[newspaper1]

How would you even know which network a pager was on just by looking at it? They were thousands of bombs disguised as consumer devices in circulation in public. There are new reports that other consumer devices may also have been rigged with explosives.

[tptacek]

I have no idea, but you could not use a Hezbollah pager for your job as an industrial technician, which was the claim made by the comment I'm replying to.

[anigbrowl]

What if that industrial sector is managed by Hezbollah and you are responsible for making it run smoothly? They more or less run everything in south Lebanon so I imagine that includes key infrastructure like electricity, water, and telecoms. Staffers in those sectors might or might not be in Hezbollah themselves, but one has to assume a lot of the management is. I don't know about private industry.

[tptacek]

It seems odd to me that random laborers would be issued military encrypted pagers, and it seems certain that you couldn't simply go buy one on your own (or at least, buy one and then use it on the Hezbollah military network), but we have reached a point of specificity on the thread where I'm comfortable that we're all talking about the same thing --- previously, I've gotten the sense that we were suggesting random workers who happened to need pagers might have these ones. My personal prediction is that everyone who had these things was a member of Hezbollah, based on the reading I'm doing, but that's all it is: a personal prediction.

[newspaper1]

That's not what they said. Pagers are used by civilians, no one would be on guard around them, they are not considered to be weapons. If you saw someone in a grocery store with a pager, you wouldn't distance yourself from them.

[tptacek]

I don't agree but also don't care to litigate this point; the only point I'm on this thread to make is that no professional who routinely carries a pager could have mistakenly been carrying a Hezbollah pager. Also: it is interesting that Hezbollah literally fought a war over phone systems in Lebanon! The rest: these are some of the most complicated conflicts in the world and we're not going to settle anything on HN. I don't begrudge you your take, I just had those two claims to make.

[newspaper1]

Children were wounded and killed because they picked up these pagers (which they assumed to be safe). Explosives were distributed into public disguised as innocuous consumer devices, it's actually not that complicated.

[tptacek]

I think the situation is much more complicated than that but can also, in rare circumstances, detect an intractable argument when it shows up on a message board. Does anything you're saying have anything to do with whether industrial engineers were unknowingly carrying Hezbollah military pagers, or whether Hezbollah fought a war against opposition parties in Lebanon to ensure that it had its own phone system? If not: there's not much productive for us to discuss here --- which is totally fine, there doesn't have to be.

[dralley]

You're assuming that. There has been no reporting on the details. For all we know she could have been sitting next to her father when the pager went off.