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Notes -
It doesn't just work once but it imposes an ongoing cost to your enemies operations to avoid the same thing happening again.
I mean... wouldn't they just make sure to dismantle a handful of pagers before distributing them from now on? They'd have to pack the things with high explosives to get a result like this, would be easy to find, not much of a cost.
They'll likely short term want to change up suppliers if that info is compromised, but by blowing up all the pagers Israel has revealed this which means it can't be used in the future and if there are other capabilities downstream from this supplier compromised like wire taps etc. Now Hezbollah knows to toss the electronics.
Yeah with the phone hacking it’s plausible that they can always find another exploit, but with this kind of physical modification it doesn’t actually invalidate the pagers as a method of communication at all.
I think the main benefit is likely psychological. Conspiracies about Israel being behind everything are already very common in the Arab world, 22 year old Hezbollah recruits aren’t familiar with the specifics of what Mossad can and can’t do. If they’re handed the next pager and promised “I swear, this one won’t blow up”, they might not believe it.
Maybe not just in the Arab world at this point.
If I was the sort of person inclined to try to convince people that "They" didn't get Epstein, shit like this would certainly make my job harder.
The argument against ‘them’ doing Epstein was always obvious. If you want to convince a bunch of rich Jews to support Israel, you don’t need to blackmail them with footage of them fucking teenagers lol.
The operative word the media used tended to be "children", not "teenagers".
The masses are stupid enough to believe a 17 year old is a child, so it works.
True, and indeed it was rarely remarked upon in the Prince Andrew case that - unless he explicitly paid her for sex - sleeping with a 17 year old Virginia Giuffre was entirely legal under British law at the time and now.
More importantly, it was legal under New York law, which is where he slept with her. Interestingly, if he had slept with her on Epstein Island, she would have been jailbait, because the age of consent in the US Virgin Islands is 18.
To me one of the oddest things about Epstein is his habit of transporting 17 year olds from jurisdictions where they were legal to the USVI where they were jailbait in order to statutory rape them (or have his mates do so). It demonstrates complete and utter scofflawism.
This was the entire point. The video footage all the cameras on that island recorded would have been titillating but not really worth anything if there was no criminal element. "I have a video of you having sex with a barely legal woman" is nowhere near as compelling a blackmail tool as "I have a video of you having illegal, criminal sex with a child".
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