The implications of weaponising a lithium battery, which seems like what was done, are potentially really significant.
Lithium batteries are everywhere, most of them significantly larger than the one in a small pager. This includes secure environments like military/intelligence facilities and aircraft.
Proof that a lithium battery pack can be weaponised as a bomb, in a way that avoids easy detection, should be a significant concern to anyone who tries to maintain the security of those spaces.
> I would imagine the rewards of silent surveillance (tracking, audio) would be of much higher value than this kind of attack where 3 out of 1000s targets were killed.
The reason they were using pagers, as opposed to phones, was to avoid exactly this kind of potential attack.
Pagers are (typically) a broadcast technology, the pager has no transmission capability. A page is broadcast from every tower, it has no idea where the receiver is. A targeted page is done by the receiver filtering out and ignoring pages that it isn't the recipient for (eavesdropping all pages is trivial).
The pager device is simple, it doesn't contain a GPS or have any concept of it's own location. No microphone or audio capability, very little processing capability. And adding such capability with something like a bug would be reasonably apparent to anyone opening one up and inspecting it.
A puncture causes runaway/explosion in seconds. Overcharging takes 13 minutes. There's not good data on a dead short (because it's unlikely during normal operation), but it's going to be between those on the faster end. From personal experience a shorts cause things to get noticeably hot after about 10 seconds, the graphs show that once you hit 60C things rapidly get worse.
A relay may have been required to hold the short as the battery stops supplying voltage.
Lithium batteries are everywhere, most of them significantly larger than the one in a small pager. This includes secure environments like military/intelligence facilities and aircraft.
Proof that a lithium battery pack can be weaponised as a bomb, in a way that avoids easy detection, should be a significant concern to anyone who tries to maintain the security of those spaces.
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