Hezbollah's Exploding Pagers

0:03Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co, as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co. I am your host, Joseph, and with me are two of the other 404 Media co-founders, the first being Emmanuel Mayberg. Hello. And the second being Jason Kebler. Hello, hello. We had to rush to publish a developing story, which is the first one we're going to talk about.

0:48The headline is, Experts, Lebanon Pager Explosions, Likely Not, Lithium Batteries Alone. I want to caveat right up top that this is a developing story, as I said. more information can and likely will come out but we weirdly do actually have some expertise to contribute here because Jason has covered sort of the world of batteries and recycling and fire hazards and all of that for a very very long time so it does actually sort of provide us a unique way into the story. I guess just first of all, Jason, before we get to all the stuff about the batteries, how did we first learn about this story and what has happened as far as we know?

1:43Well, I first learned about it because Emmanuel said something about it, because I was not monitoring the internet when it happened. But I mean, it's one of the biggest stories in the world right now. It's like the New York Times, like writers, every everyone is writing about it. But essentially, I again, caveat, like, developing things are changing. And like, by the time you're listening to this, there may be more explanations out there. But from what we have seen, something like 1000, possibly 2000 pagers, either simultaneously or near simultaneously exploded in Lebanon. Most of them seemingly belonging to people who are affiliated with Hezbollah.

2:34I think eight people are dead, thousands are injured. And a lot of the people who are injured are not the people who had the pager on them. There were also bystanders who were injured, which I think is an important detail and one that we can talk about. but as you said I've written about battery fires quite a lot over the course of the last several years lithium lithium lithium ion batteries notoriously are very dangerous if something bad happens to them like if they're punctured if they're shredded if they're damaged if they're overheated. It causes this thing called thermal runaway, which is where the cells inside of the battery itself start self-heating just because of the chemistry of the battery.

3:26And when this happens, it gets hotter, it gets hotter, it gets hotter, it gets hotter, and it catches fire eventually. And then usually after a few seconds of being on fire, it will explode. Yeah. This has caused... You go ahead. Yeah, I mean, this has caused a lot of e-waste recycling plants to burn down. It's like the biggest threat to e-waste recycling and regular recycling and trash management in the US right now. At least one of the biggest in trash management, definitely in e-waste. you know it's like when one of these gets into a shredder in an e-waste facility it will catch fire and that can be very bad and these fires are at an all-time high which is just a long way of saying that i've seen a lot of these fires before um also i'll add it's a And Jason, is it fair to say at this point, a very well understood problem because it's not just an e-waste risk.

4:33It's also anywhere where a large number of these batteries are stored, right? So in New York, I know there was a lot of fear about all the electric scooters and bikes, repair shops, official and unofficial, right? Like those are a big fire risk. electric cars obviously you said like the most likely ways for this to happen is the batteries being punctured and obviously with an electric vehicle moving at high speeds that is something that could happen and we've seen happen with teslas and it's very dangerous and i think it's to the point where like firemen are getting trained on battery fires right because they're becoming more common.

5:18That's definitely true. A place sort of around the corner from my house burned down like an e-bike rental spot burned down about a year ago because one of the, you know, batteries associated with the e-bike caught fire and then all the other ones did and then the place caught fire and it burnt down. This happens very regularly, like you said. and there's also been a couple like very high profile consumer electronics situations where this has happened like the galaxy note 7 had a defect in it that caused the battery to catch fire and explode and no one died from that there were some like serious burns and then there was a while where you like couldn't fly on a plane with a galaxy note 7 and there was a massive recall and things like that.

6:10So that's the context in which I've reported on this in the past. It is definitely a big problem for society more broadly. And in this case, we don't know exactly what happened, but it seems like the fact that there was a lithium ion battery in these pagers was leveraged in some way in this attack. Yeah, maybe just to back up a little bit before getting to what the experts said, but there's broadly two leading theories, right? The first is that there was some sort of interference or cyber attack with these pages that triggered the battery by itself to overheat and then explode, right? That's one theory.

7:00and then it seems on the other side people are saying no it seems that something additional was added to these batteries to cause the um sort of the size of the explosion from these devices and what we've sort of learned from speaking to our various experts is that they believe that is more likely which of course brings up questions of how um the attackers whoever they may be were able to put additional resources into these pages. Hezbollah has blamed the Israeli authorities. And what did these experts say exactly when we spoke to them? I think there's a quote at the top, first of all, Jason. Yeah.

7:48So I talked to Kyle Wiens, who is the CEO of iFixit, the repair part company. They source a lot of batteries. They buy a lot of batteries. They sell a lot of batteries and they've done a lot of research on batteries and one of the reasons that they they've done this research is because uh if you buy like a poorly manufactured battery it can easily explode um i forgot to mention like those cheap chinese hoverboards were exploding for a while and that was because they had like just poor quality batteries in them that it was it was easy for them to explode if they were damaged in any way um so i fix it as an entity has done a lot of research on battery fires and what causes them and what they look like.

8:31And he said to me, quote, there's no way that just a battery hurts someone other than the person wearing the pager. I also can't really see a lithium battery exploding, killing a person. Third degree burns, yes. And to be clear, he's talking like a lithium battery of this size, because if a large one exploded, it could kill someone. But he then said, so while I'd like to imagine some kind of crazy cyber attack where they overloaded the batteries, I think it's more likely this was a supply chain attack and Israel planted explosives inside the pagers with a remote trigger. To be clear, speculating here, but essentially he's saying that the explosions that we've seen, the videos that we've seen, the explosions are way too large for this to be a lithium battery alone.

9:23And I agree with that assessment. I've looked at lots of battery fires. I've looked at a lot of battery fires from smartphones, which would have a bigger battery than a pager. They're literally larger devices that are doing more than displaying a little bit of text on a pager. Right. Yeah, and they all kind of like, they light on fire first. So you can see smoke and you can see flames. And when they go into thermal runaway, they swell. So they get bigger and then they light on fire and then they explode. And there's always visible flames. And in the videos that we've seen, we haven't seen any visible flames.

10:02The sound of the explosion is very loud in the Lebanon videos. And also the explosion is clearly like, it's a big explosion. yeah um Emmanuel you're actually the one who kind of like initially told me to go do this story and I'm just you know what did you think when you saw the videos uh well the reason we wouldn't normally cover some you know Israeli covert attack in Lebanon but um and I don't necessarily blame anyone because as joe said this is a developing story and twitter being twitter people speculate and we're doing uh or our experts are doing some speculation here as well but i saw the theory that this was a hack meaning the devices weren't modified in any way that somehow they were remotely triggered to quote-unquote overload and explode the batteries.

11:07I saw that really pick up and spread around. And on its face, that seems not possible. Or if it was, it would be like, I mean, the news is wild enough, but it would be kind of a world-shattering event because we're all surrounded by lithium batteries. The idea that someone can hack devices to make them explode is just like the most chaotic thing I can imagine happening. And then also, Israel specifically has a history of planting explosives as a way to target its enemies. So that, to me, seemed like the most likely theory, even though even within that history, this would be a wild escalation in complexity because there are so many devices.

12:04Right. So it's like, how are you able to plant so many explosives and so many tiny little devices and get them where they need to go? That's, I mean, even though we're circling that as a likely thing that happened here, we don't know how. But yeah, like, and then finally, because there were so many individual instances of this happening across Lebanon and Syria, actually, there is security cameras and people just pulling out their phone and filming what has happened right in the aftermath of this. and none of it looks like a lithium battery fire, which like Jason have seen a ton of. Usually, I remember there was one story we did in Motherboard where it was somewhere in England, but it was just a laptop in an office overnight catching fire and like, I think eventually burning down the whole office.

13:03And they always look the same. It's like I said it and then one of the experts said it. It's like you're lighting a flare is what it looks like. And in the videos we saw from Lebanon, it is like big kinetic explosions. You don't see the shockwaves per se, but you see like destruction in the immediate vicinity. And it's all it's instant, right? It's like it's an explosion. It's not a fire catching and smoke and flames and then eventually an explosion, which is what lithium battery fires usually look like. So I was like, Jason knows 100 people who have seen this and know exactly how this happened.

13:44So I bet they could look at it and immediately say what it is and isn't. You mentioned that there's so many different devices, and that's true. And the other expert we spoke to is MG, who's a hardware, security, and supply chain expert in their own way because they made the OMG cable, which is these fake USB-C or Apple Lightning cables. And he's had to come to terms with how supply chains work by manufacturing those. And of course, a malicious cable is a supply chain attack in his own right. So I pinged him and he brought up sort of the variation you would have between all of these different pages.

14:28And he said, quote, a lithium battery at full charge is way more reactive than a 50 % drained one. So you'd see some very weak reactions across all of those devices if it was just the battery, right? I'm paraphrasing now, but for there to be sort of a consistent effect, you would presume that something would be added to that. And he also reflected just what Jason said earlier about a phone battery even if it's lithium it's going to be much much bigger than a page reaction so you know if it was just the um battery of a pager it would be far far more um limited i guess i i feel that's probably all we can say about what we know about what happened but i feel like you touched on it jason but sort of just what is your experience reporting on lithium batteries more generally?

15:24Did you come to it through the e-waste perspective and right to repair? How did you build a list of people you could email and Emmanuel asks you, go contact a bunch of battery people? Yeah, but before I answer that, I do want to say this is full speculation, but I just want to put it out there because just in case, it doesn't necessarily have to be one or the other in that there could have been some sort of malware that caused the battery to heat, which caused an explosive within the device to explode. And I'm seeing some reporting about that that's being tied to news outlets in Saudi Arabia. And it's just like, I have no way of vetting that at the moment.

16:12But that's something that a few folks that I've just seen, people who I think would know how an attack like this could work have theorized that that is a way that it could work where you kind of are leveraging this problem with lithium ion to start the explosion, but then the actual power of the explosion itself is coming from an additional explosive in there. Again, I don't have any reporting on that. I don't know, but I think that sounds very plausible to me. um i came into this because when i write a lot about repair there's a lot about uh sustainability reusability recycling etc and the repair industries the refurbishment industries and the recycling industries are all kind of interwoven uh with each other it's like they're all sort of trying to get more mileage out of the devices that we use.

17:14And like e-waste facilities are super interesting because electronics are often quite, it's like pretty dangerous. And one of the reasons that it's pretty dangerous is because these fires can happen very easily. and the same things that are causing devices to be harder to repair also make them harder to recycle it's like glued in batteries rather than screwed in batteries or you can just like remove a screw remove the battery make it a lot harder for someone to disassemble the device if you're trying to repair or replace that battery but it also makes it a lot harder to disassemble a device to remove the battery so that the battery doesn't explode when you put it through a recycling shredder, which is a machine that shreds the device and then sorts the materials.

18:08And so a lot of these fires are caused because the batteries are very difficult to get out of different devices, especially like really small ones like smartwatches. Like Amazon was selling a button for a while where you could just like hit a button and order more laundry detergent. And these were basically designed to be e-waste. So when they got to recycling centers, it's like, it takes a lot of human hours to get these things out. And often they have to like use a crowbar or something. Like I saw a bunch of MacBooks being crowbarred open at this e-waste recycling center I went to. And the people doing it were wearing full protective equipment because if they were prying these batteries out of the MacBooks and they punctured the battery, it would explode.

19:00And so it was very dangerous. And that's sort of like how I came into it. I wrote a lot of stories about this problem that they were facing. And it's one that's like very intertwined with right to repair, etc. Yeah. I'm glad we were able to take that expertise and contribute to this developing story, even in the small, left of field way we can. All right, we will leave that there. When we come back, we're going to talk about something we're a lot more sure about. That is that the AI-powered surveillance dystopia is already here. We will be right back after this.

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21:26All right, and we are back. Jason, this is another one you wrote. Larry Ellison's AI-powered surveillance dystopia is already here. For those who don't know, who is Larry Ellison exactly? Larry Ellison is the CEO of Oracle. And Oracle is just like a massive, massive cloud computing company, security company. They do so much stuff. And yet, if you ask me what Oracle does, I don't super... I couldn't be like, here's what Oracle is known for specifically because they're kind of like a Microsoft-esque company and it's like early web, gigantic, gigantic company. I believe it's data centers these days, which ties into what we're going to get into.

22:21But I believe that's most of their business. Most of their revenue, I think, is data centers. A ton of money and everywhere all at once, but the average person on the street is probably not going to know about them or think about them. They might know about Larry because he's rich. Yeah, he's the fifth richest person in the world. Right, there you go. And of course, they're known a lot for like enterprise software database type stuff, but it's like they were founded on the Wikipedia page, sorry. But they were founded in 1977. It's just like they're like an IBM-esque company that has evolved in many ways over the years.

22:59And it's just a gigantic, gigantic company. That is a fair comparison. So he made some comments recently in a talk, right? and it was sort of talking about society and technology, surveillance and AI. What was he pitching exactly? And I mean, we'll go into sort of almost your rebuttals to each one, but what was he pitching exactly and I guess why? Yeah, so it was like a quarter three update for investors. So every company does this. They do, you know, here's earnings reports. Here's how the company is doing. Here's what we are doing and how we're going to grow the company and make a lot more money.

23:51And every publicly traded company does this. And often the CEOs say crazy stuff at these investor calls. This is actually an investor event where he was in person with a lot of these investors and it was live streamed. but they like Oracle's thing as all of these companies are doing right now is they're talking about AI and how they are going to use AI to change business and ultimately like drive shareholder value more or less and so they did an hour-long like Q &A with various people who are using Oracle's AI products. And then Larry Ellison himself did an hour long talk slash Q &A where there weren't that many Qs.

24:40There was a lot of A's. I think I scanned through and there was like four or five questions and he talked for over an hour. And he kept kind of just going off onto different tangents, which is maybe how we end up in this place where he starts explaining that Oracle's AI is going to be used to fully change society. And this came at the end of his talk. And to be clear, everything else he said was also pretty nuts. He was like, we are going to use Starlink Internet and Oracle AI data centers to change how hospitals operate and then change how cars operate. So he talked about it in every single sector of the economy.

25:25but then he gets into public safety and policing and surveillance specifically. Right, which we have a lot of experience covering and you especially. So I'll just like provide some of the things he said and then let's hear what you think about them. So the first one or one of the ones he spoke about was securing schools with technology and I'll just read out a quote from him quote, we think we can absolutely lock down schools to dramatically reduce the case of anyone being on campus that doesn't belong on campus and immediately alert someone, use AI cameras to immediately recognize that. When you read that, what do you think?

26:09Yeah, some of these quotes are stilted because he kept changing his train of thought. I was going to say, I was reading it. I was like, wait, is that typed correctly? Did I read that properly? So he's basically like AI is going to, I mean, he doesn't say the word facial recognition, but he says like, we're going to use AI cameras to determine if anyone is going to be on campus that shouldn't be there. You know, this is something that surveillance companies have been trying to do at schools for a while in the aftermath of Uvalde, especially. I mean, there's so many school shootings, it's very upsetting to even think about.

26:45But in the aftermath of Uvalde specifically, there were a lot of surveillance tech companies that were saying, we can prevent this from happening again. And you had examples of companies that were selling like automated panic rooms in schools. Axon, the taser slash body camera slash lots of other police tech company, said that they were going to put taser drones in schools, which caused a big outcry and its own ethics board then resigned over that. And then I think most interestingly, this company called Evolve has AI scanners that are now, I don't know if they're on New York City subway yet, but they're going to be on the New York City subway.

27:32It claims to use AI and object detection to detect guns. And so you'll have to walk through one of these to go into schools. And some schools have rolled these out. And what they have learned and what we reported back at Motherboard using some FOIA requests was that there was tons of both false negatives and false positives, which is a nightmare. Not idea when you're trying to figure out who has a weapon and who doesn't. Having both negatives and that's not great. No, not good. And so things like notebooks, like three ring binders were being detected as weapons. And then like knives were not being detected as weapons were some specific examples.

28:15And, you know, it's been a couple of years now, but pretty consistently the reporting by pretty respected organizations has found that these are not super good at actually preventing... They haven't stopped school shootings. We've tried everything except for banning guns, some sort of gun control. Yeah. So Larry's dream of AI around schools is already here. Okay, that's one off the list. Thank you very much. He says they could design these always recording body cameras. And I think he uses the example of, you know, a police officer is wearing this body camera and then they'll say, hey, with voice recognition as well, hey, please stop recording.

29:05I'm going to go to the toilet. And then they do that. And the idea is that in Larry's eyes, the cameras will still be recording and it can be susceptible to a court order or something similar. and basically it's this idea that you know the cops are going to be um accountable because they're always going to be recorded citizens are going to be accountable as well because they're going to be captured up into this dragnet as well i mean what did you think when you when you read the stuff about body cameras yeah i mean he said the police will always be on their best behavior because we're constantly watching and recording everything that's going on citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on.

29:46And that's the, that's kind of like the money quote, um, the like literally describing big brother, like we will detect things as they're happening. Um, we have body cameras and they're often, but not always on. I think that cops turning off body cameras is a big problem. I am, I think that body cameras are useful for us as reporters because we can sometimes, but not always FOIA the footage. But there have been many academic studies showing that they haven't made a statistical difference in police brutality or police misconduct. And that's because there are many, many cases where the police are recorded doing something wrong and there's no accountability.

30:35And so, or there's either no accountability or underwhelming accountability and so it's more of a yeah it's like a societal political issue and sort of the ways that cops are protected in society issue versus a if only the body cameras were on that said like an always on body camera that's also filming cops while they're peeing or whatever that can't be disabled that says it's disabled but then is obtainable via court order raises all sorts of questions about, well, why is Oracle in charge of this? It should be held by the cops, theoretically. We don't want Oracle to be the arbiter of whether this public data gets released or not released, first of all.

31:26Second of all, I mean, surely, hopefully, it would be encrypted in some way. But if you're storing that, it can theoretically be hacked, taken, I would imagine. and then yeah it's just like if you are recording it it does exist so you're not actually giving people privacy I think we've seen that over and over again as a potential problem across a variety of devices yeah so Larry we're already filming a bunch so that's already done thank you very much and this one I was actually a little bit unclear on So what does he say about drones and using those exactly? Yeah, he says that we have drones. A drone gets out there way faster than a police car.