Emirates airline bans pagers and walkie-talkies after device attacks in Lebanon

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/05/travel/emirates-airline-bans-pagers-walkie-talkies-intl/index.html

by teleforce • 2 years ago

36 59 2 years ago

cnn.com

woggy• 2 years ago

Curious if the explosives in the pagers would have been detected at airports. Also, imagine if one went off in a plane.

DANmode• 2 years ago

Gotta imagine if they wanted to detonate during a flight time they could have.

killingtime74• 2 years ago

I would have not much faith in that. They only randomly do the swab tests for explosive traces from what I've seen.

Presumably the explosives were well hidden and might not even trigger these scanners.

TSA is famous for not identifying the majority of weapons: https://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-...

wkat42426• 2 years ago

The thing is, these explosives were meant to be hidden. I'm sure the swabbing and scanning would not work because Hezbollah would have access to the same tech.

It's a bit different from other military uses that are more open.

skybrian2• 2 years ago

Hezbollah examined the pagers after they were delivered to Lebanon, starting in 2022, including by travelling through airports with them to ensure they would not trigger alarms, two additional sources told Reuters.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/hezbollah-handed-o...

kmlx• 2 years ago

i find this story very weird. hezbollah is a terrorist organisation. which airports allow terrorists to travel through them with pallets of electronic devices?

seo-speedwagon• 2 years ago

The explosive used was PETN which is very difficult to make and very difficult to detect. You pretty much need a spectroscope.

Generally airports and ports are set up for detecting things like explosives you cooked up yourself or stolen mining equipment or whatever. Military grade explosives are expected to be chemically tagged because they’re for, y’know, legit military use and not terrorism.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Marking_of...

I can’t find anything on whether or not the PETN that Israel used was tagged. If not, it would be yet another layer of irresponsibility. Unexploded ordinance is very real, as the recent news about the WWII era bomb blowing a hole in that airport runway in Japan attests to.

Dalewyn• 2 years ago

The headline is sensationalist; Emirates is banning pagers and walkie talkies for all flights into and out of Dubai:

“All Passengers travelling on flights to, from or via Dubai are prohibited from transporting pagers and walkie talkies in checked or cabin baggage,” the airline wrote in a statement posted on its website Friday.

If Dubai isn't on your itinerary this doesn't affect you, at least for now.

justinclift• 2 years ago

Isn't Dubai a major international stop over for long haul flights?

bruce5112• 2 years ago

Yes. The middle east is geographically well located for intercontinental traffic. So Emirates (and Qatar) serve has big hubs for long-distance travel.

Dubai Airport is large, and runs 24x7. I've had a couple long layovers there (in the airside hotel) and its amazing to see the never-ending, round the clock, activity in the terminal.

Indeed the shops etc in the terminal cannot be closed - there are literally no doors on them.

Equally reporting flight boards are amazing. There are flights from everywhere to everywhere.

bluepizza• 2 years ago

Emirates only flies through Dubai. They don't have any flights that don't go to or depart from Dubai.

nl• 2 years ago

This isn't true. I've flown MEL->SIN. They also fly SYD->SIN

rootsudo• 2 years ago

Yes they do. New Jersey to Athens is a popular one. These are called freedom flights.

https://simpleflying.com/emirates-fifth-freedom-routes/

jfoster• 2 years ago

What's the threat vector that they are trying to mitigate against? The attack already happened and the vector that the attack used seems to be applicable to any device with a battery.

Are they worried about pagers that are affected but didn't go off in the original operation?

mingus88• 2 years ago

You must be new to airport security theater

We all had to start taking off our shoes after the Richard Reid shoe bomber. Twenty plus years later we are still reacting to a terrifying attack with an ordinary object that didn’t even work.

And we are still bottlenecking hundreds of people in a crowd BEFORE the checkpoint and it won’t be until someone attacks there will we ever actually do anything about it

It has never been about preventing anything. It was about the appearance of doing something.

tomohelix2• 2 years ago

Agree. It is simply idiotic how they conveniently gather hundreds of people in a crowded spot who are all pulling and tinkering with stuff from their backpacks. A bad actor can easily cause more deaths there than on a plane nowadays.

Everytime I go through that charade, I roll my eye at everything they do since it is so obviously useless and unnecessary. The worst thing is, apparently, some people really believe in it.

bruce5112• 2 years ago

The US particularly is extreme in this regard. The TSA has become such a large employer that it's now unthinkable to scale it back.

9.11 was of course tragic, but that problem was solved by locking the cockpit door. And yes, no-one wants to be on a plane with an explosive device, but those are really rare. Not least because that same device is easier to use, with more effective results, in pretty much anywhere else.

And after all that money spent, it's unclear that the TSA would actually prevent any serious attack.

Outside the US things tend to be a lot more relaxed. (So much so that special checkpoints are arranged for flights to and from the US to conform to US requirements.)

n_ary4• 2 years ago

Well, by regulation, an aircraft is a “national property”, so a blast in an aircraft is seen as “national incompetence”. The security check is just a filter, an attack there is seen as general terror. The stakes are very different. It is also easier to de-escalate someone with a gun or other dangerous objects at the security check, people at that location are well trained to handle such situation and extra support is just a radio away, in aircraft, not only is the situation extra dangerous because other people sitting will act immensely irrationally or panic, the crew is only trained in minor de-escalation, and it is difficult to call a backup security in mid air and any shots fired in that environment is 1000x more dangerous.

diebeforei4858• 2 years ago

Other electronic devices (laptops, tablets, etc) are far less likely to contain anything like this, because Apple, Huawei, Dell etc manage their supply chains and don't just let anyone make products carrying their brand.

There are so many manufacturers of walkie-talkies and pagers, it's essentially a wild west. No one knows how many PETN-laced pagers were manufactured. The ones that exploded were the ones that happened to have certain phone numbers and were in range at the time.

It's unclear how many of those might have PETN, which is essentially undetectable. It doesn't give off any vapors, so sniffer dogs cannot detect it. 6 grams of it can blow the fuselage of the plane. It doesn't show up on X-Rays.

eesmith• 2 years ago

Ahh, so we must have more e-waste because terrorism means we can't replace our batteries with anything not under the full control of Buy n Large.

echoangle2• 2 years ago

The ones that exploded were the ones that happened to have certain phone numbers and were in range at the time.

Nitpick but the pagers don’t have phone numbers, right? As I understood it, they are using a completely separate network from the phone network and are waiting for a message starting with a specific code which identifies them. But I don’t think you could send an SMS to a pager for example, without some gateway in the middle.

philwelch4• 2 years ago

This doesn’t match my understanding of the operation. The reporting I’ve seen said that Mossad became aware that Hezbollah was in the market for a large order of pagers and quickly set up a shell company to sell them the exact batch of compromised pagers that they subsequently detonated.

n_ary4• 2 years ago

My Thinkpad can be definitely modified to insert an explosive object and it is fairly innocent looking as no one knows whatever the device has in it. Of course the scanner will detect some mild traces of certain explosive chemicals if the inserted object is not correctly shielded.

cedws• 2 years ago

Better safe than sorry. Especially when hundreds of lives are potentially on the line.

m1keil• 2 years ago

I think the reason is clear - they suspect that there might be still devices in circulation that didn't go off and can risk a flight.

This is similar to the spontaneous igniting Samsung devices story from few years ago.

rasz• 2 years ago

They know who uses the airline and are worried of repeat. Stating outright "Hezbollah/IRGC passengers not welcome from now on" wouldnt be good PR for an airline catering to Iran https://www.emirates.com/ir/english/destinations/flights-fro...

kylehotchkiss3• 2 years ago

My favorite other emirates banned item is “attaché cases”. Never could figure out why. Please satisfy my curiosity.

rlt• 2 years ago

They watched too many spy/thriller movies?

diebeforei4858• 2 years ago

It's on the IATA dangerous goods list, with pretty much the same wording: https://www.iata.org/contentassets/6fea26dd84d24b26a7a1fd578...

Attaché cases Security-type attaché cases, cash boxes, cash bags, etc. incorporating dangerous goods, such as lithium batteries and/or pyrotechnic material, except when authorized by the airline, are totally forbidden.

https://www.emirates.com/english/before-you-fly/travel/dange...

For what it's worth the FAA doesn't like these either: https://www.faa.gov/hazmat/packsafe/security-type-equipment

wkat42426• 2 years ago

What's so special about an attaché case? It's just one of those leather briefcases with two latches, right?

compsciphd• 2 years ago

a normal leather "attache cache" is fine. the regulation says

"Security-type attaché cases, cash boxes, cash bags, etc. incorporating dangerous goods, such as lithium batteries and/or pyrotechnic material, except as provided in 2.3.2.6 are totally forbidden. See entry in 4.2–List of Dangerous Goods."

i.e. not a normal leather attache case.

wkat42426• 2 years ago

This sucks. I regularly bring walkie talkies as I'm a ham radio operator. And it's a stupid rule because it was a supply chain attack that can be done with any type of electronic device.

Having said that I would not be able to travel through Dubai anyway as I'm getting an "X" passport and they refuse those even for transfers.

kylehotchkiss3• 2 years ago

Bringing a high powered radio through Dubai would have raised suspicions even before this. It’s not what they could consider an ordinary hobby and they may assume you have more nefarious motives (the context of that just being that it’s a tense region, I’ve had my garmin handhelds carefully analyzed before) Being able to openly listen to any frequency isn’t exactly a universal right.

wkat42426• 2 years ago

It's not "high-powered" what I bring on planes. Just a regular walkie talkie (usually digital DMR) with up to 4 watts or so.

There's even ones that look like a 2005's mobile phone, like this one: https://www.radiocommunicationsonline.com/products/motorola-...

I thought of getting one of these for airline travel because they'd raise less eyebrows but in practice it wasn't needed. Also, the regular models I use are much more convenient for ham use (having a promiscuous mode to listen in to all traffic even not addressed to my DMR ID, and huge database capacity for callsigns).

A Garmin GPS also has this "military" look about it (due to its ruggedness of course), and some can also do satcom (with InReach functionality) which is pretty strictly banned in some countries like India. In the Middle East this is not a thing, and sat phones are actually a huge think (they even have their own sat network called Thuraya). Probably because of the large swathes of desert without any infrastructure. So I'd expect less eyebrows raised about the garmin there.

But yeah like I said I am never going to end up in Dubai anyway.

komali2• 2 years ago

I hadn't heard of the X on the passport thing, that's super cool. I'm guessing it'll cause issues at borders all over even if it's not banned, just from confused border agents. Not to mention on airline websites...

wkat42426• 2 years ago

Airline websites are mostly OK. Border crossings too. Even though X-passports are very rare, they are becoming much less so and of course customs officials deal with thousands every day so they still un into them regularly. I don't have one yet but I heard no problems with them from other NB people in decent countries.

As for no being permitted in Dubai and Qatar etc, I consider this more as a 'feature' than a 'bug'. These countries are known for harrassing non-gender-conformant people anyway and this way I have a fully documented way to refuse a Dubai transfer if my work wants to send me somewhere with a Dubai connection. Rather than pleading because I don't want to run the risk I can now just give them a hard and documented NO. My employer publicly prides itself on being LGBTQI+ inclusive so they can't refuse that.

The biggest problems centered around this seem to involve more local government. Old local council or federal systems not able to deal with it, or the communication between those systems not handling it properly because some ancient validator routine somewhere drops the message, leading in all sorts of procedural gaps. It's a bit reminiscent of the Y2K problem.

rkho• 2 years ago

How many collective human lifetimes have been eliminated by security theater?

Emirates airline bans pagers and walkie-talkies after device attacks in Lebanon

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