There's a lot to be said about the pager attacks on Hezbollah today, and it's opened up more questions than answers for me. First of all I think it was messed up that Israel use this kind of attack. You would never be able to tell how many innocent people were using these pagers, and to simply set them off like that is callous at best.
From what I've read Hezbollah decided to "dumb down" their communication network (as in they ditched their smart phones for pagers), as they were too often successfully being tracked. The pagers they bought don't have any GPS tracking as they communicate over radio frequencies (which BTW must be completely exposed to Israeli intel). You'd think being a terrorist (or at least a named terrorist) organization that they might be extra careful with everything they use right? Like checking to see if perhaps there were any explosives inside their devices? I mean surely there must be a secure way to communicate via smart phones with a variety of encrypted apps like signal or simplex? Do they not know about these, or they just don't trust them because they've been developed in the west? Or is Israeli intelligence just about as good as it gets? Either Hezbollah leadership don't know what they're doing or high level surveillance is a greater than we understand.
Bring it back to what it means for us I keep thinking this is like a reminder that we need to continue to check and verify. I often catch myself skipping this step out of convenience. Excuses like it's going to take longer (cause I need to learn how to verify keys for every app/client), I just want the thing now, it's definitely the right website I'm downloading it from so it should be ok. It's just a reminder that we need to be doing this EVERY TIME.
I also keep thinking about a similar attack on a larger scale. Wouldn't it be the ultimate attack on the west if the CCP managed to put an explosive and remotely blow up every IPhone? If no one is verifying then why not?
Stay paranoid.