@ Ranir,
Re : Occam had a razor for reason.
You are needlessly multiplying hypotheses when you say,
“It’s possible that the detonation signal doesn’t use the normal paging protocols or radios at all. It could be more secure—or less”
Yes it could but it is unnecessary, and currently there is no evidence to that effect.
Not only is POCSAG an open standard there are thousands of Ham/Amateur Radio operators using it to set up their own pager networks for fun and more serious Emcomm reasons. This is from more than a couple of years back,
https://emergencyham.net/blog/dapnet-decentralized-amateur-paging-network
Also have a look at someone using simple procedures to set up such a “home system” four years or so ago,
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XnyxwmMPX_g
Just typing in “Amateur radio paging” into YouTube will bring up enough videos to give you sufficient ability to bring up your own “city wide” system.
As I’ve noted that part of the world has had much of it’s civilian infrastructure deliberately destroyed by another nation intent on genocide (see legal and UN definitions). Thus those who are the elected Government are having to find much less expensive and way more robust systems to do civilian management/support as is the duty of all governments.
I suspect that a lot of those carrying those pagers were “civil servants” carrying out such services to the civilian population in a time of crisis.
After “stuxnet” and how it was investigated and eventually unmasked and finally admitted to, I suspect those involved in this “war crime” will have gone for the least technically sophisticated method for “deniability” purposes.
Why do I say “war crime” because by definition outlined in treaties and international law it is.
There was no reason to intercept these pagers and put lethal devices in them except for the purposes of genocide to kill emergency workers and the like. The way POCSAG pagers work is very simple and low tech going back to the 1970’s if not earlier. Thus is very vulnerable to the simplest of Electronic Warfare which would stop them working.
I can give a step by step procedure not just for setting up a city wide pager system, but how to simply jam it. I can further point to areas within the POCSAG standards that could be used to make them into simple remote controlled bomb detonators, but I won’t for two reasons,
1, The information is freely available with a few minutes searching and a few days reading.2, Giving a step by step guide would not be seen favourably at this time.
The point is I’ve given sufficient information for people to weed out the “fake news” being pushed from certain quarters into the Main Stream News.
Why because people should follow “evidence based reasoning” not “hyperbolic speculation”.
I’ve given sufficient base information as a foundation for people to build solid further information on.
As for access to “scanners” I highly doubt that any of these pagers were “scanned” by those who received them, remember most of their civilian infrastructure including hospitals and dentists has been quite deliberately destroyed by others with significant political intent and criminal activity.
Thus the people who “intercepted and implanted” these bomb devices inside the pagers would most likely know they would only have to pass,
1, Simple visual inspection2, Basic “goods inwards” functional test.
Oh and remember that this sort of “supply chain attack” is far from new there was a case in the UK where tiny mobile radio devices were installed in those supposedly secure “Electronic Point of Payment”(ePOS) systems of a major UK supermarket chain by we assume criminals in China as a link can be demonstrated to Chinese based criminal gangs using the data skimmed for boosting income via a “pay for Porn” US Gateway.
The supermarket, could not tell the hacked and non hacked ePOS terminals apart by visual or other scanning techniques, and it looked like they were going to have to destroy all of them. Then one person discovered that the criminals had not taken weight into account. The hacked terminals were just a few grams heavier than the unhacked ones.
I suspect that if it was a non state level organisation did this attack, then they would probably miss something like weight or center of gravity.
But probably we will never get told this by Main Stream News if this is discovered.
