditional like triggering device. Yeah, and so it's a little
Speaker 2: bit unclear as to how this was made, but whatever
Speaker 2: the case, basically what Israel did is they made their
Speaker 2: own batteries for walkie talkies that were clones of an
Speaker 2: earlier kind of walkie talkie made by a Taiwanese company
Speaker 2: that were no longer in production. Right, so this Taiwanese
Speaker 2: company had made real walkie talkies for a while, they
Speaker 2: stopped making them. Israel got their hands on some originals
Speaker 2: and manufactured copies. Now that is the part of this
Speaker 2: that would be hard to replicate. But the copies of
Speaker 2: the walkie talkies themselves were not the explosive agent. What
Speaker 2: actually where the explosives were was in the detachable battery.
Speaker 2: And Masad crafted batteries themselves for these walkie talkies and
Speaker 2: wove PETN into the batteries. So if you haven't really
Speaker 2: looked at a lithium ion battery, like one of the
Speaker 2: kinds of batteries that you're going to like, I mean,
Speaker 2: it's similar to the ones in your phone, but it's
Speaker 2: just also like any kind of electronics battery, they are
Speaker 2: kind of these weird folded things, Like they look just
Speaker 2: like a little square packet, usually with like a cord
Speaker 2: coming off of it if you actually look at the battery.
Speaker 2: But the way they're as symboled is they're like laminated
Speaker 2: into an aluminum foil pouch. And while you are kind
Speaker 2: of doing that laminating process, you can basically just weave
Speaker 2: some PETN into like alongside the battery, and it will
Speaker 2: cost you a small fraction of the batteries like life like,
Speaker 2: you won't get as much actual battery time out of it,
Speaker 2: but it's not going to detonate on its own. Ptn is.
Speaker 2: They actually just conducted in twenty twenty a study to
Speaker 2: show that it can last for years. This is like
Speaker 2: the compound we use in the detonators in our nuclear devices.
Speaker 2: Once you get a bunch of walkie talkies that are
Speaker 2: impregnated with this stuff out there, you could sit on
Speaker 2: them for years until like you needed to actually use them. Now,
Speaker 2: the key thing about this, it seems like when you're
Speaker 2: talking about wrapping a battery that's got you know, plastic
Speaker 2: explosives in it, well, that's the kind of thing that
Speaker 2: only a state level actor can do. And this is
Speaker 2: going to bring me to the source that I really
Speaker 2: want to get to people for this episode, which is
Speaker 2: an article by a guy named Andrew Hwang at Bunny's Studios.
Speaker 2: Andrew is a computer scientist. He's got a doctorate in
Speaker 2: philosophy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and kind of
Speaker 2: critically for some personal projects that he had done. Recently,
Speaker 2: he has manufactured his own the them Ion batteries, and
Speaker 2: in doing so he's figured out like how to actually
Speaker 2: build a personal production line to make batteries like this
Speaker 2: that you could customize to fit into kind of basically
Speaker 2: any kind of electronic device you want. You can buy
Speaker 2: an entire pouch cell production line that will allow you
Speaker 2: to make your own custom lithium ion batteries using Alibaba
Speaker 2: dot Com. Yeah, oh boy, Yeah, so that's great, right
Speaker 2: or lithi. Yeah, these are lithium pouch batteries. And it
Speaker 2: costs about fifteen thousand dollars in order to be able
Speaker 2: to make somewhere between like a few dozen and several
Speaker 2: hundred of these, right, So fifteen grand will provide you
Speaker 2: with all of the materials you need to from the
Speaker 2: ground up make at least, you know, probably a couple
Speaker 2: hundred pouch sell batteries. Right. And it's the kind of
Speaker 2: thing where it's not just any idiot could do it,
Speaker 2: but any reasonably intelligent person with the degree of like
Speaker 2: experience in engineering can do it.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Andrew is obviously a very smart guy with a lot
Speaker 2: of capabilities that you know, a layperson might not have.
Speaker 2: But basically any kind of competent engineer could figure this
Speaker 2: out pretty much. And you're talking again, a few thousand
Speaker 2: dollars to get potentially you know, hundreds or even more
Speaker 2: of these made now The other side of the attack
Speaker 2: here is that the Israelis created a bunch of shell companies.
Speaker 2: You know, they started manufacturing copies of these walkie talkies
Speaker 2: so that they could put their own explosives impregnated batteries
Speaker 2: in them, and then they built a bunch of shady
Speaker 2: ass companies in order to sell them. This was effectively
Speaker 2: what they were doing was creating like an Amazon like
Speaker 2: shipping company, right and the same way that like anybody
Speaker 2: who wanted to, can you know, get a business license
Speaker 2: and get access to like a bunch of electronics and
Speaker 2: sell them on Amazon, like you could buy a consignment
Speaker 2: of a thousand walkie talkies, make your own batteries for them,
Speaker 2: and sell them on Amazon. Amazon does not do a
Speaker 2: particularly like any really checking up on the people who
Speaker 2: choose to sell through their site. And even if they
Speaker 2: were to do that, PETN is effectively impossible to find.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: There is a way to scan for it, but it
Speaker 2: takes like a half hour per package, And it's the
Speaker 2: kind of thing where even if you're taking this stuff apart,
Speaker 2: unless you have someone who is like doing chemical tests
Speaker 2: on what's in there, anyone who's even someone who is
Speaker 2: moderately trained is not going to be able to recognize
Speaker 2: a battery that's had some pet and put into it
Speaker 2: from like a regular battery. So I'm going to read
Speaker 2: another quote from that New York Times article about how
Speaker 2: the Masad kind of structured the shell companies here that
Speaker 2: allowed them to pose as a company making pagers. By
Speaker 2: all appearances, BAC Consulting was a Hungary based company that
Speaker 2: was under contract to produce the devices on behalf of
Speaker 2: a Taiwanese company, gold Apollo. In fact, it was part
Speaker 2: of an Israeli front. According to Three and Tell officers
Speaker 2: briefed on the operation, BAC did take on ordinary clients,
Speaker 2: for which it produced a range of ordinary pages, but
Speaker 2: the only client that really mattered was Hesbelah, and its
Speaker 2: pages were far from ordinary.
Speaker 3: Why were hesblow using pages in the first place?
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, I can talk about that.
Speaker 3: Couldn't they afford it an iPhone? Great question or something?
Speaker 2: Well, I think we'll let me talk about that a second,
Speaker 2: But gar I will say an initial response to that.
Speaker 2: You know how, like all of the activists in the
Speaker 2: United States after twenty twenty especially, are saying like, Hey,
Speaker 2: your phone isn't safe, don't use your phone. You know,
Speaker 2: for for any kind of like actions, the state can
Speaker 2: listen in on that.
Speaker 5: Yah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well Hesbelah has been paranoid about that for a
Speaker 2: long time, and the Masad actually has spent a lot
Speaker 2: of effort spreading rumors within Hesbola about how capable Israel's
Speaker 2: smartphone exploits are, like how strong their ability to like
Speaker 2: listen in on conversations, and that played a sgnificant role
Speaker 2: in changing like policy from the top and hes a
Speaker 2: lot to like we are going to use the lowest
Speaker 2: tech communications solutions possible, and we're going to talk some
Speaker 2: more about that. You know, it's not low tech.
Speaker 3: These products and services that support this very podcast.
Speaker 2: That's right, high tech and absolutely no explosives in them,
Speaker 2: probably but really there would be no way to tell
Speaker 2: if there were. And we're back Mia, you wanted to talk. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Thelnlyst thing I want to mention about that is so
Speaker 4: there's been a lot of focus in terms of the
Speaker 4: page you use on like on Hesbela trying to build
Speaker 4: this communications grid that's like more difficult to like do
Speaker 4: to compromise. Yeah, yeah, well, well it's to compromise from
Speaker 4: like digitally, right. But the other thing that's kind of
Speaker 4: going on here that I think is getting a lot
Speaker 4: less attention is that so Lebanon's economy has been an
Speaker 4: absolute shit show for probably like eight nine years now.
Speaker 3: There's a massive dollars front.
Speaker 2: Kind of the terminal like heart attack moment was that
Speaker 2: barge exploding, but it had not been doing it had
Speaker 2: been on the road down.
Speaker 4: I mean there were there were, I mean there were
Speaker 4: there have been huge riots there over. So part of
Speaker 4: what's going on is like there aren't dollars in the economy,
Speaker 4: and this has made everything unbelievably expensive. And one of
Speaker 4: the things that's unbelievably expensive is phone calls, and so
Speaker 4: there are I don't think there's been much coverage of this,
Speaker 4: but it's like there's also just regular people also use
Speaker 4: pages for things in order to set up when a
Speaker 4: phone call is going to be because like, if you're
Speaker 4: going to have a phone call with someone, you have
Speaker 4: to make sure that both of you are like there.
Speaker 4: So it's it's not purely just a military thing. It's
Speaker 4: also just because of how unbelievably expensive like calling people
Speaker 4: has gotten and this sort of terminal crisis of the
Speaker 4: Lebanese economy in the sense that like there aren't dollars
Speaker 4: to pay for things, and so we've gotten to this
Speaker 4: point where even even sort of stuff that we consider
Speaker 4: like fairly basic and not that expensive, like phone service,
Speaker 4: has just gotten unbelievably expensive for everyone. And this is
Speaker 4: sort of caused yeah, a lot of like regular people
Speaker 4: who have no affiliation with this whatsoever to sort of
Speaker 4: move down the technology chain because it's just expensive.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and again it's this kind of perfect storm of
Speaker 2: like paranoia and economics sort of factors colliding here. But
Speaker 2: the sort of gist of it is Israel definitely wanted
Speaker 2: to push has a lot to adopting, Like they clearly
Speaker 2: had an understanding of what they could do and wanted
Speaker 2: deliberately to kind of push for this because it's a
Speaker 2: lot easier to get some a manufactured explosive and it
Speaker 2: would have been a lot harder to do this with
Speaker 2: like iPhones, right, not that Israel hasn't done this with
Speaker 2: cell phones in the past, sure, very famously, back I
Speaker 2: think it was the nineties, there was this Palestinian man
Speaker 2: yah Ya Yash who was I think generally credited as
Speaker 2: like kind of an architect of like car bombing attacks,
Speaker 2: who the Masad killed with a cell phone that they
Speaker 2: had put it explosives in it. In that case, it
Speaker 2: was a very labor intensive process with a single phone
Speaker 2: meant to target and blow the head off of like
Speaker 2: one guy. This is like a much more reckless and
Speaker 2: much more like civilian casualty open operation. Again, I'm going
Speaker 2: to quote from that New York Times article. In Lebanon's
Speaker 2: Baca Valley, in the village of Sarain, one young girl,
Speaker 2: Fatima Abullah, had just come home from her first day
Speaker 2: of fourth grade when she heard her father's pager begin
Speaker 2: to beep. Her aunt said she picked up the device
Speaker 2: to bring it to him and was holding it when
Speaker 2: it exploded, killing her. Fatima was nine. It's probably worth
Speaker 2: noting here that while HESBLA is a militant group, they
Speaker 2: are also effectively the state in a decent chunk of
Speaker 2: Lebanon and a lot of the folks who would have
Speaker 2: these because these these pagers and radios were generally seen
Speaker 2: as part of like a offensive measure, like if there
Speaker 2: is an attack, if we go to war again, these
Speaker 2: are our safe comm system, right like this is our
Speaker 2: like low tech comm system to allow us to like
Speaker 2: stay in touch. So a lot of these people would
Speaker 2: have been folks whose role was more on the social
Speaker 2: side of things rather than like actual armed militants. You
Speaker 2: have no way of knowing who you're blowing up. Everyone's
Speaker 2: just getting these devices. And it's interesting to me that
Speaker 2: the Masad or that that net Yahoo, because I'm sure
Speaker 2: this order had to have come from the top, gave
Speaker 2: the order to carry out this attack. Now, they had
Speaker 2: had these in place for a while. Exactly when is
Speaker 2: a little bit unclear, but long enough that there was
Speaker 2: like a nickname for the attack itself that everyone knew
Speaker 2: they were going to carry out at some point. So
Speaker 2: it's a little bit like, I wonder why this was
Speaker 2: specifically targeted for this point in time. I kind of
Speaker 2: suspect it may have been due to the fact that
Speaker 2: Israel's actual like ground forces are still tied up in Gaza,
Speaker 2: and so they were looking for a way to escalate
Speaker 2: with Lebanon, with Hesbelah that didn't necessitate the deployment of
Speaker 2: forces that you know, would still have a massive impact
Speaker 2: and be disruptive, which this certainly was. But you know,
Speaker 2: when it comes to kind of us and like why
Speaker 2: we're talking about this today, it's the fact that this
Speaker 2: is I think a Pandora's Box style attack, right like,
Speaker 2: you have at this point opened up the possibility to
Speaker 2: doing this to any actor that has the resources. And
Speaker 2: as we've noted about, fifteen grand will get you the
Speaker 2: capacity to manufacture battery packs like this. You can just
Speaker 2: go on Ali Baba and buy things like radios or
Speaker 2: other It doesn't have to be that you could get
Speaker 2: you know, like most a lot of people now carry
Speaker 2: around battery devices, right like external batteries to charge their
Speaker 2: phones when they're out. Sure, you can purchase those from
Speaker 2: Ali Baba by the thousand. You can disassemble them, stick
Speaker 2: in your own batteries, and it's not the kind of
Speaker 2: thing where you have to be capable of doing this
Speaker 2: on the scale that the Masade did. You could stick
Speaker 2: this and you could buy two thousand batteries. You could
Speaker 2: stick this in two hundred of them, your own replacement
Speaker 2: explosive packs, and you could just send those out into
Speaker 2: the world, right Especially, One of the things that scares
Speaker 2: me is the idea of you get a bunch of
Speaker 2: these shipped, you impregnate a few with explosives, but you
Speaker 2: have a bunch of batteries that you then have on
Speaker 2: you know, shipping through the air right and trigger in
Speaker 2: the air like while they're being shipped to a destination.
Speaker 2: Like It's the kind of thing you would eventually be
Speaker 2: able to unravel who had created the front companies and
Speaker 2: the like. But there really is nothing built into the
Speaker 2: system that would very effectively be able to tell that
Speaker 2: you'd done this as long as you there was a
Speaker 2: degree of like caretaken in the manufacturing process. And I
Speaker 2: want to turn back to Andrew Hwang's article here, and
Speaker 2: this is him talking about the way in which you
Speaker 2: could hide the fact that you had impregnated these battery
Speaker 2: packs with explosives. Once folded into the core of the battery,
Speaker 2: it is sealed in an aluminum pouch. Manufacturing process carefully
Speaker 2: isolates the folding line from the laminating line and or
Speaker 2: rinses the outside of the pouch with acetone to dissolve
Speaker 2: away any pet in residue. Prior to marking, No explosive
Speaker 2: residue can escape the pouch, thus defeating swabs that look
Speaker 2: for chemical residue. It may also well evade methods such
Speaker 2: as X ray fluorescence because the elements that compose the
Speaker 2: battery separator and PETN are too similar and too light
Speaker 2: to be detected, and through case methods like sours spatially
Speaker 2: offset Ramen spectroscopy would likely be defeated by the multi
Speaker 2: layer copper laminate structure of the battery itself, blocking light
Speaker 2: from probing inner layers. Thus, I would pose it that
Speaker 2: a lithium battery constructed with a pet and layer inside
Speaker 2: is largely undetectable. And this is from like folks I
Speaker 2: have talked to who have a degree of expertise in
Speaker 2: the matter, I think very accurate, and I think, you know,
Speaker 2: even if you're not striking air travel here number one,
Speaker 2: it would be easy to get stuff like this on
Speaker 2: planes and people. There was in December somebody attempted to
Speaker 2: and just kind of their detonation method failed, which is
Speaker 2: kind of with explosives. When people don't die and explosive attacks,
Speaker 2: what always saves them is it's kind of tricky to
Speaker 2: get the detonators right. But I'm very worried that the
Speaker 2: masade has effectively provided people with a perfect plan of
Speaker 2: attack to fuck with air travel or to fuck with
Speaker 2: the supply lines, because it imagine, just like a couple
Speaker 2: hundred people over the space of a week or so
Speaker 2: have battery packs or other electronics detonate on their person,
Speaker 2: like or a couple of dozen people. What that does
Speaker 2: both to the economy, to the supply lines, Like the
Speaker 2: extint to which that would be disruptive in society is like,
Speaker 2: the potential is enormous, and the potential for like runaway
Speaker 2: terror is enormous.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that that was one of the first
Speaker 3: things that we talked about once news of this drop.
Speaker 3: Is like, beyond the actually physical injuries and death caused
Speaker 3: by this attack, this is like primarily an infrastructure attack.
Speaker 3: In this case completely destroys like the communications infrastructure of HASBLA,
Speaker 3: but in like, yeah, the strategy behind the attack. It
Speaker 3: can be used just to target various types of infrastructure,
Speaker 3: whether that be like supply chains, travel, It puts distrust
Speaker 3: in your own equipment, and certainly it's application on like
Speaker 3: airlines is obviously very worrying.
Speaker 2: Well, it's very worrying. And one of the things that
Speaker 2: I keep thinking about is the degree to which the
Speaker 2: way Amazon has restructured the economy, and particularly the way
Speaker 2: that like digital commerce works, has created an opportunity for
Speaker 2: a malicious actor to carry out an attack like this
Speaker 2: with excellent security because you don't even have to be
Speaker 2: the one shipping these out right now. You can get
Speaker 2: I mean you have to shift them at some point,
Speaker 2: but you can ship them to a third party that
Speaker 2: is the actual company that deals with Amazon, if you
Speaker 2: have enough kind of resources and ingenuity behind it, basically
Speaker 2: set up a drop shipping scam where you wearving someone
Speaker 2: else send explosives to Amazon, which provides a lot of
Speaker 2: opportunity for you to both get away and a lot
Speaker 2: of opportunity to you could seed with a couple of
Speaker 2: different manufacturers, different devices.
Speaker 3: It's like terrorism in the era of the gig economy. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And that was one of the reasons I like to
Speaker 3: Fincher's recent movie The Killer, Yeah, just in terms of
Speaker 3: how much of the gig economy was like worked into
Speaker 3: these traditional industries, whether they be like terrorism, because like
Speaker 3: hitmen aren't really real, but certainly terrorism. And I think
Speaker 3: there's a lot of ways that these things can be
Speaker 3: applied in this kind of bizarre uber Amazon world that
Speaker 3: we've created where the economy is just so fractured in
Speaker 3: all these little ways.
Speaker 4: There's also I think the sort of production angle to
Speaker 4: which is that because the way that manufacturing is happening
Speaker 4: has become so decentralized, and because it's become based on
Speaker 4: these it's kind of less so now. But a lot
Speaker 4: of like Chinese manufacturing had worked like this, where you'd
Speaker 4: get these sort of like smaller pop up things, and
Speaker 4: each of these sort of like fairly small production facilities
Speaker 4: is like shipping stuff to like a larger one who's
Speaker 4: like doing assembly or whatever. But that means that, Yeah,
Speaker 4: like as you're saying with Alli Bob, it's like all
Speaker 4: of this stuff is just available to purchase because it's
Speaker 4: designed to be sold to these people who are like
Speaker 4: starting their sort of like small scale like production line.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's no quality control, there's no intense vetting. It's
Speaker 3: all extremely accessible. It's very easy to infiltrate this process.
Speaker 2: Yeah, here's another line from that Andrew Huang article on
Speaker 2: Bunny's at Bunny's Studios, Be You in an Ie Studios,
Speaker 2: which is his blog. You don't even have to go
Speaker 2: so far as offering anyone a bribe or being a
Speaker 2: state level agency to get tampered batteries into a supply chain.
Speaker 2: Anyone can buy a bunch of items from Amazon, swap
Speaker 2: out the batteries, restore the packaging and seals and return
Speaker 2: the goods to the warehouse. And yes, there is already
Speaker 2: a whole industry devoted to copying packaging and security seals
Speaker 2: for the purpose of warranty fraud. The perpetrator will be
Speaker 2: long gone by the time the device is resold.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And the other worrying part about that too is that
Speaker 4: you know, okay, so getting the explosives to work is
Speaker 4: kind of difficult, right, Like bomb making is not easy,
Speaker 4: but you have to have.
Speaker 2: A degree of competition.
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, but the actual cost fifteen thousand dollars like that,
Speaker 4: that's not even like you're looking at like a millionaire,
Speaker 4: Like that's just something your local dentist can afford to
Speaker 4: pull off.
Speaker 2: You could carry out an attack like this in terms
Speaker 2: of cash expenditure for the cost of like a reasonably
Speaker 2: nice car, which is not prohibitive to a large scale
Speaker 2: international terrorist organization, or even.
Speaker 4: Just like a rich guy. Yeah, not even that rich
Speaker 4: guy can pull this off.
Speaker 2: Yep, which is.
Speaker 3: I guess the kind of the main inhibiting factor is
Speaker 3: we still don't quite know how Israel got these two detonates. Yes,
Speaker 3: whether that is some sort of hack that overheated the battery,
Speaker 3: whether it was like a message that was sent out
Speaker 3: that like triggered something within the device.
Speaker 2: It seems to have been a message.
Speaker 3: That made the explosive debtonates because they.
Speaker 2: Did into message immediately before, so it seemed to have
Speaker 2: been tied to some extent with a message. Andrew Hwang
Speaker 2: kind of looked into and came to the conclusion that
Speaker 2: you could very well do a thermal runaway to set
Speaker 2: this off, but obviously the messade doesn't have any trouble
Speaker 2: getting a hold of military detonators. Wlang also walked through
Speaker 2: how you could build a circuit into the actual battery itself,
Speaker 2: like a trigger circuit. You know, I'm just gonna go ahead,
Speaker 2: and I'm going to go ahead and talk about this
Speaker 2: a little bit when we come back. But let's do
Speaker 2: our second ad break now before we tell everyone how
Speaker 2: to detonated plastic explosives.
Speaker 4: This is going to be the one that gets all arrested.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we're back. Here's a quote from Andrew on
Speaker 2: how these might have been detonated. Detonating the PETN is
Speaker 2: a bit more tricky. Without a detonator, PETN make conflagrate
Speaker 2: and fast instead of detonating and creating the much more
Speaker 2: damaging shock wave. However, the Wikipedia page notes that an
Speaker 2: electric spark with an energy in the range of ten
Speaker 2: to sixty millidules is sufficient to initiate detonation. Based on
Speaker 2: available descriptions of the devices getting hot prior to detonation,
Speaker 2: one might suppose that the detonation is initiated by a
Speaker 2: trigger circuit shorting out the battery pack, causing the internal
Speaker 2: polymer spacers to melt, and eventually the cathode anode pairs
Speaker 2: coming into contact, creating a spark. Such a spark may
Speaker 2: furthermore be guaranteed across the pet and sheet by introducing
Speaker 2: a small defect, such as a slight dimple in the
Speaker 2: surrounding cathode anoid layers. Once the packets to the melting
Speaker 2: point of the spacers, the dimpled region is likely to connect,
Speaker 2: leading to a spark that then detonates the pet and
Speaker 2: layer sandwich between the cathode and anode layers. But where
Speaker 2: do you hide this trigger circuit? It turns out that
Speaker 2: almost every lithium polymer pack has a small circuit board
Speaker 2: embedded in it, called the PCM or protection circuit module.
Speaker 2: It contains a microcontroller, often in a TSSOP eight package
Speaker 2: and at least one are more large transistors capable of
Speaker 2: handling the current capacity of the battery, and basically that's
Speaker 2: where you put it.
Speaker 3: Oops.
Speaker 2: Oops, And again I did talk to someone with expertise
Speaker 2: and explosives who said that they thought it was likelier
Speaker 2: that there was a conventional detonator, not because it would
Speaker 2: have been impossible to do with a thermal runway or
Speaker 2: the way that Andrew's set up, but because this is
Speaker 2: the masade they have access to detonators, and a detonator
Speaker 2: guarantees right that you get the proper kind of explosion.
Speaker 2: But again, even if you're using kind of the less
Speaker 2: Gucci method here, that would be available to a non
Speaker 2: state actor. If only fifty out of the three hundred
Speaker 2: devices you impregnate with explosives do a proper explosion and
Speaker 2: the rest just kind of conflagrate, well, that's still a
Speaker 2: very successful attack. You can do a tremendous amount of
Speaker 2: damage to people's sense of well being, into the economy
Speaker 2: to supply lines by carrying out an attack like that.
Speaker 3: This is so terroristic in nature, and like if any
Speaker 3: other group did this like it has blitded this a Yeah,
Speaker 3: if homosits attack, oh my god.
Speaker 2: We would be we would be bombing them right now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if some like just random like accelerationist networks somehow
Speaker 3: pulled this off, like yeah, we would be pulling our
Speaker 3: hair out. We would we would like go to war
Speaker 3: over something like this. And the fact that it's like
Speaker 3: it's this type of attack is only okay when this
Speaker 3: one military does it is just I don't know what
Speaker 3: to do any They've endangered.
Speaker 2: There, They have endangered everyone, right, Like, like every single
Speaker 2: person listening to this is less safe because it is
Speaker 2: real carried out this attack.
Speaker 3: What is airport screening going to look like? If this
Speaker 3: keeps happening?
Speaker 2: Importantly? Am I going to be able to take all
Speaker 2: of my batteries on the planes that I could play
Speaker 2: video games on a fourteen hour flight? Garrison? You know, yeah,
Speaker 2: the plugs in the seats don't always work well.
Speaker 3: I mean, and even like what if you're able to
Speaker 3: do this to like the electronics of like the pilot jeez,
Speaker 3: and then you just you just like take out an
Speaker 3: entire area. Yeah, It's like it's such a fucked up
Speaker 3: Pandora's box that it feels like there's gonna be no
Speaker 3: real consequences for which is just kind of how things
Speaker 3: have been this past year, I guess. Yeah.
Speaker 4: And the other the other issue with it is that
Speaker 4: like the only way to fix this would be an
Speaker 4: actual like you would you would have to change how
Speaker 4: our supply chains work. And it's like, well, no one's
Speaker 4: gonna do that, no one. There is no number of
Speaker 4: people that you like, maybe if they literally killed the
Speaker 4: president of the United States, maybe you could get enough
Speaker 4: political capital together to try to do something about it,
Speaker 4: But like there's no way.
Speaker 2: No, and there's there's no way, And like the way
Speaker 2: the state will respond to this is by making air
Speaker 2: travel vastly worse. Right, Yeah, it's probably not the only
Speaker 2: thing that they will do. But that is like because
Speaker 2: there's just not an actual, It's not really with present technology,
Speaker 2: there's not an easy way to actually find these things
Speaker 2: like within kind of the context of like air travel
Speaker 2: or the way in which like digital merchandising works, right,
Speaker 2: which is again why the Masad probably shouldn't have done this.
Speaker 3: No, what many reasons?
Speaker 2: What of many reasons, the dead kids being another. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I do want to conclude. I've quoted a lot from
Speaker 2: Andrew Huang's wonderful article. Turning everyday gadgets into bombs is
Speaker 2: a bad idea, but I want to quote from his
Speaker 2: conclusion here. Not all things that could exist should exist,
Speaker 2: and some ideas are better left unimplemented. Technology alone has
Speaker 2: no ethics. The difference between a patch and an exploit
Speaker 2: is the method in which a technology is disclosed. Exploding
Speaker 2: batteries have probably been conceived of and tested by spy
Speaker 2: agencies around the world, but never deployed en Moss because
Speaker 2: while it may achieve a tactical win, it is too
Speaker 2: easy for weaker adversaries to copy the idea and justify
Speaker 2: its redeployment in an asymmetric and devastating retaliation. However, now
Speaker 2: that I've seen it executed, I am left with the
Speaker 2: terrifying realization that not only is it feasible, it's relatively
Speaker 2: easy for any modestly funded entity to implement. Not just
Speaker 2: our allies can do this. A wide cast of adversaries
Speaker 2: have this capability in their reach, from nation states to
Speaker 2: cartels and gangs to shady copycat battery factories just looking
Speaker 2: for a big payday. If chemicals players can moonlight and
Speaker 2: illicit drugs, what stops battery factories from dealing in bespoke munitions.
Speaker 2: The bottom line is we should approach the public policy
Speaker 2: debate around this, assuming that someday we could be victims
Speaker 2: of exploding batteries too. Turning everyday objects into fragmentation to
Speaker 2: grenades should be a crime as it blurs the line
Speaker 2: between civilian and military technologies, and that should be something
Speaker 2: everyone can agree on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I think so. Jesus Christ. He just is
Speaker 3: enacting terrorism through like the gig economy ecosystem. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: oh boy, what a fun time we've we've built for ourselves.
Speaker 2: What a great fresh hell for us all.
Speaker 4: Yeah, very excited first to have our first drop shaping
Speaker 4: terrorist attack. It's going to be great. It's going to
Speaker 4: be it's going to be great.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, folks, maybe drive next trip you got
Speaker 2: to take. Probably should note before we come out here.
Speaker 2: The obvious question, and there's not a long answer to
Speaker 2: this for obvious reasons, is like, well, could a non
Speaker 2: state actor get their hands on PETN or RDX, you know,
Speaker 2: these kind of explosive compounds that you can make into
Speaker 2: plastic explosives. And the short answer is yes, any moderately
Speaker 2: competent chemist with the right ingredients could make this stuff
Speaker 2: and they're not super hard to find. But also a
Speaker 2: lot of people in commercial spaces particularly have access to PETN.
Speaker 2: It's a kind of thing.
Speaker 3: That like is common like demolition, right, yeah, it's.
Speaker 2: Coming to demolition. It's also something artists use a good amount.
Speaker 2: There is a specific formulation of pet in where they
Speaker 2: make it like a thin sheet that you can use
Speaker 2: to suddenly weld metals together explosively. And there are a
Speaker 2: couple of specific famous artists who like use PETN in
Speaker 2: order to like make bob relief sort of artworks. So
Speaker 2: it's again not something that is like impossible for people
Speaker 2: who are not the masade to gain access to.
Speaker 4: You need a chemist, an engineer, and someone who knows
Speaker 4: how to set up businesses, and between the three of them,
Speaker 4: they are going to have enough money to do this,
Speaker 4: which is yeah, not great, Yeah, not great.
Speaker 2: Anyway, everybody, have a good night, enjoy your next plain flight.
Speaker 3: It could happen.
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