Understanding the 'How' of the Hezbollah Pager Explosions

A review by a semi-retired paging wireless carrier manager and researcher of methods of the American Intelligence Community, and how they relate to this incident

~10 minute read

            First, I will start with a disclaimer.  I do not advocate violence in any manner.  The reasons for the calling forth of military force, in a proportional response or otherwise, are valid in few instances as the framers of our Republic understood.  Those values hold true even in today's complicated and technologically advanced societies, and we would do well in practicing our religious objections to such things, and also as atheists (as the case may be) in adhering to the principals put forth in the adoption of our nation sans any religious parts objected to (some will argue they cannot be separated, but we had better find some common ground somewhere to help save our Republic).

            In analyzing this event from the recently available news stories compared to my experiences, it seems premature (and likely very incorrect) to suspect the pager manufacturer as being involved in any way with the planting of explosive devices within their manufactured units.  In assembly, it seems there would be inherent dangers beyond the expertise of the workers.  Additionally, I cannot imagine a neutral manufacturer being in any way complicit with a state sanctioned manufacture of weapons of war, especially without lawful conformance to being a weapons manufacturer in the nation of assembly.  I can see how they could have been commissioned by contract and payment to cause a pager to be manufactured with a little extra room for post-manufacture modifications without knowing the true source or reason for the change.  If the contract/request had been lucrative enough, they would make the change.  Who would notice a little wider pager which is delivered in its own carrying case designed to be worn on a belt?

            The explosive modifications likely were made in a re-routed shipping scheme.  Some of you reading this have probably purchased electronics on-line and have watched your shipping progress via tracking numbers.  This author has seen several of his electronic purchases suddenly rerouted even from being in one of the last steps to normal delivery in my home town to hundreds of miles away.  These could easily have received a shipping 'inspection' that was actually a center designed to add a little something to a device to aid in non-4^th Amendment approved monitoring.  Of course, one would have to be involved in something that was contrary to what might be termed government approved actions, or active in the kinds of things that might lower our social scores in the eyes of the powers-that-be.  I have been involved in more than one (including an active one now).  One thing I have noticed over the years of research and behind-the-scenes activism is that 'they' do not like it when you catch them violating one of their own rules; or, to paraphrase Voltaire, it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

            The Wall Street Journal asked the question of how all of these pagers could be set to go off at the same time (probably in acknowledgement of pagers being more low-tech than our portable computer/cell phones).  A short course in paging technology will make this clear.  Paging is a sequential data stream service that is conducted on frequencies that have more limited bandwidth than high speed cellular services (thus, some of our cell phones are way up in the microwave frequency bands, and thus the concerns of their health affects to users).  Since the paging sequential data rate is slow, as paging came into such widespread use in the 1980s, 90s and beyond, their response time would slow during peak activity times of the day; it is like waiting to get into a ballpark to get to your seat, single file, for the game of the year.

            Sometimes you might get your page in a few seconds, but it could be in minutes due to the radio network load at the time.  If you wanted to alert multiple people with the same message, one way to do that is to send individual messages to each one, but with the undesired result that they would get them at different times (which in a medical situation might be critical).  Each pager had their own "address" to receive messages, but they also had the capability of having numerous addresses within them to receive messages as well.  So, if you had a heart "code blue" team of first responders in a hospital, those responders could all have the same address for the group in addition to their individual/unique address.  So, a page sent to the group would be received by everyone at the same moment.  In fact, you could have had millions of pagers with the same address, and it is no additional load on the network to get the same message at the same time to all of those units.  Just one data stream for the one address is sent out the network and they all would alert at the same moment.  This particular 'group' address was probably unknown to the users and their suppliers/sponsors, whoever that may have been.  The extra group address could have easily been added to the pagers in question today at the shipping 'center' used to plant the explosive portion of the final device.  It is easy to add or change internal addresses with a fixture that the pager sets in tied to a laptop or desktop computer.

Insofar as I know (though my wireless experience was limited in cellular carrier capabilities/services) cell phones cannot have separate 'addresses,' but their advantage is that they are on high speed networks and can receive the same message quicker even though they are sent individually to each unit (and I would love for any cell phone carrier services technicians/engineers to chime-in in the comments to educate us further if there's anything left out or misrepresented here). 

For example, you may have been in the same room with someone who received a severe weather or Amber Alert just before yours did the same thing.  Additionally, even though there can be millions of cell phones in the same area for the alert, they are grouped in different transmitter cell areas that they are physically close to that act like networks that are independent from each other, and can therefore proficiently handle those sequential messages to the ones located only in the area of coverage for that cell.  It is a very efficient way to deliver our texts and alerts.  But, because they are so ubiquitous, they are also ripe for government monitoring, even if just to know that your cell phone was in a certain area at a certain time on a specific day.  So, if you are guilty of running over a pedestrian and leaving the scene, c'est la vie (as things stand today), and you will likely become a person of interest if the investigating agency can pry the information out of the NSA et al.  If you are on your way to something private, legal and does not in anyway involve the loss of freedom to any other person, it's none of their business (ideally), but they can still know of your movements.

            So, going low-tech is good for those of us who want to try to stay out of the sights of the American Intelligence Community or any other worldwide intelligence personnel, even Mossad.  Of course, they can still decode pages and see the messages sent to them.  Some pagers now offer encryption, and I do not personally know if the manufacturers have programmed 'back-door' access for law enforcement purposes.  Still, even with a court ordered search warrant, once they have the back-door access, it could be used indiscriminately.

            One item of great concern would be that in radio wave hard-to-reach areas, some of the explosive modified units may have missed the page that set off the explosions, leaving them vulnerable to reception of an additional page on the 'special' address and exploding.  It would be highly recommended to have the battery removed right away and any unit turned over to explosive experts for disposal.

            As to comments I have seen about the batteries being the source of the explosions, pagers have typically been designed to work with common AA or AAA batteries.  In fact, somewhat ironically, pagers have an intrinsically safe certification for use within certain proximities of explosives used in construction areas (or gasoline pumps, etc.) that could be violated by using a battery from a different manufacturer or type than that which was used to obtain the original certification.  Lithium batteries are rechargeable and that has not been an option on pagers I am familiar with for many years (though they may be available on units manufactured by Motorola for first responder uses).

            In short, this was likely a Mossad operation taken from the spy craft playbooks of the American Intelligence Community.  For some insights from a past Mossad assassination project, please see https://steveosborn.substack.com/p/global-intelligence-operatives-thank?r=1r0y10.

            Note: the latest information speaks of walkie-talkie radios also exploding today.  The same re-routed shipping scheme could have been used in those devices, and probably affect completely different manufacturers, further pointing to a state actor as the originator of the modified devices.